Giorgio Agamben. Luis Granena
The boy Giorgio Agamben discovered in his native Rome that human relationships were not what he had imagined. One day, in a northern neighborhood of the Italian capital, where he was born in 1942, he saw a door open and a middle-aged man thrown into the street. “Getting up off the floor and putting his glasses back on (…) he repeated through sobs: “I am the accountant Ghislanzoni, I am the accountant Ghislanzoni…” wrote Agamben, already a famous philosopher Self-Portrait in the Studio (Adriana Hidalgo editor). “From that moment the idea of injustice entered my head and my heart and has never left there,” he added in this intellectual autobiography in 2018. In September of this year, the same publishers published “What I saw, heard and learned…”, a kind of notebook for someone who wants to write their will but does not recognize heirs.
Much of the current news and injustice is best understood by reading what Agamben wrote decades ago. The state of emergency imposed in Ecuador after the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio on Wednesday, or the state of emergency imposed by Georgia Meloni’s Italian government in May to control immigration, remind us of Agamben’s thesis, which is by no means due to the recurring crises affecting him seem to justify, the state of emergency is the norm of contemporary political power. When power dictates the law, it abuses the decree and despises parliamentary deliberation; Especially in the face of immigration, the executive evades all control in the name of sovereignty. Such as the British government preparing to keep asylum seekers on a boat that cannot deport them, or the hot repatriations practiced by Spanish police in Ceuta and Melilla.
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Homo sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben’s most important and original book, or Endless Means, both from 1995 and translated as “State of Exception” by Pre-Texts, describe the common framework of many sovereign injustices: a world governed by nation states by the principle of sovereignty, but steeped in people who do not accept to live – who do not accept to die – where and how they were born. Then what does it mean to be a citizen? “Agamben dismantles the exterior of states and shows us that, to power, man is bare life and has no rights other than those that the state sees fit to recognize,” affirms CSIC philosopher Reyes Mate.
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Born in Italy, which had not yet hanged Mussolini, Agamben came from a Jewish family of Armenian descent. He did his PhD with a thesis on the philosophy of Simone Weil, whose 80th anniversary of death is celebrated this month. In Self-Portrait in the Studio, sketched with the things the author has at his workplace (books, notebooks, photographs, a polychinella, postcards…), on the front there is an invitation to a dinner with a sentence by Weil : ” A man who has something new to say can initially only be heard by those who love him.” Agamben notes that the invitation has been on his desk since 1977.
For Agamben, “knowledge means to be born together,” according to an Indo-European etymology. In his study he keeps memories of Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher who first dedicated himself to National Socialism and then remained silent about his commitment, whose seminars he attended in Le Thor (France) in the 1960s. Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michel Foucault or Guy Debord are very present for this controversial philosopher who wanted to become a poet. The shadow of Walter Benjamin, whose work Agamben published in Italian and whose successor he proclaims, is the most obvious. Benjamin, the “poetic thinker” and friend of Hannah Arendt, committed suicide in Portbou in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis.
Agamben discovered Spain through José Bergamín. “Especially from him, who had spent much of his life in exile,” he writes. Conceptually, the refugee is the focus of his work. According to Reyes Mate, author of Memoria de Auschwitz, Agamben offers “a path to the future of incomparable originality: he questions the figure of the state and proposes diaspora or exile as an alternative.” The West has opened up all its political thinking built around the figure of belonging. A new, truly universal order is being imposed that must be inspired by non-belonging and miscegenation.”
Juan Evaristo Valls Boix, author of Giorgio Agamben: Política sin obra (Gedisa, 2020), summarizes the difference that sovereignty exercises in life: On the one hand we would have the commoners, the workers in order, the white man and the people cisheterosexuals; on the other hand, migrants dying in the waters of the Mediterranean, racialized people, sex workers and “dissidents of the heteronorm”. “The notion of bare life is at the basis of Judith Butler’s theories of vulnerability or Achille Mbembe’s reflections on necropolitics,” adds Boix.
Agamben has been accused of resorting to historical exaggeration in his theses – the sovereign is a potential criminal, the country is the political paradigm of modernity – and in the face of the pandemic himself suffered the myopia that requires literal thinking out of context. In the first article in the Inventing a Pandemic series, published February 21, 2020, he downplayed the “perceived” severity that the measures assumed. “Each article was worse than the one before,” says Boix.
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