On false relations
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 1, 2025
A good definition of political power is that that characterises it as the art to put people in false relations to each another. This, and nothing else, is what, first and foremost, power does in order to then govern them as it wishes. Once they have allowed themselves to be led into oblique relations in which they cannot recognise themselves, they can be easily manipulated and oriented as one likes. If they so easily believe the lies they are being offered, it is because false are, first and foremost, the relations in which, without them realising it, they always already found themselves.
The first move in a political strategy worthy of its name is therefore the search for a way out of the false relations in which power has put people in order to govern them. But just this is not easy, because a false relation is exactly what from what one sees no way out. Something like a way out becomes possible only if we understand that the false relation is the very form of power, that to be in a false relation means to be in a relation of power. That is, the relation is false not because we lie, but because we lack awareness of its essentially political character. Whether relations that are apparently intimate and private or those technically or socially definite are in truth always already political — that is, we find ourselves in false relations from the beginning — this awareness is the only way to change at the root our way to live through them.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 1, 2025
A good definition of political power is that that characterises it as the art to put people in false relations to each another. This, and nothing else, is what, first and foremost, power does in order to then govern them as it wishes. Once they have allowed themselves to be led into oblique relations in which they cannot recognise themselves, they can be easily manipulated and oriented as one likes. If they so easily believe the lies they are being offered, it is because false are, first and foremost, the relations in which, without them realising it, they always already found themselves.
The first move in a political strategy worthy of its name is therefore the search for a way out of the false relations in which power has put people in order to govern them. But just this is not easy, because a false relation is exactly what from what one sees no way out. Something like a way out becomes possible only if we understand that the false relation is the very form of power, that to be in a false relation means to be in a relation of power. That is, the relation is false not because we lie, but because we lack awareness of its essentially political character. Whether relations that are apparently intimate and private or those technically or socially definite are in truth always already political — that is, we find ourselves in false relations from the beginning — this awareness is the only way to change at the root our way to live through them.
(English translation by I, Robot)
鈴木 達朗 (Tatsuo Suzuki), Connection, 2014. Photo © 鈴木 達朗 (Tatsuo Suzuki). Courtesy of International Photography Awards. |
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