Giorgio Agamben speaks in Venice, November 21, 2021 — Students against the green pass: Collective needs and individual freedoms “How To Balance?”
Video of the speech (Italian): https://youtu.be/ZDg9UDfJtV4
Giorgio Agamben:
“To begin with, I would like to take up some of the points I tried to define a few days ago in Turin in attempt to understand the transformation that is taking place before our eyes.
I think the first thing we know is that we have to realize that the legal and political order we thought we were living in has now completely changed. As you see, as you know, the operating force of this transformation — perhaps one should say of this coup d’état because a real coup d’état has taken place — the operating force of this transformation is, as you know, the State of Emergency, or the State of Exception, which precisely — not by chance — is a neutral zone between politics and law. The State of Exception lies between politics and law.
Almost twenty years ago, in a book in which I tried to provide a theory of the State Of Exception, I noted that the situation of exception has become a normal form of government. You know very well, don’t you, that in a series of crises, we always governed with respect to a crisis (economic, ecological, terrorism), and in the…
