About anarchy, today
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, February 26, 2023
If for anyone who intends to think about politics, of which somehow it constitutes the extreme focus or vanishing point, anarchy has never ceased to be topical, such it is today also because of the unfair, ferocious persecution to which an anarchist is subjected in the Italian prisons. However, speaking of anarchy, as one has had to do, on the level of law, necessarily implies a paradox, because it is at least contradictory to ask the state to recognise the right to deny the state, just as, if one intends to bring the right to resistance to its ultimate consequences, it cannot reasonably be demanded that the possibility of civil war be legally protected.
In order to think of anarchy today, it will therefore be advisable to take a completely different perspective and rather question the way in which Engels conceived it, when he reproached anarchists for wanting to substitute the state with administration. Indeed, this accusation hides a decisive political problem, which neither Marxists nor perhaps the anarchists themselves have posed correctly. A problem all the more urgent, as we are witnessing today the attempt to achieve, somewhat parodically, what was for Engels the declared aim of anarchy — and, that is, not so much the simple substitution of the administration for the state, but rather the identification of state and administration in a sort of Leviathan, which assumes the good-natured mask of the administrator. This is what Sunstein and Vermeule theorise in a book (Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State) in which governance, the exercise of government, exceeding and contaminating the traditional powers (legislative, executive, judicial), exercises in the name of the administration and in a discretionary way the functions and powers that belonged to them.
What is administration? Minister, from which the term derives, is the servant or helper in opposition to the magister, the master, the holder of power. The word comes from the root *men, which means diminution and smallness. The minister is to the magister as the minus is to the magis, the less to the more, the small to the large, what diminishes to what augments. The idea of anarchy would consist, at least according to Engels, in an attempt to think of a minister without a magister, a servant without a master. Certainly an interesting attempt, since it can be tactically advantageous to play in this way the servant against the master, the minus against the plus and think of a society in which everyone is a minister and no one is a magister or boss. In a certain sense, this is what Hegel had done, showing in his notorious dialectic that the servant ultimately ends up dominating the master. It is nonetheless undeniable that the two key figures of Western politics remain thus linked to each other in a tireless relationship, which it is impossible to sort out once and for all.
A radical idea of anarchy can therefore only free itself from the incessant dialectic of the servant and the slave, of the minister and the magister, to place itself resolutely in the gap that divides them. The tertium that appears in this gap will no longer be either administration or state, neither minus nor magis: it will rather be between them as a remainder, which expresses their impossibility of coinciding. Anarchy is, i.e., above all, the radical disavowal not so much of the state nor simply of the administration, but rather of the claim of power to make state and administration coincide in the government of men. It is against this claim that the anarchist fights, ultimately in the name of that ungovernable, which is the vanishing point of every community among men.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, February 26, 2023
If for anyone who intends to think about politics, of which somehow it constitutes the extreme focus or vanishing point, anarchy has never ceased to be topical, such it is today also because of the unfair, ferocious persecution to which an anarchist is subjected in the Italian prisons. However, speaking of anarchy, as one has had to do, on the level of law, necessarily implies a paradox, because it is at least contradictory to ask the state to recognise the right to deny the state, just as, if one intends to bring the right to resistance to its ultimate consequences, it cannot reasonably be demanded that the possibility of civil war be legally protected.
In order to think of anarchy today, it will therefore be advisable to take a completely different perspective and rather question the way in which Engels conceived it, when he reproached anarchists for wanting to substitute the state with administration. Indeed, this accusation hides a decisive political problem, which neither Marxists nor perhaps the anarchists themselves have posed correctly. A problem all the more urgent, as we are witnessing today the attempt to achieve, somewhat parodically, what was for Engels the declared aim of anarchy — and, that is, not so much the simple substitution of the administration for the state, but rather the identification of state and administration in a sort of Leviathan, which assumes the good-natured mask of the administrator. This is what Sunstein and Vermeule theorise in a book (Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State) in which governance, the exercise of government, exceeding and contaminating the traditional powers (legislative, executive, judicial), exercises in the name of the administration and in a discretionary way the functions and powers that belonged to them.
What is administration? Minister, from which the term derives, is the servant or helper in opposition to the magister, the master, the holder of power. The word comes from the root *men, which means diminution and smallness. The minister is to the magister as the minus is to the magis, the less to the more, the small to the large, what diminishes to what augments. The idea of anarchy would consist, at least according to Engels, in an attempt to think of a minister without a magister, a servant without a master. Certainly an interesting attempt, since it can be tactically advantageous to play in this way the servant against the master, the minus against the plus and think of a society in which everyone is a minister and no one is a magister or boss. In a certain sense, this is what Hegel had done, showing in his notorious dialectic that the servant ultimately ends up dominating the master. It is nonetheless undeniable that the two key figures of Western politics remain thus linked to each other in a tireless relationship, which it is impossible to sort out once and for all.
A radical idea of anarchy can therefore only free itself from the incessant dialectic of the servant and the slave, of the minister and the magister, to place itself resolutely in the gap that divides them. The tertium that appears in this gap will no longer be either administration or state, neither minus nor magis: it will rather be between them as a remainder, which expresses their impossibility of coinciding. Anarchy is, i.e., above all, the radical disavowal not so much of the state nor simply of the administration, but rather of the claim of power to make state and administration coincide in the government of men. It is against this claim that the anarchist fights, ultimately in the name of that ungovernable, which is the vanishing point of every community among men.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Eileen Agar, Angel of Anarchy, 1936–40. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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