Upon Nothing

Give us this day our daily nothing

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, 27 agosto 2026

In a book published at Leipzig in October 1844 by the publisher Wigand, a not unknown at all kind of man makes his appearance, one who seemed intolerable and unprecedented to his contemporaries, but who has since become perfectly familiar to us: the man who, as we read on the first and last page, “founded his cause on nothing”, i.e. a being in whom the dissolution of all faith and values reached its extreme form. He is certainly the first and unsurpassed nihilist, provided one points out that the nihilism here in question has today become the normal condition of humanity. The book is titled The Ego and Its Own, author Max Stirner.
Eighteen years later, in the magazine Russian Messenger, Turgenev published the novel in which the type of nihilist (the word makes here its appearance), incarnated by the protagonist Bazarov, is defined as follows: “a nihilist is a man who bows before no authority, who accepts no principle without examination, no matter what credit the principle has”. In Demons, published in volume form in 1873, Dostoevsy decides to confront the epochal problem of nihilism, particularly through the figure of Kirillov. From the nihilistic denial of the existence of God, Kirillov draws a radical consequence which both absolutises and upsets his very ego. “If there is no God,” — he asserts — “I am God. [...] If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will... It is my duty to shoot myself because the fullest point of my self-will is — for me to kill myself... There is no higher idea to me than the idea that there is no God... Man has always invented God in order to make it possible for him not to kill himself: that’s the whole of universal history up till now. I alone on earth and in the history of the universe do not want to invent God”.
It is by meditating on these pages that Nietzsche thinks of the death of God as the fundamental event of modernity: “The greatest recent event — that ‘God has died’, that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable — is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. [...] But in the main one may say: the event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet”.
For both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the death of God and the advent of nihilism meant something so terrible that mankind could never accept it without questioning its very existence. For once, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were not good prophets. Nihilism became the normal condition of humanity, but, unlike Kirillov, the ordinary man seems now to live with the death of God and nihilism without suffering or caring about it, literally as if nothing had happened. It is this dull and indifferent nihilism that we deal with; it is this normal daily nothing that we must account for. And if, as Nietzsche himself suggested, nihilism, accomplished and seized as such, is humanity’s great opportunity to escape its fatal destiny, i.e. if, as Benjamin thought, nihilism can become the method of a new politics, then the question we must ask ourselves is: “Why was this opportunity not taken? What prevented us from truly laying our cause on nothing and, instead of making it our normal condition, finding in it a way out of the fates of the West?”.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Ilya Yefimovich Repin, Student Nihilist, 1883. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Force of Imagination

Thought and imagination
Again on artificial intelligence

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, August 3, 2026

The problem of artificial intelligence, which is not always discussed with natural intelligence today, had — as we already had occasion to show here — a precursor in the history of Western philosophy: the unique, separate intellect of Latin Averroism. The analogy is so compelling — a unique and separate intellect which thinks outside of single individuals — that it can even coincide in their acronym: Artificial Intelligence — Agent Intellect (as the Averroists called the separate intellect). For medieval philosophers, more shrewd in this respect than our contemporaries, the crucial problem was how the unique and separate intellect unites (copulatur) with single humans, so that thought is acquired (adeptus) by the individual and one may say hic homo intelligit, this man understands. For Averroes, the medium that enables this union was imagination, which our contemporaries seem to lack entirely. In artificial intelligence, indeed, hic homo non intellegit, this particular man renounces understanding and delegates the most precious of his faculties to a machine, which is supposed to think for him and better than him. According to the instructions of this inexorable master, imagination is not of any use (although some form of imagination might be necessary even to apply a norm). Perhaps the true problem with artificial intelligence is that it was made possible by a general loss of the faculty of imagination, almost as if its advent had been preceded by the establishment of an omnipervasive artificial imagination. A humanity which had lost imagination, was ready to give up thinking as well (which, on the other hand, as Aristotle already taught, without imagination is simply not possible).
The first thing to do to hinder the dominance of AI is therefore a patient, punctilious, and methodical search for lost imagination. And since thought is nothing but the accomplished form of imagination, there will then be no longer any need for artificial intelligence.

