Conjuncture and revolution
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, January 15, 2025
It is a fact we should never tire of meditating upon that one of the key terms of our political vocabulary — revolution — was taken from astronomy, where it designates the motion of a planet around its orbit. But also another term which, in the general tendency characteristic of our time to replace political categories with economic ones, has taken the place of revolution, comes from the astronomical lexicon. We mean to refer to the term “conjuncture”, to which Davide Stimilli called attention in an exemplary study of his.
This term, which designates “the phase of the economic cycle which economic activity goes through in a given period of short duration”, is in reality a modification of the term “conjunction”, which means the coincidence of the positions of several stars at a certain time.
Stimilli cites the passage from Warburg’s eassay on Pagan Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther, in which conjunction and revolution are juxtaposed: “Only at long intervals, known as revolutions, were such conjunctions to be expected. Great and greatest conjunctions were systematically distinguished: the latter, stellia of all three superior planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, were the most perilous of all, but were very infrequent. The more planets there were in the conjunction, the more alarming it was, although those known as benefics might exert a moderating influence on the malefics”. And it is significant that a revolutionary just like Auguste Blanqui, disappointed in his expectations, at the end of his life, got to conceive human history as something that, like the motion of the stars, repeats itself infinitely and eternally recites the same representations.
What is now happening before our eyes is just such a phenomenon, in which an economic conjuncture that by its nature is contingent and arbitrary seeks to impose its terrifying dominion over the whole social life. It would be well, then, to drop, without reservations, the nexus between politics and stars and sever all bonds which claim to bind together astronomical destiny and revolution, necessity and economic conjuncture, natural sciences and politics. Politics is not inscribed in the celestial spheres or in the laws of economics: it is in our weak hands and in the lucidity with which we deny any claim to imprison them in conjunctures and revolutions.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, January 15, 2025
It is a fact we should never tire of meditating upon that one of the key terms of our political vocabulary — revolution — was taken from astronomy, where it designates the motion of a planet around its orbit. But also another term which, in the general tendency characteristic of our time to replace political categories with economic ones, has taken the place of revolution, comes from the astronomical lexicon. We mean to refer to the term “conjuncture”, to which Davide Stimilli called attention in an exemplary study of his.
This term, which designates “the phase of the economic cycle which economic activity goes through in a given period of short duration”, is in reality a modification of the term “conjunction”, which means the coincidence of the positions of several stars at a certain time.
Stimilli cites the passage from Warburg’s eassay on Pagan Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther, in which conjunction and revolution are juxtaposed: “Only at long intervals, known as revolutions, were such conjunctions to be expected. Great and greatest conjunctions were systematically distinguished: the latter, stellia of all three superior planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, were the most perilous of all, but were very infrequent. The more planets there were in the conjunction, the more alarming it was, although those known as benefics might exert a moderating influence on the malefics”. And it is significant that a revolutionary just like Auguste Blanqui, disappointed in his expectations, at the end of his life, got to conceive human history as something that, like the motion of the stars, repeats itself infinitely and eternally recites the same representations.
What is now happening before our eyes is just such a phenomenon, in which an economic conjuncture that by its nature is contingent and arbitrary seeks to impose its terrifying dominion over the whole social life. It would be well, then, to drop, without reservations, the nexus between politics and stars and sever all bonds which claim to bind together astronomical destiny and revolution, necessity and economic conjuncture, natural sciences and politics. Politics is not inscribed in the celestial spheres or in the laws of economics: it is in our weak hands and in the lucidity with which we deny any claim to imprison them in conjunctures and revolutions.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Jane Fonda in Roger Vadim’s 1968 science fiction cult film Barbarella. Photo: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images. |
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