
In a book published a few years ago, Stasis. The civil war as a political paradigm [Stasis. La guerra civile come paradigma politico], I tried to show that in classical Greece the possibility – I stress the term “possibility” – of the civil war functioned as a threshold of politicization between the oikos and the polis , without which political life would have been inconceivable. Without stasis , the standing of citizens in the extreme form of dissent, the polis is no longer such. This constitutive link between stasisand politics was so unavoidable that even in the thinker who seemed to have based his conception of politics on the exclusion of civil war, that is, Hobbes, it remains virtually possible until the end.
The hypothesis that I would like to propose is then that if we have reached the situation of absolute depoliticization in which we now find ourselves, this is precisely because the very possibility of stasisin recent decades it has been progressively and completely excluded from political reflection, also through its surreptitious identification with terrorism.
A society in which the possibility of civil war, that is, of the extreme form of dissent, is excluded is a society that can only slip into totalitarianism.
I call totalitarian a thought that does not contemplate the possibility of confronting the extreme form of dissent, that is, a thought that only admits the possibility of consent. And it is no coincidence that it is precisely through the constitution of consensus as the only criterion of politics that democracies, as history teaches, have fallen into totalitarianism.
As often happens, what has been removed from consciousness re-emerges in pathological forms and what is happening around us today is that oblivion and inattention to stasis go hand in hand, as Roman Schnur had observed in one of the few serious studies on the issue, with the progress of a sort of world civil war. It is not just the fact, although not to be overlooked, that wars, as jurists and political scientists had already noted for some time, are no longer formally declared and, transformed into police operations, acquire the characteristics that were usually assigned to civil wars.
The decisive factor today is that the civil war, by making a system with the state of exception, is transformed like this into an instrument of government.
If we analyze the decrees and the devices put in place by governments in the last two years, it is clear that they are aimed at dividing people into two opposing groups, between which a sort of inevitable conflict is established.
Infected and healthy, vaccinated and unvaccinated, equipped with Greenpass and without Greenpass, integrated into social life or excluded from it: in any case, unity among citizens, as happens in a civil war, has failed.
What has happened before our eyes without us realizing it is, that is, that the two limit forms of law and politics have been used without scruples as normal forms of government.
And while in classical Greece, the stasis, insofar as it marked an interruption of political life, it could not for any reason be hidden and transformed into a norm, it becomes today, like the state of exception, the paradigm par excellence of the government of people.
- 9-04-2022
(intervention of the DUPRE commission)
Source: Giorgio Agamben – Quodlibet
- Translated