(English translation by I, Robot)

René Magritte, The imaginative faculty, 1948. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Two As One

State and anomie II

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 27, 2026

If we refer to the doctrine contained in the second Pauline epistle to the Thessalonians, then we can say, as we already did in this column, that the katechon, the power that holds back and delays the end, which the fathers identified with institutions (the Roman Empire and the Church itself), is now in crisis everywhere. We are therefore witnessing the advent of the anomos, a lawless power that produces ruin and proclaims itself to be God (for this reason the fathers identified it with the Antichrist).
This is evident in the United States, where institutions no longer seem to work and all power is in the hands of a man who speaks and acts without any more laws (the same can be said for Israel), and disguises himself as God. It is well to reflect on this epochal situation, which involves the entire West. Since istitutions (the State and its historical articulations) lost any credibility, it is vain to found the power that holds back the eschatological event on them. And this is all the more true because the anomos, the lawless, is not an external principle, but the appearance the institution itself assumes in its decay. Trump and Netanyahu do not come from outside: it is the State itself, the power that should hold back and delay the end, which becomes the agent that hastens and precipitates it into its most ruinous forms.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Marc Chagall, Moses receiving the Tablets of Law, 1966. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Summer Reading

In praise of Michele Mari

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 21, 2026

Already since Heraclitus and Democritus, tradition has it that philosophers distrust their contemporaries, especially their fellow citizens. Perhaps this is why, perhaps wrongly and perhaps not without good reasons, I too abstain from reading books written by my fellow citizens today. It is all the more joyful and surprising when a book refutes my prejudice, as happened just ìn these days with Le maestose rovine di Sferopoli (The majestic ruins of Sferopoli) by Michele Mari. Mari’s mind is gifted with a prodigious imagination, which unites, as in Manganelli, with an intelligece and culture that are certainly beyond the ordinary. As long as this author will write, Italian literature will stay alive among the ruins, and the philosopher will have to admit that his intransigence was, for once, out of place.

(English translation by I, Robot)

M. C. Escher, Sphere Spirals, 1958. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Within Without

The first friend and the first enemy

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 17, 2026

As an intellectually lively scientist friend writes to me, the fundamental event in the history of the living was the appearance of a microorganism capable of feeling pain. This thesis obviously needs to be clarified, putting before — or adding — “pleasure” to “pain”. If we relate this fundamental capability of the living to what Aristotle writes about the perception of the sensation of existence (“sensing that we are alive is in and of itself sweet, for life is by nature good and it is sweet to sense that such a good belongs to us”), we can then say that a primordial form of the capability to feel pleasure or pain refers to the very fact of existing, to the feeling of living. The sensation of the sweetness of living corresponds, indeed, to its symmetrically opposite one, in which for some reason — or even for no apparent reason — the feeling of living is painful.
The Aristotle quote is from his treatise on friendship that takes up Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics. After defining the sweetness of the sensation of living, Aristotle adds that we feel the same sweetness for the existence of a friend and friendship is this con-senting (synasthanesthai, sensing together) (to) the existence of an-other man, who thus becomes “an other self” (heteros autos). Not only is there a sensation of existence, a feeling of living, but this sensation is always already shared, it is always already consent to the existence of the other; and friendship is the instance of this con-senting (to) the existence of the friend in the very feeling of one’s own existence.
It will then be possible to develop this thesis in relation to the other polarity of the sensation of existence, in which it no longer appears joyful, but painful. The con-senting (to) the existence of the friend will now correspond to the con-senting (to) the existence of the enemy. And if the friend-enemy pair defines politics according to Schmitt, then at the foundation of politics are the pleasure and pain that define the human sensation of existence and the con-senting of the existence of the other inherent in it. Friendship and enmity, love and hate, the philein of philos and the echthairo of echthros do not refer to a doctrine of affections, but are first and foremost two fundamental ontological-political categories. If we feel the sensation of living as sweet, then we are in friendship and peace; if, instead, we feel it as hateful, we fall into war and enmity. Once again, at the basis of our relationship with others lies the relationship with ourselves, the way we con-sent (to) our existence determines the way we situate ourselves in the world. Our first friend and our first enemy are ourselves.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Mahmoud Farshchian, Pleasure and Pain, 1990. Courtesy of WikiArt.

