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Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben Books

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“Those who realize that the house is burning can be led to look with disdain and contempt upon their peers who seem not to realize it. And yet won’t these people who do not see and do not think be precisely the lemurs to whom you will have to answer on the last day? Realizing that the house is burning does not raise you above the others: on the contrary, they are the ones with whom you will have to exchange a last glance when the flames draw nearer. What will you be able to say to justify your supposed conscience to these people who are so unknowing that they almost seem innocent?”

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Book:When the House Burns Down: From the Dialect of Thought
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“We have evoked the curious presence, in the empty city, of the armed guards and of the two characters whose identity it is now time to reveal. Francesca Falk has drawn attention to the fact that the two figures standing near the cathedral are wearing the characteristic beaked mask of plague doctors. Horst Bredekamp had spotted the detail, but had not drawn any conclusions from it; Falk instead rightly stresses the political (or biopolitical) significance that the doctors acquired during an epidemic. Their presence in the emblem recalls 'the selection and the exclusion, and the connection between epidemic, health, and sovereignity'. Like the mass of plague victims, the unrepresentable multitude can be represented only through the guards who monitor its obedience and the doctors who treat it. It dwells in the city, but only as the object of the duties and concerns of those who exercise the sovereignity. This is what Hobbes clearly affirms in chapter 13 of De Cive, when, after having recalled that 'all the duties of those who rule are comprised in this single maxim,"the safety of the people is the supreme law"', he felt the need to specify that 'by people we do not understand here a civil person, nor the city itself that governs, but the multitude of citizens who are governed', and that by 'safety' we should understand not only 'the simple preservation of life, but (to the extent that is possible) that of a happy life'. While perfectly illustrating the paradoxical status of the Hobbesian multitude, the emblem of the frontispiece is also a courier that announces the biopolitical turn that sovereign power was preparing to make.”

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Book:The Omnibus Homo Sacer
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“In the burning house you continue to do what you had done before—but you cannot avoid seeing that the flames now show you bare. Something has changed, not in what you do but in the way in which you let it go in the world. A poem written in the burning house is truer, more right, because no one can hear it, because nothing ensures that it can escape the flames. But if, by chance, it finds a reader, then that reader will in no way be able to draw back from the apostrophe that calls out from that helpless, inexplicable, faint clamor. Only someone who is unlikely ever to be heard can tell the truth, only someone who speaks from within a house that the flames are relentlessly consuming.”

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Book:When the House Burns Down: From the Dialect of Thought
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“If one reads attentively, Wittgenstein writes as much in one of the rare pas- sages in which he makes use (in English) of the term “to constitute” with respect to the rules of chess: What idea do we have of the king of chess, and what is its relation to the rules of chess? . . . Do these rules follow from the idea? No, the rules are not something contained in the idea and got by analyzing it. They constitute it. . . . The rules constitute the “freedom” of the pieces. (Wittgenstein 5, p. 86) Rules are not separable into something like an idea or a concept of the king (the king is the piece that is moved according to this or that rule): they are immanent to the movements of the king; they express the autoconstitution process of their game. In the autoconstitution of a form of life what is in question is its freedom.”

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Book:The Omnibus Homo Sacer
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“У цьому сенсі сучасний тоталітаризм можна визначити як режим узаконеної громадянської війни, запроваджений через надзвичайний стан і такий, що зробив можливим фізичне знищення не лише політичних опонентів, а й цілих категорій громадян, яких з тих чи інших причин вважали неможливим інтегрувати у політичну систему. Відтоді свідоме використання вічного надзвичайного стану (навіть якщо його й не було проголошено офіційно) стало однією з головних практик сучасних держав, зокрема й так званих демократій.”

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Book:State of Exception
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“There is no sense in anything I do, if the house burns down.” And yet it is exactly while the house is burning that one must carry on as always, must do everything with care and precision, perhaps even more diligently—even if no one notices. Perhaps life will disappear from Earth leaving no memory of what was done, for better or for worse. But you must carry on as before; it is too late to change; there is no more time.”

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Book:When the House Burns Down: From the Dialect of Thought
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“Non rimpiangiamo questo mondo che finisce, non abbiamo alcuna nostalgia per l’idea dell’umano e del divino che le onde implacabili del tempo stanno cancellando come un volto di sabbia sul bagnasciuga della storia. Ma con altrettanta decisione rifiutiamo la nuda vita muta e senza volto e la religione della salute che i governi ci propongono. Non aspettiamo né un nuovo dio né un nuovo uomo – cerchiamo piuttosto qui e ora, fra le rovine che ci circondano, un’umile, più semplice forma di vita, che non è un miraggio, perché ne abbiamo memoria e esperienza, anche se, in noi e fuori di noi, avverse potenze la respingono ogni volta nella dimenticanza.”

