It is necessary to meditate again and again on the passage in Revelation (6:9-11) where we read: “When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters,[a] were killed just as they had been.”
History will not end and the final judgement will not be pronounced until the number of the righteous slain is completed. Is this perhaps what is happening all around us? And how many more righteous must be slain, as we see them dying every day? No doubt, history is a history of wars, deaths and murders. But the point of the opening of the fifth seal is not that, in the time in which we live, we should wait inertly for the number of the slain to be completed. Even if the newspapers do nothing but count them daily, we do not know what that number is, just as we do not know when the judgement will take place or if it will ever happen. We live in an in-between time and, like those whose throats were slit, we must bear witness to what we see and what we believe. There is no other task for us before the number of the slain is completed.
Source: Giorgio Agamben, “Il numero degli uccisi”, Quodlibet, 07/01/2025
Giorgio Agamben: The number of the murdered
The number of the murdered
It is necessary to meditate again and again on the passage in Revelation (6:9-11) where we read: “When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters,[a] were killed just as they had been.”
History will not end and the final judgement will not be pronounced until the number of the righteous slain is completed. Is this perhaps what is happening all around us? And how many more righteous must be slain, as we see them dying every day? No doubt, history is a history of wars, deaths and murders. But the point of the opening of the fifth seal is not that, in the time in which we live, we should wait inertly for the number of the slain to be completed. Even if the newspapers do nothing but count them daily, we do not know what that number is, just as we do not know when the judgement will take place or if it will ever happen. We live in an in-between time and, like those whose throats were slit, we must bear witness to what we see and what we believe. There is no other task for us before the number of the slain is completed.
Source: Giorgio Agamben, “Il numero degli uccisi”, Quodlibet, 07/01/2025