A Search for Truth

Truth and opinion

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 13, 2026

The ancient problem of the relationship between truth and opinion, already articulated at the origins of Western philosophy in Parmenides’ poem, takes on a new topicality today. It is indeed evident that the clear distinction between the two forms of knowledge, taken for granted by the ancients, is now completely cancelled out. There are only opinions, which claim to be true. It is all the more urgent to remember that truth and opinions set themselves on different paths. Truth — which the Greeks called aletheia, meaning unconcealedness, openness — concerns the being, i.e. the experience that something is, that there is something rather than nothing. Opinion (which the Greeks called — and which we still call so — doxa) concerns entities, the knowledge that things are one way rather than another. The former, says Parmenides, is still (atremes, literally not-trembling, fearless), circular and timeless; the latter can be correct or erroneous and is, therefore, changeable and uncertain.
It is crucial, however, to understand the relationship between these two forms of human knowledge. The first in no way guarantees the correctness of opinions, but it provides us with a place from which to consider them, from which we can ask ourselves whether they are right or wrong. Those who dwell solely on opinion will inevitably tend to consider it correct. While truth discloses the possibility of both true and erroneous opinion, opinion can only assert its own truth. Hence the apparent paradox, according to which truth defines itself through the possiblity of error, which opinion must exclude at any costs.
It is not surprising that a culture that has lost the difference between truth and opinion has produced artificial intelligence, i.e. a doxa that asserts its own truth without being able to gain experience from it. Where this doxa, which has closed itself off to the possibility of error, will lead the people who believe they can use it, is a question we should never cease to ask ourselves.

(English translation by I, Robot)

René Magritte, The break in the clouds (The calm), 1941. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Planet of the Apes

A way out

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 6, 2026

Often, amid widespread awareness that we are living in the end of a culture, the need — or hope — for a new beginning arises, that is, that after the collapse of a long tradition, a new and more alive one will sooner or later come into being. Against this naive expectation, one must remember that we don’t need a new beginning, but a way out. Assuming that a new beginning were possible, then everything would start again as before, possibly with different ideas and projects, but still within the frontiers of a historical age and tradition somehow homogeneous with the previous one. After the collapse of the history of the West, the last thing we may want is a new historical age; rather, we want to put an end to ages, to get out once and for all, and not simply to start again. Get out where? We can’t say it, but this is good. Our silence is more precious than chatters about the characters of an improbable future, which betray its solidarity with the past by repeating old-fashioned formulas such as “new or post- or transhumanism”. As the monkey in A Report to an Academy, which has become something radically other, says: “I didn’t want freedom, only a way out”.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Friedensreich Hundertwasser, 626 The Way to You, 1966. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Incognito, Ergo Sum

Where are the righteous

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 3, 2026

Who are the righteous? What does it mean to be righteous? It is, to be sure, not a quality of a subject, an attribute of this or that man, this or that woman. Justice — Benjamin wrote — is a state of the world, a dimension of being, not of will or intention. Things are just, Spinoza said, when you see them not at a certain time or at a certain place, but when you see them in God. This is why justice is something you can never have, but only contemplate. And yet, when you see things as they are in God, being the flower of that flower, being the smile of that smile, being the innocent of that innocent, then you feel a need you cannot escape, a need that neither demands nor commands you anything, but that acts within you beyond any will or intention — that’s how it is, and there’s nothing else to do. I will never forget the words of a young woman who was part of a resistance organisation in a Nazi-occupied country. She was arrested and tortured but confessed nothing. When she was liberated, her comrades wanted to celebrate her as a hero, telling her that if she had been able to stand torture it was because of the strength of her political convictions, her loyalty to the cause, and similar nonsense. But she shook her head and just said: no, I did it because I liked it, on a whim. She saw justice, she felt a need that overwhelmed her on all sides, but she never thought for a single moment that she was righteous, that justice could belong to her. If she had only believed in the just cause, but had not seen justice, she would have succumbed to torture and confessed.
This is why, according to Jewish tradition, the righteous, the tzadikim, are hidden in the world — hidden above all from themselves. And this is why there is something paradoxical in wanting to reward the righteous, as it were the other side of that justice that consists in punishing the guilty. Just as punishment can never come from justice, but only from law, neither reward nor recognition belong to justice. The righteous one recognised and rewarded, the no longer hidden tzadik, is no longer a righteous one.
The mystery of law, i.e. the mistery of guilt and punishment, must not be confused with the mystery of justice. For this reason it is perhaps well that the guilty be punished, but it is not equally sure that the righteous should be rewarded. They wander the world unrecognised until the end of times and, as legend has it, only in this way do they save the world.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Joan Miró, The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers (from the Constellation series), 1941. Courtesy of WikiArt.

All World’s a Home

People and tourists

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 1, 2026

The word tourist first appeared in Italian in 1837 (tourism only in 1907). The etymology is clear: the tour (the grand tour) is the educational travel that European aristocrats and intellectuals took starting from the 18th century, especially in Italy, to learn about its art history, ways of life and culture. As often happens, what was initially exclusive to an elite, has over time turned into a mass phenomenon.
It is significant that its antecedent is certainly the pilgrimages that believers took to visit the sacred sites of their religion: tourists, like pilgrims, are peregrini, i.e., according to the Latin meaning of the term, strangers on earth. Tourism is the sign of an epochal shift in the relation between people and the land they inhabit: wherever they are, they are extranei, foreigners (extra), especially in the very city where they live. I perfectly remember the astonishment with which, many years ago already, when I lived in Venice, I realised it was no longer possible to distinguish Venetians from tourists.
But it’s not just the relationship of citizens with their city that has changed; the city itself has changed altogether: people have become tourists, i.e. foreigners, to the same extent that the land they inhabit (or rather, they once inhaibited) is now extranea and peregrina. If one reads, as I have recently, Joseph Roth’s extraordinary description of Marseille in the autumn of 1925, with its dense, adventurous alleys, where all ages of history were crowded, lively, in an area of just a few kilometers and no one was a stranger, it’s difficult to escape the bitter, implacable observation that cities no longer exist today: tourism was able to destroy them, because they already ceased to be alive. Overtourism doesn’t come from outside; it began within us, within familiar districts and neighbourhoods, which we are no longer capable of inhabiting. To inhabit is an intensive form of the verb to have (habeo) and signifies a certain way of dwelling and living, of having habits and customs. And if ethos in Greek designates the habitual dwelling place, then inhabitation is the primordial form of ethics. Having become tourists, having lost the ability to inhabit, being peregrini and strangers everywhere, then compels us to imagine from scratch a possible ethics, to reinvent the ability to inhabit from top to bottom. It is certainly not an easy task, but it perhaps offers us the only way out of tourism, to make our land and our cities habitable again.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Dan Witz, Lotus Lounge big, 2010. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Voldemort and Harry

The rule of madness

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, June 15, 2026

How can one explain — or even simply attempt to understand — what is happening in the United States? How can one put forward the fact — actually inexplicable — that the nation which until recently dominated the world has been — and continues to be — governed for the past decade by a technically mentally deranged president? Perhaps the only possible answer is that the United States find themselves in a historical situation for which only madness is adequate. When a country reaches the ultimate stage of the spiritual break-up, no rational decision to address it is any longer accessible. One can only rush, with all means, the now inevitable collapse, and madness — real or simulated — is certainly the most useful instrument of government.
As a loyal subject of the United States, Europe, too, is self-destroying and, like the United States, appears to be rushing into madness. Whether some European states will be able to stop themselves on the brick of the abyss or whether they will fall down into it along with the wretched and illegitimate body called European Community, is something the next few years will show.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Francisco Goya, The Madness of Fear, 1819–1823. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Grammar of the West

