The accomplice and the sovereign
Giorgio Agamben, Intervention at the “Doubt and Precaution Commission” of November 28, 2022
I would like to share with you some reflections on the extreme political situation we have lived through and from which it would be naïve to believe that we have escaped or even that we can escape. I believe that not all of us have realised that what we are dealing with is more and other than a flagrant abuse in the exercise of power or a perversion — however grave — of the principles of law and public institutions. I believe that we are rather faced with a shadow line which, unlike that of Conrad’s novel, no generation can think to climb over with impunity. And if one day historians shall investigate on what happened under the cover of the pandemic, it will result — I believe — that our society has, perhaps, never reached such an extreme degree of cruelty, irresponsibility and, at the same time, decay. I used with reason these three terms, now tied in a Borromean knot, that is, a knot in which each element can’t be untied from the other two. And if, as some, not without reason, claim, the seriousness of a situation is measured by the number of killings, I believe that this index too will result much higher than we believed or pretended to believe. Borrowing from Lévi-Strauss an expression that he used for Europe in the Second World War, one could say that our society “vomited itself up”. That’s why I think that for this society there is no way out of the situation in which, more or less consciously, it confined itself, unless something or someone puts it into question from the beginning to the end.
But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about; rather, I would like to question myself with you about what we have done so far and what we can continue to do in such a situation. Indeed, I fully share the considerations contained in a document which was circulated by Luca Marini regarding the impossibility of a reconciliation. There can be no reconciliation with those who have said and done what has been said and done in these two years.
We do not simply have before us people who have deceived themselves or have, for some reasons, professed erroneous opinions, that we can try to correct. Whoever thinks this is deluded. We have before us something different, a new figure of man and citizen, to use two terms familiar with our political tradition. In any case, it is a matter of something that took the place of that hendiadys and which I propose to call provisionally with a technical term of criminal law: the accomplice — provided it is made clear that it is a special figure of complicity, or, so to say, of absolute complicity, in the sense that I will try to explain.
In the terminology of criminal law, the accomplice is the one who put in place a conduct that in itself does not constitute a crime, but which contributes to the criminal action of another subject, the offender. We found ourselves, and we find ourselves, facing individuals — indeed an entire society — which made itself accomplice to a crime with no offender present — or, anyway, with no offender to name. That is, a paradoxical situation in which there are only accomplices, but no culprit, a situation in which everyone — be it the President of the Republic or the ordinary citizen, the Minister of Health or a simple doctor — always acts as accomplices and never as offenders.
I believe that this singular situation may enable us to read the Hobbesian pact in a new perspective. That is, the social contract has assumed the figure — which is perhaps its true, extreme figura — of a pact of complicity without the offender — and this absent offender coincides with the sovereign whose body is formed by the same mass of accomplices and therefore it is nothing other than the incarnation of this general complicity, of this being com-plici, i.e. folded together, of all single individuals. A society of accomplices is more oppressive and suffocating than any dictatorship, because whoever does not participate in the complicity — the non-accomplice — is purely and simply excluded by the social pact, he has no longer a place in the city.
There is also another sense in which one can speak of complicity, and it is the complicity not so much and not only between the citizen and the sovereign, but also and rather between the man and the citizen. Hannah Arendt has repeatedly shown how ambiguous the relationship between these two terms is, and how in the Declarations of Rights the inscription of birth, i.e. of the biological life of the individual, is actually in question in the juridical-political order of the modern nation-state.
Rights are attributed to man only to the extent that he is the immediately vanishing presupposition of the citizen. The emergence in our time — on a stable basis — of man as such is the indicator of an irreparable crisis in that fiction of identity between man and citizen upon which the sovereignty of the modern state is founded. What we are faced with today is a new configuration of this relationship, in which the man no longer passes dialectically into the citizen, but establishes a singular relationship with him, in the sense that, with the birth of his body, he provides the citizen with the complicity he needs to constitute himself politically, and the citizen, for his part, declares himself an accomplice to the man’s life, of which he takes care. This complicity, you will have understood, is biopolitics, which has now reached its extreme — and hopefully last — configuration.
