Giorgio Agamben Quotes

#1. Those who are truly contemporary are those who neither perfectly coincide with their time nor adapt to its demands ... Contemporariness, then, is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disconnection.

Giorgio Agamben

#2. Life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision.

Giorgio Agamben

#3. The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become more terroristic.

Giorgio Agamben

#4. Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

Giorgio Agamben

#5. Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system

Giorgio Agamben

#6. The coming being is whatever being.

Giorgio Agamben

#7. One of the essential characteristics of the state of exception-the provisional abolition of the distinction among legislative, executive, and judicial powers-here shows its tendency to become a lasting practice of government.

Giorgio Agamben

#8. God did not die; he was transformed into money

Giorgio Agamben

#9. In the eyes of authority - and maybe rightly so - nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man.

Giorgio Agamben

#10. To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) - this is the perpetual illusion of morality.

Giorgio Agamben

#11. The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.

Giorgio Agamben

#12. One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.

Giorgio Agamben