Giorgio Agamben Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

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
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
If human beings were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible... This does not mean, however, that humans are not, and do not have to be, something, that they are simply consigned to nothingness and therefore can freely decide whether to be or not to be, to adopt or not to adopt this or that destiny (nihilism and decisionism coincide at this point). There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality.

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

Giorgio Agamben
Antoine Meillet also noted that imperatives in European languages are typically the morphological root of the verb, and hypothesised that the imperative was the primitive form of a verb: walk! precedes to walk or he walks. This opens up the possibility of an alternative ontology, or pre-ontology, based on commandment rather than assertion, on be! rather than is. While philosophical or scientific statements would fall under the ordinary is -based ontology, fields like law, religion or magic would operate in the imperative mode: let there be…

Giorgio Agamben