Political consciousness today
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, October 10, 2023
What defines political consciousness today? A careful conjugation of renunciation and hope. When his God ordered him to sacrifice Isaac on the Mount Moriah, Abraham renounced his son without reserve and, yet — so at least Kierkegaard suggests in Fear and Trembling — somewhere in his heart continued to believe (faith, one knows, is only a form of hope) that God would not take Isaac away from him, although he had renounced him once and for all. Thus, in the extreme situation in which we are in, a lucid mind cannot help but leave aside projects, plans and even the idea of a possible happy political community among mankind and yet, at the same instant in which it has renounced them, it has to hope infallibly in what it had to do without.
Renunciation and hope, idea and disillusionment, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza come together in one only person and mutually deny and verify each other. Only a hope that, clearing away the specious certainties of dogmas and ideologies, churches and parties, turns with all its forces to what it has just declared impossible, will be able to find the way out of the siege of facts and, by striking dominion in its weak points, regain eventually the unexpected. And as in the city and in the public sphere, so too in the twilight of private existence it is possible to believe and hope only in that happiness which one has been able to give up.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, October 10, 2023
What defines political consciousness today? A careful conjugation of renunciation and hope. When his God ordered him to sacrifice Isaac on the Mount Moriah, Abraham renounced his son without reserve and, yet — so at least Kierkegaard suggests in Fear and Trembling — somewhere in his heart continued to believe (faith, one knows, is only a form of hope) that God would not take Isaac away from him, although he had renounced him once and for all. Thus, in the extreme situation in which we are in, a lucid mind cannot help but leave aside projects, plans and even the idea of a possible happy political community among mankind and yet, at the same instant in which it has renounced them, it has to hope infallibly in what it had to do without.
Renunciation and hope, idea and disillusionment, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza come together in one only person and mutually deny and verify each other. Only a hope that, clearing away the specious certainties of dogmas and ideologies, churches and parties, turns with all its forces to what it has just declared impossible, will be able to find the way out of the siege of facts and, by striking dominion in its weak points, regain eventually the unexpected. And as in the city and in the public sphere, so too in the twilight of private existence it is possible to believe and hope only in that happiness which one has been able to give up.
(English translation by I, Robot)
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René Magritte, Swift Hope, 1928. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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