Giorgio Agamben, interview with Peppe Savà: August 16, 2012

My translation of the interview with Giorgio Agamben that took place in 2012. Fascinating to read it today, 13 years later. Original Italian is here.

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“He is one of the greatest living philosophers. A friend of Pasolini and Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben has been called one of the world’s top ten thinking heads by The Times and Le Monde. For the second year in a row he spent an extended vacation in Scicli, granting an interview to Peppe Savà.”

Q: The Monti government invokes the crisis and the state of necessity, and it seems to be the only way out of both the financial catastrophe and the indecent forms that power had taken in Italy; was Monti’s call the only way out, or could it rather provide the pretext to impose a serious crackdown on democratic freedoms?

A: “Crisis” and “economy” are not used today as concepts, but as buzzwords, which serve to impose and enforce measures and restrictions that people have no reason to accept. “Crisis” today means only “you must obey!” I think it is obvious to everyone that the so-called “crisis” has lasted for decades now and is nothing but the normal way in which capitalism functions in our time. And it is a kind of functioning that has nothing rational about it.

To understand what is going on, we need to take verbatim Walter Benjamin’s idea that capitalism is, in truth, a religion, and the fiercest, most relentless and irrational religion that has ever existed, because it knows no redemption or mercy. It celebrates an uninterrupted cult whose liturgy is work and whose object is money. God is not dead; he has become Money. The Bank — with its shadowy authorities and experts — has taken the place of the Church and its priests and, by governing credit (even the credit of the States, which have meekly gave up their sovereignty), manipulates and manages the faith — the scanty, uncertain confidence — that our time still has in itself. After all, that capitalism is now a religion, nothing shows this better than the headline in a major national newspaper a few days ago: “save the Euro at any cost.” Already “saving” is a religious concept, but what does that “at any cost” mean? Even at the cost of “sacrificing” human lives? Only from a religious (or, rather…