Now the question I wanted to ask you is this: to what extent can we still feel obliged to this society? Or if, as I believe, still somehow, despite everything, we feel obbliged, in what ways and within what limits can we respond to this obligation and speak publicly?
I don’t have a comprehensive answer, I can only tell you, like the poet, what I know I can no longer do.
I can no longer, faced with a doctor or anyone who denounces the perverse way in which medicine has been used in these two years, not to question — first of all — the medicine itself. If we do not rethink about what medicine has progressively become and perhaps the entire science of which it claims to form a part, we will in no way be able to hope to stop its lethal rush.
I can no longer, faced with a jurist or anyone who denounces the way in which the law and the constitution have been manipulated and betrayed, not to revoke — first of all — the law and the consitution in question. Is it perhaps necessary, not to mention present times, that I recall here that neither Mussolini nor Hitler needed to question the constitutions in force in Italy and Germany, but rather found in them the devices they needed to establish their regimes? It is possible, i.e., that the gesture of whoever seeks today to base his battle on the constitution and on rights is already defeated from the start.
If I have evoked this double impossibility of mine, it is not, in fact, in the name of vague metahistorical principles, but, on the contrary, as an unavoidable consequence of a precise analysis of the historical situation in which we find ourselves. It is as if certain procedures or principles in which one believed or, rather, pretended to believe, had now shown their true face, which cannot omit to look at.
By this I do not mean to devalue or consider useless the critical work we have carried out so far and that even today will be certainly be carried on with rigour and sharpness. This work can be, and no doubt is, tactically useful, but it would be blind to identify it simply with a long-term strategy.
In this perspective, much still remains to be done and can only be done by letting go of concepts and truths that we took for granted without reservations. The work before us may begin, according to a beautiful image by Anna Maria Ortese, only there where all is lost, without compromise and without nostalgia.
Giorgio Agamben, Intervention at the “Doubt and Precaution Commission” of November 28, 2022
I would like to share with you some reflections on the extreme political situation we have lived through and from which it would be naïve to believe that we have escaped or even that we can escape. I believe that not all of us have realised that what we are dealing with is more and other than a flagrant abuse in the exercise of power or a perversion — however grave — of the principles of law and public institutions. I believe that we are rather faced with a shadow line which, unlike that of Conrad’s novel, no generation can think to climb over with impunity. And if one day historians shall investigate on what happened under the cover of the pandemic, it will result — I believe — that our society has, perhaps, never reached such an extreme degree of cruelty, irresponsibility and, at the same time, decay. I used with reason these three terms, now tied in a Borromean knot, that is, a knot in which each element can’t be untied from the other two. And if, as some, not without reason, claim, the seriousness of a situation is measured by the number of killings, I believe that this index too will result much higher than we believed or pretended to believe. Borrowing from Lévi-Strauss an expression that he used for Europe in the Second World War, one could say that our society “vomited itself up”. That’s why I think that for this society there is no way out of the situation in which, more or less consciously, it confined itself, unless something or someone puts it into question from the beginning to the end.
But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about; rather, I would like to question myself with you about what we have done so far and what we can continue to do in such a situation. Indeed, I fully share the considerations contained in a document which was circulated by Luca Marini regarding the impossibility of a reconciliation. There can be no reconciliation with those who have said and done what has been said and done in these two years.
We do not simply have before us people who have deceived themselves or have, for some reasons, professed erroneous opinions, that we can try to correct. Whoever thinks this is deluded. We have before us something different, a new figure of man and citizen, to use two terms familiar with our political tradition. In any case, it is a matter of something that took the place of that hendiadys and which I propose to call provisionally with a technical term of criminal law: the accomplice — provided it is made clear that it is a special figure of complicity, or, so to say, of absolute complicity, in the sense that I will try to explain.
