The two faces of power 2: politics and economics
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 13, 2023
It is well-known the lapidary sentence that Napoleon uttered as he met Goethe at Erfurt in October 1808: Le destin c’est la politique — “destiny is politics”. This statement, which at the time was perfectly intelligible, even if apparently revolutionary, has completely lost its meaning for us today. We no longer know what the term “politics” means, and even less will we dream of seeing our destiny in it. “Destiny is the economy” is rather the refrain that so-called “politicians” have been repeating to us for decades now. And yet not only do they insist on calling themselves as such, but the parties to which they belong as well as their government coalitions and the decisions they continue to make, claim to be “political”.
So, what do we mean today when we pronounce, albeit without too much conviction, the word “politics”? Is there in it something like a unitary meaning or, rather, the sense that the term carries is constutively split? The terminological uncertainty in the translation of the term politeia, which we’ve already analysed, is not only recent. The Latin translation of Aristotle’s Politics by Leonardo Aretino, published at Rome in 1942 along with Thomas’s commentary, renders the term as gubernatio and respublica (more rarely as civitatis status). If the passage we have quoted (1279a, 25–26) in its Latin translation reads: Cum vero gubernatio civitatis et regimen idem significant [...], in the previous passage politeia is rendered instead as respublica (est autem respublica ordinatio civitatis). In the commentary of Thomas, who obviously had another translation before his eyes, politeia is sometimes translated with policia and sometimes with respublica. The proximity of the term policia with our “polizia” (police) ought not to be surprising: polizia is indeed, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Italian term that corresponds to politeia. “Polizia” can still be read in the translation of Plutarch by Marcello Adriani, published at Florence in 1819: “it means the order and arrangement of a city by which its affairs are organised; and so it is said there are three polizie (sorts of government): monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy”.
In the German theorists of cameralism and police science, that takes form and spreads throughout Europe during the eighteenth century, the science of state becomes a science of government (Regierungwissenschaft), whose essential purpose is the Polizei, defined — with respect to the Politik, which is responsible only for the struggle with external enemies — such as the administration of the good order of the community and the care of the well-being and life of the subjects in all its aspects. And it is certainly no coincidence that Napoleon, who resolutely affirmed politics as destiny, was also the ruler who gave the administration and police the modern form with which we are familiar. The administrative state theorised by Sunstein and Vermeule, which is imposing itself in advanced industrial societies, is in its own way faithful to this model, in which the state seems to resolve itself into administration and government, and “politics” to transform itself entirely into “police”. It is significant that, just in a state conceived in this sense as a “police state”, the term ends up designating the least edifying aspect of government, i.e. the corps required to ensure in the last resort by force the realisation of the governmental vocation of the state. And yet, the formal apparatus of the legislative state does not disappear, just as the laws that, in spite of everything, governments continue to issue do not disappear, nor the offices and dignity that according to the consitution embody and safeguard the legitimacy of the system are abolished. Beyond its transformations, the essential bipolar nature of the political machine maintains itself, at least formally, in life.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 13, 2023
It is well-known the lapidary sentence that Napoleon uttered as he met Goethe at Erfurt in October 1808: Le destin c’est la politique — “destiny is politics”. This statement, which at the time was perfectly intelligible, even if apparently revolutionary, has completely lost its meaning for us today. We no longer know what the term “politics” means, and even less will we dream of seeing our destiny in it. “Destiny is the economy” is rather the refrain that so-called “politicians” have been repeating to us for decades now. And yet not only do they insist on calling themselves as such, but the parties to which they belong as well as their government coalitions and the decisions they continue to make, claim to be “political”.
So, what do we mean today when we pronounce, albeit without too much conviction, the word “politics”? Is there in it something like a unitary meaning or, rather, the sense that the term carries is constutively split? The terminological uncertainty in the translation of the term politeia, which we’ve already analysed, is not only recent. The Latin translation of Aristotle’s Politics by Leonardo Aretino, published at Rome in 1942 along with Thomas’s commentary, renders the term as gubernatio and respublica (more rarely as civitatis status). If the passage we have quoted (1279a, 25–26) in its Latin translation reads: Cum vero gubernatio civitatis et regimen idem significant [...], in the previous passage politeia is rendered instead as respublica (est autem respublica ordinatio civitatis). In the commentary of Thomas, who obviously had another translation before his eyes, politeia is sometimes translated with policia and sometimes with respublica. The proximity of the term policia with our “polizia” (police) ought not to be surprising: polizia is indeed, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Italian term that corresponds to politeia. “Polizia” can still be read in the translation of Plutarch by Marcello Adriani, published at Florence in 1819: “it means the order and arrangement of a city by which its affairs are organised; and so it is said there are three polizie (sorts of government): monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy”.
In the German theorists of cameralism and police science, that takes form and spreads throughout Europe during the eighteenth century, the science of state becomes a science of government (Regierungwissenschaft), whose essential purpose is the Polizei, defined — with respect to the Politik, which is responsible only for the struggle with external enemies — such as the administration of the good order of the community and the care of the well-being and life of the subjects in all its aspects. And it is certainly no coincidence that Napoleon, who resolutely affirmed politics as destiny, was also the ruler who gave the administration and police the modern form with which we are familiar. The administrative state theorised by Sunstein and Vermeule, which is imposing itself in advanced industrial societies, is in its own way faithful to this model, in which the state seems to resolve itself into administration and government, and “politics” to transform itself entirely into “police”. It is significant that, just in a state conceived in this sense as a “police state”, the term ends up designating the least edifying aspect of government, i.e. the corps required to ensure in the last resort by force the realisation of the governmental vocation of the state. And yet, the formal apparatus of the legislative state does not disappear, just as the laws that, in spite of everything, governments continue to issue do not disappear, nor the offices and dignity that according to the consitution embody and safeguard the legitimacy of the system are abolished. Beyond its transformations, the essential bipolar nature of the political machine maintains itself, at least formally, in life.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Christian Rohlfs, Cerberus, 1912. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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