State of exception and civil war Giorgio Agamben, (Intervention at the “Doubt and Precaution Commission”), Quodlibet, April 9, 2022 In a book published a few years ago, “Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm”, I tried to show that in classical Greece the possibility — and I underline the term “possibility” — of civil war served as a threshold of politicisation between the oikos and the polis, without which political life would have been inconceivable. Without stasis — the rising of citizens up to the extreme form of dissent — the polis is no longer such. This constitutive link between stasis and politics was so inescapable that even for the thinker who seems to have based his conception of politics upon the exclusion of civil war, namely Hobbes, instead this remains virtually possible until the very end. Thus the hypothesis that I would like to propose is that if we have reached the situation of absolute depoliticisation in which now we find ourselves, this is precisely because in the last few decades the very possibility of stasis has been progressively and completely excluded from political reflection, also through its surreptitious identification with terrorism. A society in which the possibility of civil war — i.e., of the extreme form of dissent — is excluded, is a society that cannot but slip into totalitarism. I call totalitarian a thought which does not contemplate the possibility of confronting itself with the extreme form of dissent — a thought, i.e., which only admits the possibility of consensus. And it is no coincidence that it is just through the constitution of consensus as the only criterion of politics that democracies, as history teaches, have fallen into totalitarianism. As often happens, what has been removed from consciousness reappears in pathological forms and what is now happening around us is that oblivion and carelessness towards stasis go hand in hand — as Roman Schnur observed in one of the few serious studies on the matter — with the progress of a sort of world civil war. It is not just the fact, yet not to be neglected, that wars, as jurists and political scientists long ago noted, are no longer formally declared and, once transformed into police operations, acquire the characteristics that were usually attributed to civil wars. It’s crucial today that civil war, making system with the state of exception, like it transforms itself into an instrument of government policy. If we analyse the decrees and orders enacted by governments in the last two years, it is clear that they are aimed at dividing people into two opposing groups, between which a sort of ineliminable conflict is posited. Infected and healthy, vaccinated and unvaccinated, with vaccine pass and without vaccine pass, socially integrated or socially excluded — in any case, unity amongst citizens, as happens in a civil war, fell away. What happened before our eyes without us realizing is, i.e., that the two limit forms of law and politics have been utilised without any scruples as normal forms of government. And while in classical Greece, stasis, insofar as it marked an interruption of political life, could not for any reason be hidden and turned into rule, now it becomes, like the state of exception, the paradigm par excellence of mankind’s government. |
(English translation by I, Robot)
Theo van Doesburg, Dancers, 1916. Courtesy of WikiArt.