Crisis and exceptionality

This piece discusses the meaning of crisis, clarifies its relationship to exceptionality and considers the usefulness of the concept of crisis within the Covid-19 context. By means of a disambiguation of the term, it is argued that emergency responses come hand in hand with crises. The overlapping of crisis and emergency politics hinders our analytical capacity, and suggests the need to pay more attention to agency when thinking about crises. A critical reading of exceptionality is proposed, mainly through the work of Agamben and Neocleous, to elucidate the usefulness of the term crisis in the current context.