Giorgio Agamben Quotes & Sayings

Those who are truly contemporary are those who neither perfectly coincide with their time nor adapt to its demands ... Contemporariness, then, is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disconnection. — Giorgio Agamben

The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. — Giorgio Agamben

In the eyes of authority - and maybe rightly so - nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man. — Giorgio Agamben

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

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

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

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

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

The coming being is whatever being. — Giorgio Agamben

God did not die; he was transformed into money — Giorgio Agamben

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 — Giorgio Agamben

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

The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become more terroristic. — Giorgio Agamben

Life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision. — Giorgio Agamben

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

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