Autonomies

The old doctrine that evil is merely the deprivation of the good, and therefore does not exist in itself, needs to be corrected and supplemented in the sense that it is not so much the deprivation as the perversion of the good (with the codicil, formulated by Ivan Illich, corruptio optimi pexima, “there is nothing worse than a corrupt good”). The ontological link with the good thus remains, but the question remains of how and in what sense a good can be perverted and corrupted. If evil is a perverted good, if we can still recognise in it a corrupted and distorted figure of the good, how can we combat it when we are confronted with it today in every area of human life?

Conjuncture and revolution

It is a fact on which we should never tire of reflecting that one of the key terms in our political vocabulary – “revolution” – has been taken from astronomy, where it designates the movement of a planet as it travels through its orbit. But another term which, in the general tendency to replace political categories with economic categories that characterises our time, has also replaced revolution, comes from the astronomical lexicon. We refer to the term “conjuncture”, to which Davide Stimilli has paid special attention in an exemplary study.

This term, which denotes “the phase of the economic cycle that economic activity goes through in a given period of short duration”, is in fact a modification of the term “conjunction”, which means the coincidence of the position of several heavenly bodies at a given time.

Stimilli quotes the passage from Warburg’s essay, La divinazione antica pagana in testi e immagini dell’età di Lutero, where conjunction and revolution are juxtaposed: “Only within vast periods of time, called revolutions, could such conjunctions be expected. In a carefully conceived system, great and maximal conjunctions were distinguished; the latter were the most dangerous, resulting from the meeting of the higher planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. The more conjunctions coincided, the more frightening the situation seemed to be, although the planet with the most favourable character could influence the worst.” And it is significant that it was precisely a revolutionary like Auguste Blanqui, disappointed in his expectations, who at the end of his life came to conceive the history of mankind as something which, like the movement of the stars, repeats itself infinitely and eternally stages the same representations.

What is happening before our eyes today is exactly such a phenomenon, in which an economic conjuncture, by its very nature contingent and arbitrary, tries to impose its terrifying domination over the whole of social life. The link between politics and the stars must therefore be completely abandoned, and the tie that seeks to intertwine astronomical destiny and revolution, necessity and economic conjuncture, natural science and politics, must be severed in all areas. Politics is inscribed neither in the celestial spheres nor in the laws of economics: it is in our weak hands and in the lucidity with which we refute all pretensions to imprison it in conjunctures and revolutions.

Source: Giorgio Agamben, “Congiuntura e rivoluzione”, Quodlibet, 15/01/2025

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