A community in society
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 17, 2021
Italy, as a political laboratory for the West, in which the strategies of the dominant powers are worked out in advance in its extreme form, is today a country — humanly and politically — in disrepair, where an unethical and unscrupulous tyranny has allied itself with a mass in the grip of a pseudo-religious terror, ready to renounce not only what were once called constitutional freedoms, but even any warmth in human relations. Indeed believing that the greenpass means the return to normality is really naïve. Just as a third vaccine shot is already being imposed, so new ones will be imposed, and new situations of emergency and new red zones will be declared as long as the government and the powers it expresses will judge it useful. And those who have been recklessly obedient will be the first to pay the price.
In these conditions, without putting down any possibile instrument of immediate resistance, dissidents have to think about creating something like a society in the society, a community of friends and neighbours inside the society of enmity and distance. The forms of this new clandestinity, that will have to make itself as autonomous as possible from the institutions, ought to be each time pondered and experimented, but only they can guarantee human survival in a world which has devoted itself to a more or less conscious self-destruction.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 17, 2021
Italy, as a political laboratory for the West, in which the strategies of the dominant powers are worked out in advance in its extreme form, is today a country — humanly and politically — in disrepair, where an unethical and unscrupulous tyranny has allied itself with a mass in the grip of a pseudo-religious terror, ready to renounce not only what were once called constitutional freedoms, but even any warmth in human relations. Indeed believing that the greenpass means the return to normality is really naïve. Just as a third vaccine shot is already being imposed, so new ones will be imposed, and new situations of emergency and new red zones will be declared as long as the government and the powers it expresses will judge it useful. And those who have been recklessly obedient will be the first to pay the price.
In these conditions, without putting down any possibile instrument of immediate resistance, dissidents have to think about creating something like a society in the society, a community of friends and neighbours inside the society of enmity and distance. The forms of this new clandestinity, that will have to make itself as autonomous as possible from the institutions, ought to be each time pondered and experimented, but only they can guarantee human survival in a world which has devoted itself to a more or less conscious self-destruction.
M. C. Escher, Bond of Union, 1956. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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