We are all in hell, but some seem to think that there is nothing to do here but to study and describe in detail the demons, their horrible appearance, their ferocious behaviour, their infamous machinations. Perhaps they delude themselves into believing that in this way they can escape from hell, and do not realise that what occupies them completely is nothing but the worst of the punishments that the demons have devised to torment them. Like the peasant in the Kafkaesque parable, they do nothing but count the fleas on the guardian’s lapel. It must be said that those in hell who spend their time describing the angels of paradise are not right either; this too is a punishment, apparently less cruel, but no less odious than the other.
True politics lies between these two punishments. It begins, first of all, by knowing where we are and that it is not given to us to escape so easily from the infernal machinery that surrounds us. Of demons and angels we know what there is to know, but we also know that it was with a deluded imagination of paradise that hell was built, and that to every consolidation of the walls of Eden there corresponds a deepening of the abyss of Gehenna. Of good we know little, and it is not a subject we can delve into; of evil we only know that it was we ourselves who built the infernal machinery with which we torment ourselves. Perhaps a science of good and evil has never existed, and in any case, here and now it is of no interest to us. True knowledge is not a science; it is, rather, a way out. And it is possible that today it coincides with a tenacious, lucid and agile resistance on the spot.
Giorgio Agamben: A political allegory
We are all in hell, but some seem to think that there is nothing to do here but to study and describe in detail the demons, their horrible appearance, their ferocious behaviour, their infamous machinations. Perhaps they delude themselves into believing that in this way they can escape from hell, and do not realise that what occupies them completely is nothing but the worst of the punishments that the demons have devised to torment them. Like the peasant in the Kafkaesque parable, they do nothing but count the fleas on the guardian’s lapel. It must be said that those in hell who spend their time describing the angels of paradise are not right either; this too is a punishment, apparently less cruel, but no less odious than the other.
True politics lies between these two punishments. It begins, first of all, by knowing where we are and that it is not given to us to escape so easily from the infernal machinery that surrounds us. Of demons and angels we know what there is to know, but we also know that it was with a deluded imagination of paradise that hell was built, and that to every consolidation of the walls of Eden there corresponds a deepening of the abyss of Gehenna. Of good we know little, and it is not a subject we can delve into; of evil we only know that it was we ourselves who built the infernal machinery with which we torment ourselves. Perhaps a science of good and evil has never existed, and in any case, here and now it is of no interest to us. True knowledge is not a science; it is, rather, a way out. And it is possible that today it coincides with a tenacious, lucid and agile resistance on the spot.
March 8, 2025
From Quodlibet