On May 5, the World Health Organization declared an end to the COVID global public health emergency. For its part, the Biden administration allowed the US national public health emergency to elapse on May 11. Having lived through a seemingly interminable pandemic, four years of the Trump administration’s incessant chaos and malignancy, and January 6’s attempted coup d’état—all of which demarcated evident states of exception from ordinary life—it’s an opportune moment for us to meditate on the true meaning of the word emergency and reflect on the serious philosophical and political repercussions of our tendency to misunderstand and misuse the term, at least conventionally. More

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