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, April 20, 2026

In a 1942 essay, Louis Renou could assert that “Indian thought has as substructure reasonings of a grammatical nature”. The three categories into which, according to Indian philosophy, all reality is articulated — substance, quality, action — unquestionably derive from the grammatical analysis of language: noun, adjective, verb. Pāṇini’s Sanskrit grammar and Patanjali’s commentary, indeed predate most Indian philosophical texts.
One may wonder to what extent this also applies to the Greek philosophy that underlies our culture. This hypothesis seems to be countered by the tradition which attributed to Plato and Aristotle the discovery of the parts of speech and, consequently, the invention of grammar. The contrast fades and disappears as soon as one understands that what was being suggested was that, in order to be philosophers, Plato and Aristotle had first had to be grammarians.
The West is, from beginning to end, a grammatical civilisation, which has made the analysis of language and its construction in a grammar the basis of its knowledge of the world and its dominion over nature. Science, which has become the religion of the West, indeed presupposes, like every religion, a named world, in which ontology — that is, the fact that being is expressed and ordered in language — is subdivided into regions, each of which is taken charge of by a particular science. The destiny of the West is thus inscribed in Indo-European grammar, with its cases and logical-syntactic connections of hierarchical dependence in which, along with its language, it articulates its thought.
Perhaps it will be by looking to China — a culture which has not analysed and constructed its own language within a grammar, but sees in it monosyllables without any grammatical articulation — that will arise, if not a new thought, at least a way out of the dark fates that, without our realising it, the logical analysis of language, which is not coincidentally taught to us in elementary school, has inevitably assigned us.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Avigdor Arikha, Anne with Hand on Mouth, 1970. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Paradise Lost

Adam’s childhood

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, April 13, 2026

One cannot comprehend our culture’s conception of the human being without remembering that at its foundation is a man without childhood: Adam. According to the Genesis narrative, the man that the Lord creates and puts in the Garden of Eden is an adult, to whom He speaks and gives commands, and for whom He creates a companion so that he will not be alone. And an adult only, certainly not an infante, could give a name to all animals in the garden.
It is not surprising that a being without childhood cannot remain innocent and is fatally doomed to guilt and sin. Perhaps the pessimism that condemns the Christian West to always postpone happiness and fulfillment to the future stems from this singular deficiency, which makes Adam a being constitutively devoid of childhood. And it is perhaps because of this lack, more original of any sin, that, on the one hand, childhood is for each of us the place of nostalgia for impossible happiness and, on the other, a defective condition in social organisation, which must be disciplined and educated at all costs. And if psychoanalysis sees the child as the hidden subject of every neurosis, this is perhaps just because the Adamic paradigm of a man without childhood acts somewhere within us.
This means that the recovery from the West’s disease — that is, an adult culture that, by repressing childhood, ends up condemning itself to puerility — shall be possible only if we will able to give Adam back his childhood.

(English translation by I, Robot)

萧云从 (Xiāo Yúncóng), 女娲 (Nǚwā) repairing the pillar of heaven, 1645. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Cuckoo’s Nest

Quem Deus vult perdere dementat

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 30, 2026

It is well to reflect on a fact so much incredible that one attempts to repress it at all costs: that the state that claims to be the most powerful in the world was ruled for years by men who are technically mentally deranged. It is not about giving an extreme form to a political judgment: that Trump — certainly like Biden before him — must be considered deranged in the pathological sense of the term is evidence now shared by many psychiatrists, and anyone who observes his way to express himself cannot help but agree. It goes without saying that what interests us here is not the clinical case of individuals named Trump and Biden; rather, the question we cannot help but ask is: what is the historical significance of the fact that a country like the United States — which in some ways leads the entire West — is ruled by an insane madman? What radical spiritual and moral decline, even before a political one, can have led to such an extreme consequence? That the fate of the West was sealed by nihilism was something Nietzsche had already diagnosed over a century ago, along with the death of God; but that nihilism had to take the form of dementia was not a given. It is perhaps in some way out of compassion and pity that the God who wants to lose the West, leads it to its end not through awareness and responsability, but through unconsciousness and madness.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Vasan Sitthiket, Misled – Crazy, 2002. Courtesy of WikiArt.

