The exile and the citizen
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, November 7, 2024
It is well to reflect on a phenomenon which is both familiar and alien to us, but that, as often happens in these cases, can provide us with useful indications for our life among other men: exile. Legal historians still discuss whether exile — in its original figure, in Greece and in Rome — must be regarded as the exercise of a right or as a penal situation. Since it presents itself, in the classical world, as the faculty granted to a citizen to escape punishment (usually capital punishment) by fleeing, exile seems in reality to be irreducible to the two great categories into which the sphere of law can be divided from the viewpoint of subjective situations: rights and punishments. Thus Cicero, who had experienced exile, can write: “Exilium non supplicium est, sed perfugium portumque supplicii” — “Exile is not a punishment, but a sanctuary and refuge from punishment”. Even when, over time, the state appropriates it and configures it as a punishment (in Rome that occurred with the lex Tullia of 63 BC), exile continues to be, in fact, a way of escape for the citizen. Thus Dante, when the Florentines institute a banishment trial against him, does not appear in court and, anticipating the judges, begins his long life as an exile, refusing to return to his city even when he is offered the possibility. It is significant, in this perspective, that exile does not imply the loss of citizenship: the exile in fact excludes himself from the community to which he nevertheless formally continues to belong. Exile is neither a right nor a punishment, but an escape and refuge. If one wanted to configure it as a right, which in reality it is not, exile would get to be defined as a paradoxical right to put oneself outside the law. In this perspective, the exile enters a zone of indistinction with respect to the sovereign, who, by deciding on the state of exception, can suspend the law, and is, like the exile, both inside and outside the legal system.
Just because it presents itself as the faculty of a citizen to put himself outside the community of citizens and therefore situates itself with respect to the legal system in a sort of threshold, now exile cannot but interest us in a particular manner. For anyone with eyes to see, it is indeed evident that the states in which we live have entered a situation of crisis and progressive, unarrestable decay of all institutions. In such a condition, in which politics disappears and gives way to the economy and technology, it is inevitable that citizens become de facto exiles in their own country. It is this internal exile that must now be reclaimed, turning it from a passively endured condition into a form of life chosen and actively pursued. There where citizens have lost even the memory of politics, it will be only those who are in exile in their city that will engage in politics. And it is only in this community of exiles, scattered throughout the formless mass of citizens, that something like a new political experience can, now and here, become possible.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, November 7, 2024
It is well to reflect on a phenomenon which is both familiar and alien to us, but that, as often happens in these cases, can provide us with useful indications for our life among other men: exile. Legal historians still discuss whether exile — in its original figure, in Greece and in Rome — must be regarded as the exercise of a right or as a penal situation. Since it presents itself, in the classical world, as the faculty granted to a citizen to escape punishment (usually capital punishment) by fleeing, exile seems in reality to be irreducible to the two great categories into which the sphere of law can be divided from the viewpoint of subjective situations: rights and punishments. Thus Cicero, who had experienced exile, can write: “Exilium non supplicium est, sed perfugium portumque supplicii” — “Exile is not a punishment, but a sanctuary and refuge from punishment”. Even when, over time, the state appropriates it and configures it as a punishment (in Rome that occurred with the lex Tullia of 63 BC), exile continues to be, in fact, a way of escape for the citizen. Thus Dante, when the Florentines institute a banishment trial against him, does not appear in court and, anticipating the judges, begins his long life as an exile, refusing to return to his city even when he is offered the possibility. It is significant, in this perspective, that exile does not imply the loss of citizenship: the exile in fact excludes himself from the community to which he nevertheless formally continues to belong. Exile is neither a right nor a punishment, but an escape and refuge. If one wanted to configure it as a right, which in reality it is not, exile would get to be defined as a paradoxical right to put oneself outside the law. In this perspective, the exile enters a zone of indistinction with respect to the sovereign, who, by deciding on the state of exception, can suspend the law, and is, like the exile, both inside and outside the legal system.
Just because it presents itself as the faculty of a citizen to put himself outside the community of citizens and therefore situates itself with respect to the legal system in a sort of threshold, now exile cannot but interest us in a particular manner. For anyone with eyes to see, it is indeed evident that the states in which we live have entered a situation of crisis and progressive, unarrestable decay of all institutions. In such a condition, in which politics disappears and gives way to the economy and technology, it is inevitable that citizens become de facto exiles in their own country. It is this internal exile that must now be reclaimed, turning it from a passively endured condition into a form of life chosen and actively pursued. There where citizens have lost even the memory of politics, it will be only those who are in exile in their city that will engage in politics. And it is only in this community of exiles, scattered throughout the formless mass of citizens, that something like a new political experience can, now and here, become possible.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Solaris with its two suns. Courtesy of Dominique Signoret.
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