WHAT IS POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS TODAY? -
Giorgio Agamben
It is the deepest look into the eyes of the one who has nothing to lose.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, October 10, 2023
Translated from Italian, original text here.
“POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS TODAY
What defines political consciousness today? A wise blending of sacrifice and hope. Abraham , when his God commanded him to sacrifice Isaac on the mountain of Moriah, unreservedly renounced his son, and yet — so at least Kierkegaard suggests in Fear and Trembling — somewhere in his heart he continued to believe (faith, it is known, is but a form of hope) that God would not take Isaac away from him, whom he had just once and for all renounced. Thus, in the extreme situation in which we find ourselves, a clear-headed mind must leave aside the projects, plans and even the idea of a possible felicitous united community of humans — and yet, at the same instant that it has renounced it, it must infallibly hope for that which it has to keep living without.
Renunciation and hope, idea and disillusionment, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza converge in one person, disproving and verifying each other. Only a hope that, clearing the field of the pretentious assurances of dogmas and ideologies, of churches and parties, turns with all its might to what it has just declared impossible, becoming able to find its way out of the siege of events and, striking the domination at its weak points, eventually regain the unexpected. And just as in the State and the public sphere, so too in the shelter of personal existence it is possible to believe and hope only in that happiness which one has been willing to give up.”
October 10, 2023
Giorgio Agamben
