Giorgio Agamben > Quotes

“Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

“One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.”
― Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

“...there is no head of state in the world today who is not in virtuality a criminal. Those who shoulder the dreary mantle of sovereignty know that their turn may come to be branded a criminal by their colleagues. We certainly will not be the ones to complain. For the sovereign, who freely consented to donning the executioner's clothes, is now finally manifesting his originary kinship with the criminal. ”
― Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics

“In the eyes of authority - and maybe rightly so - nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man.”
― Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays

“To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

“مكن تعريف الشمولية الحديثة بأنها: "عملية تأسيسِ حربٍ أهلية قانونية من خلال تطبيق «حالة الاستثناء»"، بما يُتِيحُ التصفية الجسدية ليس فقط للخصوم السياسيين، بل لشرائح كاملة من المواطنين تعتبرهم السلطة، لسببٍ أو لآخر، غير قابلين للاندماج في النظام السياسي. منذ ذلك الحين، بات الخلق الطوعي لحالة طوارئ دائمة، حتى وإن كانت غير مُعلنةٍ –ربما- على الصعيد الفني للمصطلح، أحد الإجراءات الضرورية الهامة التي تلجأ إليها الدول المعاصرة، حتى تلك المُسمَّاةِ دولاً ديمقراطية”
― Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

“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.”
― Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

“The coming being is whatever being.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community

“According to the mystics, the obscure matter that creation presupposes is nothing other than divine potentiality. The act of creation is God’s descent into an abyss that is simply his own potentiality and impotentiality, his capacity to and capacity not to . . . In this context, “abyss” is not a metaphor . . . It is the life of darkness in God, the divine root of Hell in which the Nothing is eternally produced. Only when we succeed in sinking into this Tartarus and experiencing our own impotentiality do we become capable of creating, truly becoming poets.”
― Giorgio Agamben

“إن «الديمقراطية الخاضعة للحماية» ليست ديمقراطية على الإطلاق”
― Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

“One of the lessons of Auschwitz is that it is infinitely harder to grasp the mind of an ordinary person than to understand the mind of a Spinoza or Dante.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive

“فما لا يقبله القانون بأي حالٍ من الأحوال ويعده تهديدًا لا مجال للتسامح معه مطلقًا هو وجود عنفٍ يقع خارج نطاق القانون؛ وليس هذا لأنَّ الهدف من ذلك العنف لا يتماشى مع القانون، بل لمجرد أنه يقع خارج القانون”
― Giorgio Agamben

“Every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to 'change the world', but also - and above all - to 'change time'.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience

“If it is the sovereign who, insofar as he decides on the state of exception, has the power to decide which life may be killed without commission of homicide, in the age of bio-politics this power becomes emancipated from the state of exception and transformed into the power to decide the point at which life ceases to be politically relevant. When life becomes the supreme political value, not only is the problem of life's non-value thereby posed, it is as if the ultimate ground of sovereign power were at stake in this decision. In modern bio-politics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or non-value of life as-such.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

“The friend is not another I, but an otherness immanent in selfness, a becoming other of the self. At the point at which I perceive my existence as pleasant, my perception is traversed by a concurrent perception that dislocates it and deports it towards the friend, towards the other self. Friendship is this desubjectivization at the very heart of the most intimate perception of self.”
― Giorgio Agamben

“One of the essential characteristics of the state of exception-the provisional abolition of the distinction among legislative, executive, and judicial powers-here shows its tendency to become a lasting practice of government.”
― Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

“What our investigation has shown is that the real problem, the central mystery of politics is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God, but the angel; it is not the king, but ministry; it is not the law, but the police—that is to say, the governmental machine that they form and support.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“لِمَ الصَّمْتُ أَيُّهَا الفُقَهَاءِ حِيَالَ قَضَايَا تَهُمُّكُمْ !؟”
― Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

“Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall cal an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, determine, intercept, model, control , or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and - why not - language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses - one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primitive inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face.”
― Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays

“If Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not. The Tartarus into which Bartleby, the new savior, descends is the deepest level of the Palace of Destinies, that whose sight Leibniz cannot tolerate, the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where "nothing exists rather than something.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

“Comunicar los deseos imaginados y las imágenes deseadas es la tarea más ardua.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Profanations

“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.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics

“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.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“The Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin, director of the Psychiatric Hos- pital of Kyoto and translator of Binswanger, sought to deepen Heidegger’s anal- ysis of temporality in Being and Time with reference to a classification of the fundamental types of mental illness. To this end he made use of the Latin for- mula post festum (literally, “after the celebration”), which indicates an irreparable past, an arrival at things that are already done. Post festum is symmetrically dis- tinguished from ante festum (“before the celebration”) and intra festum (“during the celebration”).
Post festum temporality is that of the melancholic, who always experiences his own “I” in the form of an “I was,” of an irrecoverably accomplished past with respect to which one can only be in debt. This experience of time corresponds in Heidegger to Dasein’s Being-thrown, its finding itself always already abandoned to a factual situation beyond which it can never venture. There is thus a kind of constitutive “melancholy” of human Dasein, which is always late with respect to itself, having always already missed its “celebration.”
Ante festum temporality corresponds to the experience of the schizophrenic, in which the direction of the melancholic’s orientation toward the past is in- verted. For the schizophrenic, the “I” is never a certain possession; it is always something to be attained, and the schizophrenic therefore always lives time in the form of anticipation. “The ‘I’ of the schizophrenic,” Kimura Bin writes, “is not the ‘I’ of the ‘already been’; it is not tied to a duty. In other words, it is not the post festum ‘I’ of the melancholic, which can only be spoken of in terms of a past and a debt. . . . Instead, the essential point here is the problem of one’s own possibility of being oneself, the problem of the certainty of becoming oneself and, therefore, the risk of possibly being alienated from oneself” (Kimura Bin 1992: 79). In Being and Time, the schizophrenic’s temporality corresponds to the primacy of the future in the form of projection and anticipation. Precisely because its experience of time originally temporalizes itself on the basis of the future, Dasein can be defined by Heidegger as “the being for whom, in its very Being, Being is always at issue” and also as “in its Being always already anticipat- ing itself.” But precisely for this reason, Dasein is constitutively schizophrenic; it always risks missing itself and not being present at its own “celebration.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin's posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“The democratic principle of the separation of powers has today collapsed and the executive power has in fact, at least partially, absorbed the legislative power. Parliament is no longer the sovereign legislative body that holds the exclusive power to bind the citizens by means of the law: it is limited to ratifying the decrees issued by the executive power. In a technical sense, the Italian Republic is no longer parliamentary, but executive. And it is significant that though this transformation of the constitutional order (which is today underway to varying degrees in all the Western democracies) is perfectly well known to jurists and politicians, it has remained entirely unnoticed by the citizens. At the very moment when it would like to give lessons in democracy to different traditions and cultures, the political culture of the West does not realize that it has entirely lost its cannon.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“Uma obra crítica ou filosófica, que não se mantenha de alguma maneira numa relação essencial com a criação, está condenada a girar no vazio, do mesmo modo que uma obra de arte ou de poesia, que não contenha em si uma exigência crítica, está destinada ao esquecimento.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Nudities

“The relation between technology and slavery has often been evoked by histo- rians of the ancient world. According to the current opinion, in fact, the striking lack of technological development in the Greek world was due to the ease with which the Greeks, thanks to slavery, could procure manual labor. If Greek mate- rial civilization remained at the stage of the organon, that is, of the utilization of human or animal power by means of a variety of instruments and did not have access to machines, this happened, one reads in a classic work on this argument, “because there was no need to economize on manual labor, since one had access to living machines that were abundant and inexpensive, different from both human and animal: slaves” (Schuhl, pp. 13–14). It does not interest us here to verify the correctness of this explanation, whose limits have been demonstrated by Koyré (pp. 291ff.) and which, like every explanation of that kind, could be easily reversed (one could say just as reasonably, as Aristotle does in the end, that the lack of machines rendered slavery necessary).
What is decisive, rather, from the perspective of our study, is to ask ourselves if between modern technology and slavery there is not a connection more es- sential than the common productive end. Indeed, if it is clear that the machine is presented from its first appearance as the realization of the paradigm of the animate instrument of which the slave had furnished the originary model, it is all the more true that what both intend is not so much, or not only, an increase and simplification of productive labor but also, by liberating human beings from necessity, to secure them access to their most proper dimension—for the Greeks the political life, for the moderns the possibility of mastering the nature’s forces and thus their own.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“If, unlike what happens in classical historiography, history has for us a meaning and a direction that the historian needs to be able to grasp; if it is not simply a series temporum but something in which a purpose and a destiny are at stake, this is first of all due to the fact that our concept of history has been formed according to the theological paradigm of the revelation of a “mystery” that is, at the same time, an “economy,” an organization, and a “dispensation” of divine and human life. Reading history amounts to deciphering a mystery that involves us in an essential way; yet, this mystery does not concern anything like pagan fate or stoic necessity, but rather an “economy” that freely arranges creatures and events, leaving to them their contingent character and even their freedom and their inclinations:”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“Deze schat - dat wat nooit geweest is - bergt de idee van het geluk.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose