Agamben, Giorgio. "Terrorisme ou Tragi-Comédie." in: Libération. November 19, 2008, (English).
"One such measure authorizes the detention for ninety-six hours of a group of young – perhaps careless – people, to whom “it is not possible to attribute a criminal act.” Another, equally serious, is the adoption of laws that criminalize association, the formulations of which are left intentionally vague and that allow the classification of political acts as having terrorist “intentions” or “inclinations,” acts that until now were never in themselves considered terrorist."
Agamben, Giorgio. "Terrorisme ou Tragi-Comédie." in: Libération. November 19, 2008, (English).
"...to understand what a metropolis is one needs to understand the process whereby power progressively takes on the character of government of things and the living, or if you like of an economy. Economy means nothing but government, in the 18th century, the government of the living and things. The city of the feudal system of the ancient regime was always in a situation of exception in relation to the large territorial powers, it was the citta franca, relatively autonomous from the great territorial powers (3). So I would say that the metropolis is the dispositif or group of dispositifs that replaces the city when power becomes the government of the living and of things."
Agamben, Giorgio. "Metropolis." Arianna Bove (Translator). March 17, 2007. (English).
"We cannot go into the complexity of the transformation of power into government. Government is not dominion and violence, it is a more compolecx configuration that traverses the very nature of the governed thus implying their fredom, it is a power that is not transcendental but immanent, its essential character is that it always is, in its specific manifestation, a collateral effect, something that originates in a general economy and falls onto the particular (4). When the US strategists speak of collateral damage they have to be taken literally: government always has this schema of a general economy, with collateral effects on the particulars, on the subjects."
Agamben, Giorgio. "Metropolis." Arianna Bove (Translator). March 17, 2007. (English).
"Thus whereas leprosy is a paradigm of exclusive society, the plague is a paradigm of disciplinary techniques, technologies that will take society through the transition from the ancient regime to the disciplinary paradigm."
Agamben, Giorgio. "Metropolis." Arianna Bove (Translator). March 17, 2007. (English).
"There is no dispositif without a process of subjectivation, to talk of dispositif one has to see a process of subjectivation. Subject means two things: what leads an individual to assume and become attached to an individuality and singularity, but also subjugation to an external power (7). There is no process of subjectivation without both these aspects."
Agamben, Giorgio. "Metropolis." Arianna Bove (Translator). March 17, 2007. (English).
"What is often lacking, also in the movements, is the consciousness of this relation, the awareness that every time one takes on an identity one is also subjugated."
Agamben, Giorgio. "Metropolis." Arianna Bove (Translator). March 17, 2007. (English).
"Confession always entailed in the creation of a subject also the negation of a subject, for instance in the figure of the sinner and confessor, it is clear that the assumption of a subjectivity goes together with a process of de-subjectivation. So the point today is that dispositifs are increasingly de-subjectifying so it is difficult to identify the processes of suvbjectivation that they create."
Agamben, Giorgio. "Metropolis." Arianna Bove (Translator). March 17, 2007. (English).
"But the metropolis is also a space where a huge process of creation of subjectivity is taking place. About this we don't know enough. When I say that we need to know these processes, I am not just referring to the sociological or economic and social analysis; I am referring to the ontological level or Spinozian level that puts under question the subjects' ability/power to act; i.e. what, in the processes whereby a subject somehow becomes acttached to a subjective identity, leads to a change, an increase or decrease of his/her power to act (8). We lack this knowledge and this perhaps makes the metropolitan conflicts we witness today rather opaque."
Agamben, Giorgio. "Metropolis." Arianna Bove (Translator). March 17, 2007. (English).
"Like all historical research deserving of the name, Prodi's own opens up questions about the present. By relating what is at stake in his work to the results of other inquiries in linguistics and the history of law and religion, the present study aims to ask: what is the oath, and how can it define and question man as a political animal? If the oath is the sacrament of political power, which elements of its structure and history provide it with this role? What decisive anthropological feature characterises the oath as something by which and through which an entire person, in life and in death, can be called into question?"
