The place of politics
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, January 9, 2023
The forces which push towards a world political unity seemed to be stronger than those directed towards a more limited political unity, such as the European one, to such an extent that it was possible to write that the unity of Europe could be only “a collateral product, not to say a waste one, of the global unity of the planet”. In reality, the forces pushing towards the achievement of unity have proved to be just as insufficient for the planet as they are for Europe. If European unity, in order to give life to a true constituent assembly, would have presupposed something like an “European patriotism”, which did not exist anywhere (and the first consequence was the failure of the referendums to approve the so-called European constitution, which, from a juridical point of view, is not a constitution, but only an agreement between states), the political unity of the planet presupposed a “patriotism of the species and or of the human genre” even more difficult to find. As Gilson has rightly pointed out, a society of political societies cannot itself be political, but needs a metapolitical principle, such as religion was at least in the past.
It is possible, then, that what governments have attempted to achieve through the pandemic is just such a “patriotism of the species”. But they could do it only parodically in the form of shared terror in the face of an invisible enemy, whose result was not the production of a homeland and community bounds, but a mass founded on an unprecedented separation, proving that distance couldn’t in any case — as an odious, obsessively repeated watchword claimed — constitute a “social” bound. Apparently more effective was the recourse to a principle capable of replacing religion, which was immediately identified in science (in the case in point, medicine). But here, too, medicine as a religion has shown its inadequacy, not only because in exchange for the salvation of a whole existence could promise only health from illness, but also, and above all, because, in order to assert itself as a religion, medicine have had to produce a state of incessant threat and insecuruty, in which viruses and pandemics followed one another without respite and no vaccine granted that serenity that the sacraments had been able to ensure to the devotees.
The project of creating a patriotism of the species failed to such an extent that ultimately, once again and brazenly, it was necessary to resort to the creation of a particular political enemy, not by chance identified among those which had already played this role: Russia, China, Iran.
In this sense, the political culture of the West hasn’t taken a single step in a different direction from the one in which it has always moved, and only if we’ll put back all its founding principles and values in question, will be possible to think otherwise of the place of politics, beyond both nation-states and the global economic state.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, January 9, 2023
The forces which push towards a world political unity seemed to be stronger than those directed towards a more limited political unity, such as the European one, to such an extent that it was possible to write that the unity of Europe could be only “a collateral product, not to say a waste one, of the global unity of the planet”. In reality, the forces pushing towards the achievement of unity have proved to be just as insufficient for the planet as they are for Europe. If European unity, in order to give life to a true constituent assembly, would have presupposed something like an “European patriotism”, which did not exist anywhere (and the first consequence was the failure of the referendums to approve the so-called European constitution, which, from a juridical point of view, is not a constitution, but only an agreement between states), the political unity of the planet presupposed a “patriotism of the species and or of the human genre” even more difficult to find. As Gilson has rightly pointed out, a society of political societies cannot itself be political, but needs a metapolitical principle, such as religion was at least in the past.
It is possible, then, that what governments have attempted to achieve through the pandemic is just such a “patriotism of the species”. But they could do it only parodically in the form of shared terror in the face of an invisible enemy, whose result was not the production of a homeland and community bounds, but a mass founded on an unprecedented separation, proving that distance couldn’t in any case — as an odious, obsessively repeated watchword claimed — constitute a “social” bound. Apparently more effective was the recourse to a principle capable of replacing religion, which was immediately identified in science (in the case in point, medicine). But here, too, medicine as a religion has shown its inadequacy, not only because in exchange for the salvation of a whole existence could promise only health from illness, but also, and above all, because, in order to assert itself as a religion, medicine have had to produce a state of incessant threat and insecuruty, in which viruses and pandemics followed one another without respite and no vaccine granted that serenity that the sacraments had been able to ensure to the devotees.
The project of creating a patriotism of the species failed to such an extent that ultimately, once again and brazenly, it was necessary to resort to the creation of a particular political enemy, not by chance identified among those which had already played this role: Russia, China, Iran.
In this sense, the political culture of the West hasn’t taken a single step in a different direction from the one in which it has always moved, and only if we’ll put back all its founding principles and values in question, will be possible to think otherwise of the place of politics, beyond both nation-states and the global economic state.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Achraf Baznani, A Place with no Name, 2017. Courtesy of WikiArt.