Totalitarianism as mass complicity
Giorgio Agamben’s speech at the Doubt And Precaution Commission (DU.PRE Commissione) on November 28, 2022.
Translation from Italian
“In the terminology of criminal law, an accomplice is the one who has engaged in conduct that in itself does not constitute a crime, but assists the criminal action of another person, the offender. We are being faced with individuals — indeed an entire society — that have made themselves accomplices to a crime where the offender is absent or otherwise unnamed. That is, a paradoxical situation in which there are only accomplices, but the offender is missing, a situation in which everyone — whether the President of the Republic or the ordinary citizen, the minister of health or a simple doctor — always acts as an accomplice and is never responsible as an offender.
I believe that this singular situation may allow us to read the Hobbesian covenant in a new perspective. That is, the social contract has taken on the figure — which is perhaps its true, extreme figure — of a covenant of complicity without the offender — and this absent offender matches the Sovereign whose body is formed from the same mass of accomplices and is therefore nothing more than the embodiment of this general complicity, of this being com-plici, that is, bound together, of all individuals.
A society of accomplices is more oppressive and suffocating than any dictatorship, because those who do not participate in the complicity — the non-complice — are purely and simply excluded from the social pact, no longer have a place in the State.”
Giorgio Agamben, Speech to DU.PRE Committee, 28-XI-2022