Agamben, Giorgio. "The sacrament of language: Archaeology of the oath (Homo Sacer II, 3)." in: Arianna Bove. Homer Sacer 3. 2008.(English).
"Rather than the utterance as such, the oath concerns the guarantee of its efficacy: rather than the semiotic and cognitive function of language as such, it is the assurance of its truthfulness and realisation that is under question in the oath."
Agamben, Giorgio. "The sacrament of language: Archaeology of the oath (Homo Sacer II, 3)." in: Arianna Bove. Homer Sacer 3. 2008.(English).
"One might think that the oath is a remedy to this ‘Indo-European' scourge that is the violation of a word given and, more broadly, the possibility of falsehood inherent in language. However, the oath is revealed to be particularly inadequate to avoid such a scourge."
Agamben, Giorgio. "The sacrament of language: Archaeology of the oath (Homo Sacer II, 3)." in: Arianna Bove. Homer Sacer 3. 2008.(English).
"My first consideration is that the primacy of the notion of movement lies in the function of the becoming unpolitical of the people (remember that the people is the unpolitical element that grows in the shadow and under the protection of the movement). So the movement becomes the decisive political concept when the democratic concept of the people, as a political body, is in demise. Democracy ends when movements emerge. Substantially there are no democratic movements (if by democracy we mean what traditionally regards the people as the political body constitutive of democracy). On this premises, revolutionary traditions on the Left agree with Nazism and Fascism. It is not by chance that contemporary thinkers who try to think of new political bodies, such as Toni, take a distance from the people. For me it is significant that around Jesus there are never laos or demos (technical terms for people) but only oclos (a mass, a turba, multitude). The concept of movement presupposes the eclypse of the notion of people as constitutive political body."
Agamben, Giorgio. "Movement." in: Arianna Bove (Translator). Uni.Nomade. Seminar War and Democracy. March 8, 2005, (English).
"These are my questions : Do we have to keep using the concept of movement ? If it signals a threshold of politicisation of the unpolitical, can there be a movement that is different from civil war ? or: In what direction can we rethink the concept of movement and its relation to biopolitics?"
Agamben, Giorgio. "Movement." in: Arianna Bove (Translator). Uni.Nomade. Seminar War and Democracy. March 8, 2005, (English).
"The concept of movement is central to Aristotle, as kinesis, in the relaiton between potenza and act. Aristotle defines movement as the act of a potenza as potenza, rather than the passage to act. Secondly he says that movement is ateles, imperfect act, without an end. Here I would suggest a modification to his view, and maybe Toni might agree with me for once on this : that movement is the constitution of a potenza as potenza. But if this is true then we cannot think of movement as external or autonomous in relation to the multitude. It can never be subject of a decision, organisation, direction of the poeple, or element of politicisation of the multitude or the people."
Agamben, Giorgio. "Movement." in: Arianna Bove (Translator). Uni.Nomade. Seminar War and Democracy. March 8, 2005, (English).
"In this perspective the motto I cited as a rule for myself might be reformulated ontologically as this : the movement is that which if it is, is as if it wasn’t, it lacks itself (manca a se stesso), and if it isn’t, is as if it was, it exceeds itself. It is the threshold of indeterminacy between an excess and a deficiency which marks the limit of every politics in its constitutive imperfection."
Agamben, Giorgio. "Movement." in: Arianna Bove (Translator). Uni.Nomade. Seminar War and Democracy. March 8, 2005, (English).
"The term ‘dictatorship’ is absolutely inadequate to provide a reason from the legal point of view for these regimes, just as the sharp opposition democracy/dictatorship is misleading for an analysis of contemporary governmental paradigms."
Agamben, Giorgio, Kevin Attell (Translator). State of Exception. University Of Chicago Press. January 15, 2005, Paperback, 104 pages, Language: English, ISBN: 0226009254.
"This labour of definition is necessary because if we carry on reading Schmitt we see threatening aporiae: in so far as the movement is the determining political and autonomous element and the people is in itself un-political, then the movement can only find its own being political by assigning to the un-political body of the people an internal caesura that allow for its politicisation. In Schmitt, this caesura is what he calls the identity of species, i.e. racism ()."
