Liberty and insecurity Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, December 8, 2022 John Barclay, in his prophetic novel Argenis (1621), has defined in these terms the security paradigm that later European governments would progressively adopt: “Either therefore restore them to their liberty, or settle their domestic peace, for which they have left their liberty”. Liberty and security are, i.e., two antithetical paradigms of government, between which the State has to make his choice every time. If it wants to promise its subjects security, the sovereign will have to sacrifice their liberty and, vice versa, if it wants liberty will have to sacrifice their security. Michel Foucault, however, has shown how security should be understood (la sureté publique), which the physiocratic governments, starting with Quesnay, are the first to explicitly assume among their tasks in France of eighteenth-century. It was not a matter — then as now — of preventing catastrophes, which in Europe of those years were essentially famines, but to let them being produced in order to then be able to intervene immediately to govern them in the most useful direction. Governing here regains its etymological meaning, i.e. “cybernetic”: a good pilot (kibernes) cannot avoid storms, but, when they do happen, he must anyway be able to steer his ship according to his interests. In this perspective, it was essential to spread a feeling of security among the citizens, through the belief that the government was watching over their tranquility and their future. What we are witnessing today is an extreme development of this paradigm and, at the same time, its punctual overthrow. The primary task of governments seems to have become the widespread diffusion among citizens of a feeling of insecurity and even panic, which coincides with an extreme compression of their liberties, that finds its justification just in that insecurity. The antithetical paradigms are now no longer liberty and security; rather, in Barclay’s terms, now one should say: “give people insecurity and they will give up liberty”. Therefore, it is no longer necessary for governments to show themselves capable of governing problems and catastrophes: insecurity and emergency, which now constitute the sole foundation of their legitimacy, can in no way be eliminated, but — as we are seeing today with the substitution of the war between Russia and Ukraine for the one against the virus — only articulated according to convergent modalities, though each time different. A government of this type is basically anarchic, in the sense that it has no principle to abide by, other than the emergency that it itself produces and maintains. It is probable, however, that the cybernetic dialectic between anarchy and emergency will reach a threshold, beyond which no pilot will be able to steer the ship, and thus mankind, in the now inevitable shipwreck, will have to go back to wondering about the liberty which they have so recklessly sacrificed. |
(English translation by I, Robot)
José Manuel Capuletti, La Belle Epoque. Courtesy of Artnet.