COVID-19 emergency and (ir)responsibility: everyday practices of mobility, evasion and protests

This paper investigates the concept of (ir)responsibility during COVID-19 emergency. It will focus on the following questions: what is it that make citizens (ir)responsible during a life-threatening pandemic? Is it their ability to conform to governmental rules? Or is it their ability not to lose their critical capacity to challenge, contest and question governmental decisions? Focusing on the Italian context, I suggest that, despite the mobility restrictions, the government retained overall its liberal rationality and people too used all the available gaps in the system in order to evade immobility rules. While everyday practices of evasion did not fundamentally transform the citizens into irresponsible citizens, many acts of resistance and protests did. Building upon the work of Jacques Derrida, the paper will suggest that response-ability is above all the ability to respond beyond the law and dominant rules. Any act involves both responsibility and irresponsibility, that is the responsibility toward some and irresponsibility toward others. COVID-19 restrictions have precisely generated impossible decisions: while responsible citizens are required not to give up their being political, COVID-19 emergency required inactivity and immobility.