To live or to survive
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, December 10, 2025
Those who govern us today seek to organise the survival of humanity; that is, they seek to turn the living into survivors. But what survives is no longer alive; only those who do not survive their own way of life and their own world truly live. Bare life does not exist — it is only an abstraction of law and power. The survivors who surround us have neither mouths nor ears; they neither speak nor listen; they only count. Ain't no use to speak to them. Poets and philosophers are dead — that’s why we can speak to them.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, December 10, 2025
Those who govern us today seek to organise the survival of humanity; that is, they seek to turn the living into survivors. But what survives is no longer alive; only those who do not survive their own way of life and their own world truly live. Bare life does not exist — it is only an abstraction of law and power. The survivors who surround us have neither mouths nor ears; they neither speak nor listen; they only count. Ain't no use to speak to them. Poets and philosophers are dead — that’s why we can speak to them.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Käthe Kollwitz, The Survivors, 1923. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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