LABIRINTI E CASEMATTE

Allegory of politics

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 8, 2025

We are all in hell, but some seem to think that there is nothing else to do here but to study and minutely describe the devils, their hideous appearance, their ferocious behaviors, their treacherous plots. Perhaps they thus delude themselves that they can escape hell and do not realise that what fully engages them is nothing but the worst of the punishments that the devils conceived to torment them. Like the peasant in Kafka’s parable, they do nothing but count the fleas on the doorkeeper’s collar. It goes without saying that even those who spend their time in hell describing the angels of heaven are not in the right — this too is a punishment, apparently less cruel, but not less heinous than the other.
True politics stands between these two punishments. It begins, first of all, with knowing where we are and that we are not given to escape so easily the infernal machine which surrounds us. We know what there is to know about demons and angels, but we also know that hell was created with a fallacious imagination of paradise and that any consolidation of the walls of Eden corresponds to a deepening of the abyss of Gehenna. We know little about good and it is not a theme we can develop; about evil we only know that we ourselves had built the infernal machine with which we torment ourselves. Perhaps a science of good and evil has never existed, and in any case, it doesn’t interest us here and now. True knowledge is not a science — it is, rather, a way out. And it is possible that this coincides now with a tenacious, lucid, alert resistance on the spot.

(English translation by I, Robot)