Agamben, Giorgio, Arianna Bove (Transcriber and Translator). "Rethinking Movement". in: Generation-Online Seminar given at the Nomad University, January 2005.
"The state of exception establishes a hidden but fundamental relationship between law and the absence of law. It is a void, a blank and this empty space is constitutive of the legal system."
Agamben, Giorgio, Ulrich Raulff (Interviewer). "Interview with Giorgio Agamben – Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life." in: Morag Goodwin (Translator). The German Law Journal March 2004. (Originally Published in German) in: Süddeutsche Zeitung April 6, 2004.
"The specific quality of the state of exception appears clearly if we examine one measure in Roman Law that may be considered as its true archetype, the iustitium. When the Roman Senate was alerted to a situation that seemed to threaten or compromise the Republic, they pronounced a senatus consultum ultimum, whereby consuls (or their substitutes, and each citizen) were compelled to take all possible measures to assure the security of the State. The senatus consultum implied a decree by which one declared the tumultus, i.e., a state of exception caused by internal disorder or an insurrection whose consequence was the proclamation of a iustutium."
Agamben, Giorgio. "State of Exception." in: European Graduate School. 2003. (English).
"The term iustitium - construed precisely like solstitium— literally signifies "to arrest, suspend the ius, the legal order." The Roman grammarians explained the term in the following way: "When the law marks a point of arrest, just as the sun in its solstice." Consequently, the iustitium was not so much a suspension within the framework of the administration of justice, as a suspension of the law itself. If we would like to grasp the nature and structure of the state of exception, we first must comprehend the paradoxical status of this legal institution that simply consists in the production of a leg. void, the production of a space entirely deprived by ius."
Agamben, Giorgio. "State of Exception." in: European Graduate School. 2003. (English).
"Faced with this anomic space that violently comes to coalesce with that of the City, both ancient and modern writers seem to oscillate between two contradictory conceptions: either to make iustitium correspond to the idea of a complete anomy within which all power and all legal structures are abolished, or to conceive of it as the very plentitude of law where it coincides with the totality of the real."
Agamben, Giorgio. "State of Exception." in: European Graduate School. 2003. (English).
"Whence the question: what is the nature of the acts committed during iustitium? From the moment they are carried out in a legal void they ought to be considered as pure facts with no legal connotation: The question is important, because we are here contemplating a sphere of action that implies above all the license to kill."
Agamben, Giorgio. "State of Exception." in: European Graduate School. 2003. (English).
"The state of exception is not a dictatorship, but a space devoid of law."
Agamben, Giorgio. "State of Exception." in: European Graduate School. 2003. (English).
"That the state of exception since then has become the norm does not only signify that its undecidability has reached a point of culmination, but also that it is no longer capable of fulfilling the task assigned to it by Schmitt."
Agamben, Giorgio. "State of Exception." in: European Graduate School. 2003. (English).
"For one reason or another this space devoid of law seems so essential to the legal order itself that the latter makes every possible attempt to assure a relation to the former, as if the law in order to guarantee its functioning would necessarily have to entertain a relation to an anomy."
Agamben, Giorgio. "State of Exception." in: European Graduate School. 2003. (English).
"But if the essence of the law - of every law - is the trial, if all right (and morality that is contaminated by it) is only tribunal right, then execution and transgression, innocence and guilt, obedience and disobedience all become indistinct and lose their importance."
Agamben, Giorgio, Daniel Heller-Roazen (Editor and Translator). Remnants of Auschwitz The Witness and the Archive. Zone Books. January 1, 2002, Reprint edition, Paperback, 176 pages, Language: English, ISBN: 189095117X.
"In der linken Philosophieszene bildet sich ein neuer Meisterdenker heraus, den selbst die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung den anregendsten italienischen Philosophen der Gegenwart nennt."
Agamben, Giorgio. Information Philosophie. October 2001.
"But this is only the beginning. It barely touches by a new structure of subjectivity, but it is very complicated, it's quite a job to do. We really need ... This practice, not a principle. I think we can not have general principles, but be careful not to fall into a process of re-subjectification that is also a liability, that is to say, being a subject in as a strategy or tactics. That is why it is very important to see in practice that each or the movements themselves how to draw these areas possible."