A Handful of Flies

The staff and the hand

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 16, 2026

“Shall the axe boast itself against him that heweth therewith? Or shall the saw magnify itself against him that moveth it? As if the rod moved them that lift it up, or as if the staff lifted itself up, and were not wood” (Isaiah, 10:15). The prophet’s words exactly describe what is happening today. Technological devices are the staff that claims to direct and in fact directs him who wields it or, rather, believes he wields it. And artificial intelligence appears at the moment in which man, now incapable of dominating the tools which he himself created, falls prey to what Günther Anders called Promethean shame and, by giving up thinking, submits to the staff that has slipped out from his hand.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov, Right hand, keeping the staff, ca. 1885. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Lord Voldemort

Heads of state and murderers

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 10, 2026

For the first time in history, we see the head of a self-proclaimed civilised state speaking openly like a murderer, saying of the religious leader of a country he assaulted: “we’re gonna kill him”, and of that country’s inhabitants: “we’ll massacre them”. Neither Hitler nor Stalin ever spoke like this. And yet, not only is this man not charged and deposed, but the heads of state of the so-called Western democracies approve of him, implicitly accepting that now politicians express themselves publicly as perhaps not even murderers dare to do among themselves.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Edvard Munch, The Murderer, 1910. Courtesy of WikiArt.

From Sham to Shame

Europe’s shame

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 5, 2026

A country was attacked without any real reason and treacherously, while a sham negotiation was going on, and its spiritual head was murdered. European Union — i.e., that illegitimate organisation which bears such name — not only failed to condemn a blatant violation of international law, committed by two countries which appear to have lost all sense of self and responsibility, but also enjoined Iranian people to cease defending themselves.

(English translation by I, Robot)

A tryst in the woods ends in shame, in Edvard Munch’s painting Ashes (1894–5, detail). Credit: Heritage.

The Fall of the Masks

State and terror

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 2, 2026

What is a state that, ignoring all legality, methodically murders or kidnaps the heads of states it arbitrarily declares enemies? Yet this is what is happening with the approval or embarrassed silence of European countries. This means that we live in a time when the state threw its legal masks off and is now acting according to its true nature, which is ultimately terror. It is probable, however, that this extreme situation is literally such that the shedding of the masks coincides with that end of the state form, without which a new politics will not be possible.

(English translation by I, Robot)

James Ensor, Death and the Masks, 1897. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Love in the Time of Cholera

Politics in the time of impossibility of politics

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, February 18, 2026

In the Seventh Letter Plato links his decision to consecrate himself to philosophy to the wretched political conditions of the city in which he lived. After trying every way to participate in public life — he writes — he finally realised that all cities were politically corrupt (kakos politeuontai), and he felt, therefore, compelled to abandon politics and devote himself to philosophy.
Philosophy presents itself, from this perspective, as a substitute for politics. We must engage with philosophy, because — now no less than then — engaging in politics has become impossible. One must not forget this particular nexus between politics and philosophy, which makes philosophising a substitute for political action, a supply and a compensation, certainly not fully satisfying, for something we can no longer practise. What value should we then set upon this substitute, which we would not have chosen had political life been still possible? Philosophy shows here its true meaning, which is not to work out theories and opinions to propose to those who believe they can still engage in politics. Philosophy is a form of life, that allows us to live in politically unlivable conditions. Thus — just because it enables us to inhabit the uninhabitable and impolitic city — philosophical life proves to be the only possible politics in the time of impossibility of politics.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Edvard Munch, Kiss, 1897. Courtesy of WikiArt.

rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1

The fall of the West

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, February 16, 2026

The word “Occidente” (“West”), with which we define our culture, derives etymologically from the verb cadere (to fall) and literally means: “that which is falling, that which never ceases to fall”. Also connected to this verb are the terms caso (case, chance) and casuale (chance, random). That which never ceases to fall and set (occasus is the Latin for sunset) is for this reason also prey to chance, to an unceasing randomness. It is therefore not surprising that the government of men and things takes today the form of intervention protocols, independent of certain outcomes, in a world conceived as available and calculable just because of its being random. The West exists and rules itself only in the time of its end and its constant fall and, like its God, is uninterruptedly in act of dying. But just herein lies its strength: an incessant death is properly endless; an infinite transience or randomness is meant to be just unarrestable.
A strategy that seeks to confront this perpetual decline must find in it an interstice or an interruption where the West loses its continuity and falls down once and for all. This abysmal caesura is memory. The West, as it is random and fleeting, has no memory of itself, knows no way or form where something like a memory may for a moment burst forth and grow up. It can certainly construct, as it does, archives and registers in which to chronologically arrange the events — the cases — of its history, but it lacks the capacity to truly carry out a past, to open itself to something that breaks the uniform thread of its representations. Anamnesis, memory, instead, takes the form of an interstice where the decline — chance — is halted for an instant and lets a heterogeneous and unrepresentable past appear as if it had never been. “Oh, past, thou abyss of thought!” (Schelling): only the thought that resolutely descends into this abyss can lead the West once and for all to its end.

(English translation by I, Robot)

As Tennessee Williams said, “In memory everything seems to happen to music”. Photo © 陈漫 (Chén Màn).

Caesuras

Bilingualism and thought

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, January 22, 2026

We live in our language like blind men
walking on the edge of an abyss... This language is laden
with future catastrophes... The day will come when it will turn
against those who speak it.
Gershow Scholem

All the peoples of the earth are now hanging over the abyss of their language. Some are sinking, others are already almost sunken and, as they believe they are mastering the language, they are unknowingly being mastered by it instead. Thus the Jews, who turned their sacred language into an instrumental language of use, are like larvae in the netherworld who must drink blood in order to speak. As long as it was confined to the separate sphere of worship, it provided them with a place free from the logic of economical, technical, and political necessities, with which they measured themselves in the languages they borrowed from the peoples among whom they lived. For Chrstians, too, Latin has long offered a space in which the word was not merely a tool for information and communication, in which one could pray and not exchange messages. Bilingualism could also be internal to the language, as in classical Greece, where the language of Homer — the language of poetry — passed on an ethical heritage which could somehow direct the behaviour of those who every day spoke diverse and changable dialects.
Aa a matter of fact, our way of thinking is more or less unconsciously determined by the structure of language in which we believe we express it. In this sense — as Pasolini tirelessly repeated, but as Dante had already fully realised, distinguishing the lingua volgare from the grammatical language we learn through study — some form of bilingualism is necessary to guarantee the freedom of individuals in the face of the automatisms and conatraints that monolingualism, historically crystallised in the form of a national language, increasingly imposes on them. One cannot think in such a language, because it lacks that inexpressible distance between the thing to be expressed and the expression that alone can guarantee a free space for the thinking subject. Thought is this gap and this internal disconnection, which interrupts the inarrestable flow of language and its supposed self-sufficiency. It is a caesura in the sense that this term has in the metrics of poetry: an interruption that, suspending the rhythm of linguistic representations, lets language itself appear.
What is happening today is that mankind, entirely enslaved to a language they believe they dominate, have become so incapable of thinking that they prefer to delegate thought to an external linguistic machine, the so-called artificial intelligence. If, like the Jews according to Scholem, all peoples are now blindly walking on the abyss of a language and a reason that they have, so to say, abandoned to itself, this implies that the language from which they withdrew as conscious subjects will sooner or later take revenge, leading them to ruin. By relying on a language that is both instrument and master, and of which they have lost all awareness, they do not hear the groan, the accusation, and the threat that it, while leading them to ruin, never ceases to address them.

(English translation by I, Robot)

沈周 (Shěn Zhōu), Chanting Poems in Leisure Among Pines, ca. 1687. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.