The Crisis of Representation of Expert Knowledge and Medical Practice in the Age of COVID-19: Raoult-Agamben’s Case

The gap between fundamental and applied science in today’s world is caused by a number of social, political, and now biological factors related to the challenges humanity faces, such as climate change, international terrorism, hybrid wars, intense inter-country competition, and, finally, pandemics. World governments are responding to the emergence of mixed natural-social formations, including “new wars,” global warming, environmental pollution and COVID-19, with rather brutal biopolitics, not always based on relevant scientific expertise, especially in the context of its systemic crisis. For scientists, these circumstances mean an even greater challenge, forcing them to step out of their usual university and laboratory settings into the “field,” rethinking their relationships with applied scientists and engineers, as well as politicians, doctors, journalists, and non-human agents (viruses, gadgets, programs, etc.). The recent scandal surrounding the French microbiologist from Marseille, Didier Raoul, is most revealing in this context.

A comparative analysis of his case and the case of the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in the context of reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, will help to evaluate the scale of the crisis of the global healthcare system, biology and medicine in Europe and the USA, and the difficulties of representation of expert knowledge in the humanities discourse, mass culture, contemporary hypermedialized environment and conflicting political and economic interests. The author sees a possible way out of this situation as involving non-human actors in the dialogue on these issues, rethinking the role of the human being and re-evaluating the possibilities of the mass media and institutions of governance.