Where are we?
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 15, 2025
In hell. Any discourse that does not start from this awareness is simply groundless. The circles in which we find ourselves are not arrayed vertically, but scattered throughout the world. Wherever humans associate with each other, they produce hell. The circles and ditches are everywhere around us, and we recognise, as in Goya’s caprichos, the monsters and devils that govern them.
What can we do in this hell? Not so much, or not only, as Italo said, to take care of a parcel of good, what is not hell in hell. Because it too has been contaminated, in whole or in part — in any case no te escaparas. But rather let you stop, be silent, observe, and, at the right time, speak out, tear down the curtain of lies upon which hell lies. Because hell itself is a lie, the lie of lies that prevents the passage of non-hell, of what joyfully, simply, anarchically exists. Of the never been that every time hell covers with its being, as if there were no other possibility outside the ditches and circles in which inevitably you have been always already enrolled. Be you the point, the threshold in which the state exhausts itself, where the possible, the only true reality, springs up from the source. Thought does not consist in accomplishing the possible, as the demons invite you to do, but in making the real possible, in finding a way out of the ineluctability of facts that the dominant ideology seeks to impose in all spheres — and first and foremost in politics. While in the infernal hubbub around you, everyone attempts to diabolically, technically at any cost accomplish the possible, every state, every thing, every thread of grass, if you perceive them in their truth, become once again, silently, lucidly for you possible.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 15, 2025
In hell. Any discourse that does not start from this awareness is simply groundless. The circles in which we find ourselves are not arrayed vertically, but scattered throughout the world. Wherever humans associate with each other, they produce hell. The circles and ditches are everywhere around us, and we recognise, as in Goya’s caprichos, the monsters and devils that govern them.
What can we do in this hell? Not so much, or not only, as Italo said, to take care of a parcel of good, what is not hell in hell. Because it too has been contaminated, in whole or in part — in any case no te escaparas. But rather let you stop, be silent, observe, and, at the right time, speak out, tear down the curtain of lies upon which hell lies. Because hell itself is a lie, the lie of lies that prevents the passage of non-hell, of what joyfully, simply, anarchically exists. Of the never been that every time hell covers with its being, as if there were no other possibility outside the ditches and circles in which inevitably you have been always already enrolled. Be you the point, the threshold in which the state exhausts itself, where the possible, the only true reality, springs up from the source. Thought does not consist in accomplishing the possible, as the demons invite you to do, but in making the real possible, in finding a way out of the ineluctability of facts that the dominant ideology seeks to impose in all spheres — and first and foremost in politics. While in the infernal hubbub around you, everyone attempts to diabolically, technically at any cost accomplish the possible, every state, every thing, every thread of grass, if you perceive them in their truth, become once again, silently, lucidly for you possible.
(English translation by I, Robot)
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Sandro Botticelli, The Abyss of Hell, 1480. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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