Giorgio Agamben: The exile and the citizen

It is good to reflect on a phenomenon that is both familiar and unfamiliar to us, but which, as often occurs in such cases, can provide us with useful indications for our life among others: exile. Legal historians continue to debate whether exile – in its original form, in Greece and Rome – should be considered 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 a penalty (generally capital punishment) by fleeing, exile seems in fact 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 knew exile, could write: ‘Exilium non supplicium est, sed perfugium portumque supplicii’, ‘Exile is not a punishment, but a refuge and a way of escape from punishment’. Even when it is eventually appropriated by the State and configured as a punishment (in Rome this happens with the lex Tullia of 63 BC), exile remains de facto an escape route for the citizen. Thus Dante, when the Florentines instituted banishment proceedings against him, did not appear in court and, anticipating the judges, began his long life as an exile, refusing to return to his city even when offered the opportunity. Significantly, in this perspective, exile does not imply the loss of citizenship: the exile effectively excludes himself from the community to which he nevertheless formally still belongs. Exile is neither right nor punishment, but flight and refuge. If it were configured as a right, which in reality it is not, exile would be defined as a paradoxical right to be outside the law. From this perspective, the exile enters a zone of indistinction with respect to the sovereign, who, by deciding on the state of exception, can suspend the law, and is then, like the exile, both inside and outside order.

Precisely insofar as it is presented as the power of a citizen to place themselves outside the community of citizens and thus to situate themselves with respect to the legal order on a kind of threshold, exile cannot fail to be of particular interest to us today. For anyone with eyes to see, it is obvious that the states in which we live have entered upon a situation of crisis and the progressive and unstoppable disintegration of all institutions. In these conditions, where politics disappears and gives way to economics and technology, it is fatal that citizens become de facto exiles in their own country. It is this internal exile that must be reclaimed today, transforming it from a passively suffered condition into a chosen and actively pursued way of life. Where citizens have lost even the memory of politics, only those exiled in their own city will make politics. And only in this community of exiles, dispersed in the formless mass of citizens, can something resembling a new political experience become possible here and now.

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, November 7, 2024