On the time to come
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, November 23, 2020
What is happening today on a global scale is certainly the end of a world. But it is not — as it is for those who are trying to govern in accordance with their own interests — an end in the sense of being a transition to a world that is better suited to the new needs of the human consortium. The era of bourgeois democracies, with its rights, its constitutions, and its parliaments, is fading. But beyond this surface-level legal transformation, which is certainly not irrelevant, what is ending is, primarily, the world that began with the Industrial Revolution and built up to the two — or three — world wars and to the totalitarianisms — tyrannical or democratic — that accompanied them.
If the powers that govern the world believed that they had to resort to measures and apparatuses as extreme as biosecurity and the health terror — which they have established everywhere and without any scruples (but which are now getting out of hand) — this is because, as all the evidence suggests, they feared they had no other choice if they wanted to survive. And if people accepted without any mitigation the despotic measures and the unprecedented constraints to which they have been subjected, this was not just because they dreaded the pandemic but, presumably, because they also knew more or less unwittingly that the world in which they had lived up until then could not continue to exist — it was too unjust and too inhumane. Needless to say, governments are preparing an even more inhumane and unjust world; but in any case, and on both sides, it was in a way foretold that the previous world — as we are now starting to call it — could not continue to exist. There is surely in this, as in any foreboding, a religious element. Health has replaced salvation, biological life has taken the place of eternal life, and the Church, which has been accustomed for quite some time to compromising with mundane exigencies, has more or less explicitly consented to this substitution.
We do not regret the ending of this world. We have no nostalgia for the notions of the human and of the divine that the implacable waves of time are erasing from the shore of history. But we reject with equal conviction the mute and faceless bare life and the health religion that governments are proposing. We are not awaiting either a new god or a new human being. We rather seek, here and now, among the ruins around us, a humbler, simpler form of life. We know that such a life is not a mirage, because we have memories and experiences of it — even if, inside and outside of ourselves, opposing forces are always pushing it back into oblivion.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, November 23, 2020
What is happening today on a global scale is certainly the end of a world. But it is not — as it is for those who are trying to govern in accordance with their own interests — an end in the sense of being a transition to a world that is better suited to the new needs of the human consortium. The era of bourgeois democracies, with its rights, its constitutions, and its parliaments, is fading. But beyond this surface-level legal transformation, which is certainly not irrelevant, what is ending is, primarily, the world that began with the Industrial Revolution and built up to the two — or three — world wars and to the totalitarianisms — tyrannical or democratic — that accompanied them.
If the powers that govern the world believed that they had to resort to measures and apparatuses as extreme as biosecurity and the health terror — which they have established everywhere and without any scruples (but which are now getting out of hand) — this is because, as all the evidence suggests, they feared they had no other choice if they wanted to survive. And if people accepted without any mitigation the despotic measures and the unprecedented constraints to which they have been subjected, this was not just because they dreaded the pandemic but, presumably, because they also knew more or less unwittingly that the world in which they had lived up until then could not continue to exist — it was too unjust and too inhumane. Needless to say, governments are preparing an even more inhumane and unjust world; but in any case, and on both sides, it was in a way foretold that the previous world — as we are now starting to call it — could not continue to exist. There is surely in this, as in any foreboding, a religious element. Health has replaced salvation, biological life has taken the place of eternal life, and the Church, which has been accustomed for quite some time to compromising with mundane exigencies, has more or less explicitly consented to this substitution.
We do not regret the ending of this world. We have no nostalgia for the notions of the human and of the divine that the implacable waves of time are erasing from the shore of history. But we reject with equal conviction the mute and faceless bare life and the health religion that governments are proposing. We are not awaiting either a new god or a new human being. We rather seek, here and now, among the ruins around us, a humbler, simpler form of life. We know that such a life is not a mirage, because we have memories and experiences of it — even if, inside and outside of ourselves, opposing forces are always pushing it back into oblivion.
(English translation by Valeria Dani)
László Moholy-Nagy, Human Mechanics, ca. 1925. Courtesy of WikiArt. |
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