In hell. Any discussion that does not start from this awareness is simply unfounded. The circles in which we find ourselves are not arranged vertically, but scattered throughout the world. Wherever men and women associate, they produce hell. The circles and pits are all around us, and we recognise, as in Goya’s caprichos, the monsters and devils that rule them.
What can we do in this hell? Not so much or not only, as Italo said, to guard a parcel of good, that which in hell is not hell. For it too has been contaminated, in whole or in part – in any case, no te escaparas [you will not escape]. Rather, stop, be silent, observe, and, at the right moment, speak, break the curtain of lies upon which hell rests. Because hell itself is a lie, the lie of lies that prevents the passage to non-hell, to what exists happily, simply, anarchically. To what has never been that hell always covers over with its way of being, as if there were no other possibility outside the pits and circles in which you have always necessarily been enrolled, be you the point, the threshold, where what is ceases to be, where the possible springs forth, the only true reality. The idea is not to realise the possible, as the demons invite you to do, but to make the real possible, to find a way out of the inevitability of the facts that the dominant ideology seeks to impose in every sphere – and above all in politics. While in the infernal clamour around you everyone is trying to diabolically realise the possible, technically at any cost, for you, every state, every thing, every blade of grass, if you perceive them in their truth, becomes silently, lucidly, possible again.
Quodlibet, September 15, 2025
Giorgio Agamben: Where are we?
In hell. Any discussion that does not start from this awareness is simply unfounded. The circles in which we find ourselves are not arranged vertically, but scattered throughout the world. Wherever men and women associate, they produce hell. The circles and pits are all around us, and we recognise, as in Goya’s caprichos, the monsters and devils that rule them.
What can we do in this hell? Not so much or not only, as Italo said, to guard a parcel of good, that which in hell is not hell. For it too has been contaminated, in whole or in part – in any case, no te escaparas [you will not escape]. Rather, stop, be silent, observe, and, at the right moment, speak, break the curtain of lies upon which hell rests. Because hell itself is a lie, the lie of lies that prevents the passage to non-hell, to what exists happily, simply, anarchically. To what has never been that hell always covers over with its way of being, as if there were no other possibility outside the pits and circles in which you have always necessarily been enrolled, be you the point, the threshold, where what is ceases to be, where the possible springs forth, the only true reality. The idea is not to realise the possible, as the demons invite you to do, but to make the real possible, to find a way out of the inevitability of the facts that the dominant ideology seeks to impose in every sphere – and above all in politics. While in the infernal clamour around you everyone is trying to diabolically realise the possible, technically at any cost, for you, every state, every thing, every blade of grass, if you perceive them in their truth, becomes silently, lucidly, possible again.
Quodlibet, September 15, 2025