Will and necessity Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, February 12, 2021 The question of whether governments are consciously taking advantage of the pandemic to declare a state of exception that strengthens their powers beyond all limits or whether they had no other choice but the emergency is badly posed. What is happening today, as it has been in any momentous historical crisis, is that both things are true: the resort to the state of exception as a ruse and the impossibility to govern other than through it are coincident. The sovereign, although acting in an absolutely arbitrary way, is at the same time compelled to make the incessant decision over the exception that ultimately defines its nature. The time we are now living in is one in which the illegitimacy of the powers ruling the earth appears in full light: since they lost all possibilities of configuring in a recognisable symbolic order, they are compelled to suspend the law and constitutional principles which might define it. The state of exception becomes in this sense a normal state of affairs and whoever governs can in no way rule otherwise. It is perhaps possible that the state of exception is formally revoked: but a government of national salvation such as the one which is now developing, where all oppositions cease, is the perfect continuation of the state of exception. In any case this confirms our diagnosis of a definitive decline of the age of bourgeois democracies. It remains to be seen how long the suspension of politics and the emergency as a paradigm of government can last without assuming a different form than the health terror upon which they founded themselves so far. |
(English translation by I, Robot)
René Magritte, Territory, 1957. Courtesy of WikiArt.