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GIORGIO AGAMBEN — WHO WILL LAY THE FOUNDATIONS OF A NEW SOCIETY?
Citizens, in exile in their own countries
My translation of the Giorgio Agamben’s intervention on Una Voce di Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, found here, November 7, 2024
The exile and the citizen
“It is good to reflect on a phenomenon that is both familiar and unfamiliar to us, but which, as is often the case in such cases, can provide us with useful insights into our lives among other men: exile. Legal historians still debate whether exile — in its original figure, in Greece and Rome — should be regarded as the exercise of a right or as a penal situation. Insofar as it is presented, in the classical world, as the faculty granted to a citizen to escape by flight from a penalty (usually capital punishment), exile actually seems irreducible to the two major categories into which the sphere of law can be divided from the point of view of subjective situations: rights and penalties. Thus Cicero, who had known exile, can write, “Exilium non supplicium est, sed perfugium portumque supplicii,” “Exile is not a penalty, but a refuge and an escape from punishment.” Even when over time the state appropriates it and configures it as a penalty (in Rome this occurs with the lex Tullia of 63 B.C.), exile continues to be a de facto escape route for the…
