The state and war
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, June 14, 2025
What we call State is, ultimately, a machine for waging wars, and sooner or later this constitutive vocation ends up emerging beyond all more or less edifying aims it can give itself to justify its existence. This is particularly evident today. Netanyahu, Zelenskyy, European governments pursue at all costs a policy of war for which aims and justifications can certainly be identified, but whose ultimate motive is unconscious and lies on the very nature of the state as a war machine. This explain why war, as is evident in the case of Zelenskyy and Europe — but as is true even for Israel — is pursued even at the cost of coming up against one’s own possible self-destruction. And it is vain to hope that a war machine can stop in the face of this risk. It will go on till the end, whatever the price to pay.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, June 14, 2025
What we call State is, ultimately, a machine for waging wars, and sooner or later this constitutive vocation ends up emerging beyond all more or less edifying aims it can give itself to justify its existence. This is particularly evident today. Netanyahu, Zelenskyy, European governments pursue at all costs a policy of war for which aims and justifications can certainly be identified, but whose ultimate motive is unconscious and lies on the very nature of the state as a war machine. This explain why war, as is evident in the case of Zelenskyy and Europe — but as is true even for Israel — is pursued even at the cost of coming up against one’s own possible self-destruction. And it is vain to hope that a war machine can stop in the face of this risk. It will go on till the end, whatever the price to pay.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Francisco Goya, Ravages of war, 1810. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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