Agamben Quotes & Sayings

I'm not special, no more special than anybody else. — Herbie Hancock

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

The coming being is whatever being. — Giorgio Agamben

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar. — Adam Johnson

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

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

Does everyone feel this way? When I was young, I was perpetually overconfident or insecure. Either I felt completely useless, unattractive, and worthless, or that I was pretty much a success, and everything I did was bound to succeed. When I was confident, I could overcome the hardest challenges. But all it took was the smallest setback for me to be sure that I was utterly worthless. Regaining my self-confidence had nothing to do with success ... whether I experienced it as a failure or triumph was utterly dependent on my mood. — Bernhard Schlink

We are about to enter a new era in which, each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how we adjust to this new regime. That choice - not whether, but how to reduce energy usage and make a transition to renewable alternatives - will have profound ethical and political ramifications. — Richard Heinberg

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

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

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

Steerpike was, of course, alive with ideas and projects. These two half-witted women were a gift. That they should be the sisters of Lord Sepulchrave was of tremendous strategic value. They would prove an advance on the Prunesquallors, if not intellectually at any rate socially, and that at the moment was what mattered. And in any case, the lower the mentality of his employers the more scope for his own projects. — Mervyn Peake

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

If Scripture teaches the imputation of sin, we should not stumble when we find it affirming the imputation of righteousness. — Arthur W. Pink

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

Giorgio Agamben is possibly the most delicate and probing thinker since Walter Benjamin. — Avital Ronell

Faithful heart may have froward tongue. — J.R.R. Tolkien

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

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

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

For all the civilians saved thanks to the presence of peacekeepers, there have been those who were lost - the United Nations personnel who sacrificed their lives for a noble cause. Even as we mourn our fallen colleagues, we are all uplifted by their unflinching commitment and are inspired to strive even harder for the collective cause so eloquently envisaged in the United Nations Charter: a world free from the scourge of war. — Jan Eliasson

Pointing to a trend in Western democracies, Agamben posits that the declaration of an emergency state of exception itself has gradually been replaced by a "generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government" (2003/2005, 14), that is, the state of exception or emergency has become integrated in the normal functioning of the state. — Nicholas De Genova

Hearing that people read my books when they were sick, or that the books helped them find an escape when they were having a hard time ... stuff like that makes all the hard work pay off. — Sarah J. Maas

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

Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet — Terence McKenna

I placed my new novel, 'The Book of Lost Fragrances', in Paris, knowing it would be a challenge. But the book belonged in the city that is one of the greatest perfume capitals of the world and has been since for more than three centuries. — M.J. Rose

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

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