With fires literally raging across the world, we return to a 2020 essay by Giorgio Agamben.
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“Nothing I’m doing makes any sense if the house is on fire.” Yet even when the house is on fire it is necessary to continue as before, to do everything with care and precision, perhaps even more so than before—even if no one notices. Perhaps life itself will disappear from the face of the earth, perhaps no memory whatsoever will remain of what has been done, for better or for worse. But you continue as before, it is too late to change, there is no time anymore.
“What’s happening around you / is no longer your business”. Like the geography of a country that you must leave behind forever. Yet how does it still affect you? Precisely now that it is no longer your business, now that everything seems over, everything and every place now appears in its truest guise, somehow they all touch you even more intimately—just as they are: splendor and poverty.
Philosophy, a dead language. “The language of poets is always a dead language…it is a strange thing to admit: a dead language that one uses to provide greater life to thought.” Perhaps not a dead language, but a dialect. That philosophy and poetry speak in a language that is less than language is the measure of their rank, of their special vitality. To weigh and judge the world by measuring it against a dialect, a dead language that nevertheless pours forth anew, in which not even a comma can be changed. Keep speaking this dialect, even now that the house is on fire.
Which house is on fire? The country where you live, or Europe, or the entire world? Perhaps the houses and cities already burned down in some enormous fire—who knows how long ago—that we pretended not to notice. Of most of them all that remains are pieces of walls, a fresco, a patch of roof, names, so many names, already gnawed upon by flames. Nevertheless we carefully cover it all over with whitewash and falsified words, so that it looks intact. We live in houses and cities incinerated from one end to another as if they were still standing upright; people pretend to live in them and stroll in masks through ruins as if they were still in the familiar neighborhoods of a bygone era.
Today the flame has changed its form and nature, it has become digital, invisible and cold—but precisely for this very reason it is even closer still and surrounds us at every moment.
That a civilization—a barbarism—can sink, never to rise again, is nothing new. Historians are accustomed to identifying and dating caesuras and shipwrecks. But how can we bear witness to a world that is falling into ruin with eyes blindfolded and face covered, a republic collapsing with neither lucidity nor pride, but in abjection and fear? The blindness is all the more desperate since the shipwrecked claim to be governing their own shipwreck, they swear that everything can be controlled technically, that there is no need for either a new god or a new sky, only prohibitions, experts and doctors. Panic and villainy.
What would a God be to whom neither prayers nor sacrifices were addressed? And what would a law be that knew neither command nor enforcement? What is a word that has neither meaning nor command, but is truly held in the beginning—indeed, before the beginning?
A culture that feels it is at its end, that it has no life left, attempts to govern its decay in the only way it knows how, through a permanent state of exception. The total mobilization in which Jünger saw the essential character of our time should be understood from this perspective. People must be mobilized, they must feel themselves in a state of emergency at every moment, regulated down to the last detail by those who maintain the power to declare such an emergency. But whereas in the past mobilization sought to gather people together, today it aims to isolate them, to distance them from one another.
How long has the house been burning? How long since it burned down? Certainly a century ago, between 1914 and 1918, something happened in Europe that poured flames and madness upon everything that once seemed to remain intact and alive; then thirty years later, the flames again spread everywhere, and ever since have continued to burn without pause, submerged, barely visible beneath the cinders. But perhaps the fires began much earlier, when humanity’s blind impulse towards …