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Giorgio Agamben
12 quotes
“In the eyes of authority – and maybe rightly so – nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man.”
Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays (2009), Stanford University Press, p. 35.
“God didn't die, he was transformed into money.”
Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Giorgio Agamben, "What is a commandment?" March 28, 2011
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is.”
Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[E]ase names perfectly that "free use of the proper" that, according to an expression of Friedrich Hölderlin's, is "the most difficult task.”
Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Matter that does not remain beneath form, but surrounds it with a halo.”
Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.”
Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[M]odern 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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kuhn acknowledges having used the term "paradigm" in two different meanings. In the first one, "paradigm" designates what the members of a certain scientific community have in common, that is to say, the whole of techniques, patents and values shared by the members of the community. In the second sense, the paradigm is a single element of a whole, say for instance Newton’s Principia, which, acting as a common model or an example... stands for the explicit rules and thus defines a coherent tradition of investigation. Thus the question is for Kuhn to investigate by means of the paradigm what makes possible the constitution of what he calls "normal science". That is to say, the science which can decide if a certain problem will be considered scientific or not. Normal science does not mean at all a science guided by a coherent system of rules, on the contrary, the rules can be derived from the paradigms, but the paradigms can guide the investigation also in the absence of rules. This is precisely the second meaning of the term "paradigm", which Kuhn considered the most new and profound, though it is in truth the oldest.”
Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Today, in the era of the complete triumph of the spectacle, what can be reaped from the heritage of Debord? It is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans. This means that a fuller Marxian analysis should deal with the fact that capitalism (or any other name one wants to give the process that today dominated world history) was directed not only toward the expropriation of productive activity, but also and principally toward the alienation of language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of that logos which one of Heraclitus' fragments identified as the Common. The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle of our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle remains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it.”
Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source