Quotes from Giorgio Agamben

God did not die; he was transformed into money

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.

Life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision.

The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become more terroristic.

Those who are truly contemporary are those who neither perfectly coincide with their time nor adapt to its demands... Contemporariness, then, is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disconnection.

In the eyes of authority - and maybe rightly so - nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man.

A democracy that is reduced in having state of emergency and security as its unique paradigms, is no longer a democracy.

Uma obra crítica ou filosófica, que não se mantenha de alguma maneira numa relação essencial com a criação, está condenada a girar no vazio, do mesmo modo que uma obra de arte ou de poesia, que não contenha em si uma exigência crítica, está destinada ao esquecimento.

Que haya palabra y se vea su silencio, y, en este silencio, aparezca por un instante la cosa restituida a su anonimato, al no tener todavía o ya no tener nombre.

Ello no significa, sin embargo, que la escritura filosófica deba ser poética sino que sobre todo debe contener las huellas de una escritura poética que se desvanece, debe exhibir de algún modo el retiro de la poesía.

A constructed situation is the room with the spider and the moonlight between the branches exactly in the moment when -- in answer to the demon's question: "Do you desire this once more innumerable times more?" -- it is said: "Yes, I do.

Sellele ajale - meie ajale - on omane, et kõik rahvad ja inimesed maa peal on leidnud end ühel hetkel jäägi olukorrast

If the sovereign is truly the one to whom the juridical order grants the power of proclaiming a state of exception and, therefore, of suspending the order's own validity, then "the sovereign stands outside the juridical order and, nevertheless, belongs to it, since it is up to him to decide if the constitution is to be suspended in toto.

Le transport rythmique, qui donne au vers son élan, est vide, il n'est que le transport de lui-même. Et c'est ce vide que la césure pense et tient en suspens, en tant que parole pure, pendant le bref instant où s'arrête le cheval de la poésie.

Aos olhos da autoridade - e, talvez, está tenha razão - nada se assemelha melhor ao terrorista que o homem comum.

Pertence verdadeiramente ao seu tempo, é verdadeiramente contemporâneo, aquele que não coincide perfeitamente com este, nem está adequado às suas pretensões e é, portanto, nesse sentido, inatual; mas, exatamente por isso, exatamente através desse deslocamento e desse anacronismo, ele é capaz, mais do que os outros, de perceber e apreender seu tempo.

When life and politics - originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-mans-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life - begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.

there is no head of state in the world today who is not in virtuality a criminal . Those who shoulder the dreary mantle of sovereignty know that their turn may come to be branded a criminal by their colleagues. We certainly will not be the ones to complain. For the sovereign, who freely consented to donning the executioner's clothes, is now finally manifesting his originary kinship with the criminal.

In the eyes of authority - and maybe rightly so - nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man.

The coming being is whatever being.

To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality.

Every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to 'change the world', but also - and above all - to 'change time'.