Agamben, Giorgio, Stany Grelet & Mathieu Potte-Bonneville (Interviewers). "Interview with Giorgio Agamben – A Minor Biopolitics." in: Vacarme, row 10 Winter 2000.
"Because the modern state operates, I think he, as a kind of machine desubjectification, that is to say, as a machine that scrambles all classical identities and at the same time, Foucault shows as a machine to recode, legally particular identities dissolved: there is always a resubjectivation, a reidentification of these subjects destroyed, these subjects emptied of all identity. Today, it seems that the political ground is a kind of battlefield where these two processes take place: at the same time destroying all that was traditional identity - I say this without any nostalgia of course - and with instant resubjectivation the State, and not only by the state but also by the subjects themselves."
Agamben, Giorgio,Stany Grelet & Mathieu Potte-Bonneville (Interviewers). "Interview with Giorgio Agamben – A Minor Biopolitics." in: Vacarme, row 10 Winter 2000.
"The face is at once the irreparable being-exposed of humans and the very opening in which they hide and stay hidden. The face is the only location of community, the only possible city."
Agamben, Giorgio and Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Translation). Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Univ of Minnesota Press. October 2000, Library Binding, 160 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816630356.
"That is why human beings- as beings of power who can do or not do, succeed or fail, lose themselves or find themselves- are the only beings for whom happiness is always at stake in their living, the only beings whose life is irremediably and painfully assigned to happiness. But this immediately constitutes the form-of-life as political life. "
Agamben, Giorgio and Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Translation). Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Univ of Minnesota Press. October 2000, Library Binding, 160 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816630356.
"Potency – or knowledge- is the specifically human faculty of connectedness as lack; and language, in its split between language and speech, structurally contains this connectedness, is nothing other than this connectedness."
Agamben, Giorgio, Liz Heron (Translator). Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Verso Books. New York, December 1996, 256 pages, Hardcover, ISBN: 0860914704.
"Communication cannot be anything but the communication of communicability, beacuse it is impossible to communicate what is not communicable, what does not belong to the order of language; but, as such, communication implies and exteriority that originally transforms it into comunication of something."
Agamben, Giorgio, Sam Whitsitt and Michael Sullivan (Translation). Idea of Prose. Intersections. State University of New York Press. May 1995. Hardcover, ISBN: 0791423794.
"Artistic subjectivity without content is now the pure force of negation that everywhere and at all times affirms only itself as absolute freedom that mirrors itself in pure self-consciousness."
Agamben, Giorgio and Georgia Albert (Translation). The Man Without Content. Stanford University Press. Stanford. June 1999, Hardcover, Language English, ISBN: 0804735530.
"This fascination of not uttering something absolutely. "
Agamben, Giorgio and Michael Hardt (Translator). The Coming Community. University of Minnesota Press. March 1993. Paperback, 105 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816622353.
"Image of an angel that writes nothing but its potentiality to not-write."
Agamben, Giorgio and Michael Hardt (Translator). The Coming Community. University of Minnesota Press. March 1993. Paperback, 105 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816622353.
"Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is."
Agamben, Giorgio and Michael Hardt (Translator). The Coming Community. University of Minnesota Press. March 1993. Paperback, 105 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816622353.
"The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-state (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization."
Agamben, Giorgio and Michael Hardt (Translator). Coming Community. University of Minnesota Press. March 1993. Paperback, 105 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816622353.
"What is thus overlooked is the fact that every authentic poetic project is directed toward knowledge, just as every authentic act of philosophy is always directed toward joy."
Agamben, Giorgio, Ronald L. Martinez (Translator). Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. University of Minnesota Press. January 1993. Hardcover, 224 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816620377.
"To appropriation without consciousness and to consciousness without enjoyment criticism opposes the enjoyment of what cannot be possessed and the possession of what cannot be enjoyed."
Agamben, Giorgio, Ronald L. Martinez (Translator). Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. University of Minnesota Press. January 1993. Hardcover, 224 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816620377.