In the terminology of criminal law, the accomplice is the one who put in place a conduct that in itself does not constitute a crime, but which contributes to the criminal action of another subject, the offender. We found ourselves, and we find ourselves, facing individuals — indeed an entire society — which made itself accomplice to a crime with no offender present — or, anyway, with no offender to name. That is, a paradoxical situation in which there are only accomplices, but no culprit, a situation in which everyone — be it the President of the Republic or the ordinary citizen, the Minister of Health or a simple doctor — always acts as accomplices and never as offenders.
I believe that this singular situation may enable us to read the Hobbesian pact in a new perspective. That is, the social contract has assumed the figure — which is perhaps its true, extreme figura — of a pact of complicity without the offender — and this absent offender coincides with the sovereign whose body is formed by the same mass of accomplices and therefore it is nothing other than the incarnation of this general complicity, of this being com-plici, i.e. folded together, of all single individuals. A society of accomplices is more oppressive and suffocating than any dictatorship, because whoever does not participate in the complicity — the non-accomplice — is purely and simply excluded by the social pact, he has no longer a place in the city.
There is also another sense in which one can speak of complicity, and it is the complicity not so much and not only between the citizen and the sovereign, but also and rather between the man and the citizen. Hannah Arendt has repeatedly shown how ambiguous the relationship between these two terms is, and how in the Declarations of Rights the inscription of birth, i.e. of the biological life of the individual, is actually in question in the juridical-political order of the modern nation-state.
Rights are attributed to man only to the extent that he is the immediately vanishing presupposition of the citizen. The emergence in our time — on a stable basis — of man as such is the indicator of an irreparable crisis in that fiction of identity between man and citizen upon which the sovereignty of the modern state is founded. What we are faced with today is a new configuration of this relationship, in which the man no longer passes dialectically into the citizen, but establishes a singular relationship with him, in the sense that, with the birth of his body, he provides the citizen with the complicity he needs to constitute himself politically, and the citizen, for his part, declares himself an accomplice to the man’s life, of which he takes care. This complicity, you will have understood, is biopolitics, which has now reached its extreme — and hopefully last — configuration.
Now the question I wanted to ask you is this: to what extent can we still feel obliged to this society? Or if, as I believe, still somehow, despite everything, we feel obbliged, in what ways and within what limits can we respond to this obligation and speak publicly?
I don’t have a comprehensive answer, I can only tell you, like the poet, what I know I can no longer do.
I can no longer, faced with a doctor or anyone who denounces the perverse way in which medicine has been used in these two years, not to question — first of all — the medicine itself. If we do not rethink about what medicine has progressively become and perhaps the entire science of which it claims to form a part, we will in no way be able to hope to stop its lethal rush.
I can no longer, faced with a jurist or anyone who denounces the way in which the law and the constitution have been manipulated and betrayed, not to revoke — first of all — the law and the consitution in question. Is it perhaps necessary, not to mention present times, that I recall here that neither Mussolini nor Hitler needed to question the constitutions in force in Italy and Germany, but rather found in them the devices they needed to establish their regimes? It is possible, i.e., that the gesture of whoever seeks today to base his battle on the constitution and on rights is already defeated from the start.
If I have evoked this double impossibility of mine, it is not, in fact, in the name of vague metahistorical principles, but, on the contrary, as an unavoidable consequence of a precise analysis of the historical situation in which we find ourselves. It is as if certain procedures or principles in which one believed or, rather, pretended to believe, had now shown their true face, which cannot omit to look at.
By this I do not mean to devalue or consider useless the critical work we have carried out so far and that even today will be certainly be carried on with rigour and sharpness. This work can be, and no doubt is, tactically useful, but it would be blind to identify it simply with a long-term strategy.
In this perspective, much still remains to be done and can only be done by letting go of concepts and truths that we took for granted without reservations. The work before us may begin, according to a beautiful image by Anna Maria Ortese, only there where all is lost, without compromise and without nostalgia.
(English translation by I, Robot)
José Manuel Capuletti, Not Guilty, 1967. Courtesy of WikiArt.
No comments:
Post a Comment