GIORGIO AGAMBEN’s Speech at the conference of Venetian students against the greenpass on November 11, 2021 at Ca’ Sagredo

My translation of the Quodlibet text. Italian original is here.

Previously, I posted an English translation of the transcription of his actual speech, this is a re-worked version for print, which I found even superior to the spoken version.

“To begin with, I would like to take up some of the points I tried to make a few days ago in an attempt to define the surreptitious, but no less radical, transformation that is taking place before our eyes. I believe we must first realize that the legal and political order in which we believed to have been living has completely changed. The operating agent of this transformation has been, as is evident, that dead zone between law and politics that is the state of emergency.

Almost twenty years ago, in a book that attempted to provide a theory of the state of exception, I noted that the state of exception was becoming the normal system of governing. As you know, the state of exception is a space of suspension of the law, and therefore an anomic space, which, however, claims to be included in the legal system.

But let’s take a closer look at what happens in the state of exception. From a technical point of view, there is a separation of the law enforcement from the law in a formal sense. The state of exception defines, that is, a “state of the law” in which, on the one hand, the law theoretically exists, but has no enforcement, is not applied, is suspended — and on the other hand, measures and directives that do not have the force of law acquire the enforcement. One could say that, at the end, what is at stake in the state of exception is a fluctuating law enforcement outside of the law. However one defines this situation — whether one considers the state of exception to be internal or sees it instead as external to the legal order — in any case it results in a sort of eclipse of the law, in which, as in an astronomical eclipse, it remains, but no longer emanates its light.

The first consequence is the loss of the fundamental principle of legal certainty. If the State, instead of prescribing normative discipline to a phenomenon, intervenes, thanks to the emergency, on that phenomenon…