[from Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) Trans. Michael Hardt]
“When
the real world is transformed into an image and images become real, the
practical power of humans is separated from itself and presented as a world
unto itself. In the figure of this world separated and organized by the media,
in which the forms of the State and the economy are interwoven, the mercantile
economy attains the status of absolute and irresponsible sovereignty over all
social life.” (78)
“The
extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the
politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle our own
linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely what is
being expropriated is the very possibility of a common good) the violence of
the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle retains
something like a positive possibility that can be used against it.” (79)
“For
this very reason, ..., the era in which we live is also that in which for the first
time it is possible for humans to experience their own linguistic being—not
this or that content of language, but language itself; not this or that true
proposition, but the very fact that one speaks. Contemporary politics is this
devastating experimentum linguae that
all over the planet unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and
religions, identities and communities.
Only
those who succeed in carrying it to completion—without allowing what reveals
[itself] to remain veiled in the nothingness that reveals [itself], but
bringing language itself to language—will be the first citizens of a community
with neither presuppositions nor a State, where the nullifying and determining
power of what is common will be pacified. … [T]hey will enter into the paradise
of language and leave unharmed.” (82)