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Author:Giorgio Agamben
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“As is well known, what characterizes both the Fascist and Nazi regimes is that they allowed the existing constitutions (the Albertine Statute and the Weimar Constitution, respectively) to subsist, and according to a paradigm that has been acutely defined as "dual state" - they placed beside the legal constitution a second structure, often not legally formalized, that could exist alongside the other because of the state of exception.”

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Book:State of Exception
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“The fracture between theology and oikonomia, being and action, insofar as it makes the praxis free and 'anarchic', opens in fact, at the same time, the possibility and necessity of its government. In a historical moment that witnesses a radical crisis of classical conceptuality, both ontological and political, the harmony between the transcendent and eternal principle and the immanent order of the cosmos is broken, and the problem of the 'government' of the world and of its legitimization becomes the political problem that is in every sense definitive.”

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Book:The Omnibus Homo Sacer
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“O que nos interessa aqui é a indicação de que a esfera da glória - cujo significado e cuja arqueologia procuramos reconstruir - não desaparece nas democracias modernas, mas desloca-se simplesmente para outro âmbito, o da opinião pública. Se isso é verdadeiro, o problema hoje tão debatido da função política dos media nas sociedades contemporâneas assume novo significado e nova urgência. Em 1967, com um diagnóstico cuja precisão nos parece, hoje, mais que evidente, Guy Debord constatava a transformação, em escala planetária, da política e da economia capitalista numa «imensa acumulação de espetáculos», em que a mercadoria e o próprio capital assumem a forma mediática da imagem. Se juntarmos as análises de Debord à tese schmittiana da opinião pública como forma moderna da aclamação, todo o problema do atual domínio espetacular dos media sobre qualquer outro aspecto da vida social aparecerá em uma nova dimensão... O que está em questão é nada menos que uma nova e inaudita concentração, multiplicação e disseminação da função da glória como centro do sistema político. O que ficava confinado às esferas da liturgia e dos cerimoniais concentra-se agora nos media e, por meio destes, difunde-se e penetra em cada instante e em cada âmbito, tanto público quanto privado, da sociedade. [Assim,] o Estado holístico fundado na presença imediata do povo aclamante e o Estado neutralizado resolvido nas formas comunicativas sem sujeito contrapõem-se apenas em aparência. Eles nada mais são que as duas faces do mesmo dispositivo glorioso em suas duas formas: a glória imediata e subjetiva do povo aclamante e a glória mediática e objetiva da comunicação social.”

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Book:The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government
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“That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.”

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Book:Means Without End: Notes on Politics
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“The stakes in the debate between Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of exception can now be defined more clearly. The dispute takes place in a zone of anomie that, on the one hand, must be maintained in relation to the law at all costs, and, on the other, must be just as implacably released and freed from this relation. That is to say, at issue in the anomic zone is the relation between violence and law - in the last analysis, the status of violence as a cipher for human action. While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it - as pure violence - an existence outside of law. For reasons that we must try to clarify, this struggle for anomie seems to be as decisive for Western politics as the gigantomachia peri tes ousias, the 'battle of giants concerning being', that defines Western metaphysics. Here, pure violence as the extreme political object, as the 'thing' of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exception, which must ensure the relation between anomic violence and law, is the counterpart to the onto-theo-logical strategy aimed at capturing pure being the meshes of the logos.”

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Book:The Omnibus Homo Sacer
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“Classical Greece is perhaps the place in which this tension found for a moment an uncertain, precarious equilibirum. In the course of the subsequent political history of the West, the tendency to depoliticise the city by transforming it into a house or a family, ruled by blood relation or by merely economic operations, will alternate together with other, symmetrically opposed phases in which everything that is unpolitical must be mobilised and politicised. In accordance with the prevailing of one or the other tendency, the function, situation and form of civil war will also change. But so long as the words 'family' and 'city', 'private' and 'public', 'economy' and 'politics' maintain an albeit tenuous meaning, it is unlikely that it can ever be eliminated from the political scene of the West.”

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Book:The Omnibus Homo Sacer
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“The form that civil war has acquired today in world history is terrorism. If the Foucauldian diagnosis of modern politics as biopolitics is correct, and if the genealogy that traces it back to an oikonomical-theological paradigm is equally correct, then global terrorism is the form that civil war acquires when life as such becomes the stakes of politics. Precisely when the polis appears in the reassuring figure of an oikos - the 'Common European Home', or the world as the absolute space of global economic management - then stasis, which can no longer be situated in the treshold between the oikos and the polis, becomes the paradigm of every conflict and re-emerges in the form of terror. Terrorism is the 'global civil war' which time and again invests this or that zone of planetary space. It is no coincidence that the 'terror' should coincide with the moment in which life as such - the nation (which is to say, birth) - became the principle of sovereignty. The sole form in which life as such can be politicised is its unconditioned exposure to death - that is, bare life.”

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Book:The Omnibus Homo Sacer
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“Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system”

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Book:State of Exception
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