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    Agamben - On Security and Terror

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    Rodrigo Santaella
    The document discusses the development of security as the basic principle of state politics and the dangers that arise when security becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. It argues that when politics reduces itself to just policing, the difference between state and terrorism threatens to disappear. The document calls for a revision of the concept of security as the basic principle of state politics to prevent this.

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    Agamben - On Security and Terror

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    Rodrigo Santaella
    181 views2 pages
    The document discusses the development of security as the basic principle of state politics and the dangers that arise when security becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. It argues that when politics reduces itself to just policing, the difference between state and terrorism threatens to disappear. The document calls for a revision of the concept of security as the basic principle of state politics to prevent this.

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    Agamben, on security and terror.

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    The document discusses the development of security as the basic principle of state politics and the dangers that arise when security becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. It argues that when politics reduces itself to just policing, the difference between state and terrorism threatens to disappear. The document calls for a revision of the concept of security as the basic principle of state politics to prevent this.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    181 views2 pages

    Agamben - On Security and Terror

    Uploaded by

    Rodrigo Santaella
    The document discusses the development of security as the basic principle of state politics and the dangers that arise when security becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. It argues that when politics reduces itself to just policing, the difference between state and terrorism threatens to disappear. The document calls for a revision of the concept of security as the basic principle of state politics to prevent this.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 2

    ON SECURITY AND TERROR

    Giorgio Agamben

    Security as the basic principle of state politics dates back to the birth of the
    modern state. Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of fear, which compels
    human beings to join together in the formation of a society. But the thought
    of security does not fully develop until the 18th century. In a still-unpublished
    lecture at the Collge de France in 1978, Michel Foucault has shown how the
    political and economic practice of the Physiocrats opposes security to discipline
    and the law as instruments of governance.
    Turgot and Quesnay as well as Physiocratic ofcials were not primarily
    concerned with the prevention of famine or the regulation of production,
    but wanted to allow for their development to then govern and secure their
    consequences. Whereas disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories,
    measures of security lead to an opening and to globalisation; whereas the law
    wants to prevent and prescribe, security wants to intervene in ongoing processes
    to direct them. In short, discipline wants to produce order, security wants to
    govern disorder. Since measures of security can only function within a context
    of freedom of trafc, trade, and individual initiative, Foucault can show that the
    development of security and the development of liberalism coincide.
    Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments in the
    thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralisation of politics and the
    progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as
    23

    Creating Insecurity

    ON SECURITY AND TERROR

    the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive

    (ecological, medical, military), but there is no politics to prevent them. On the

    measures of public administration until the rst half of the twentieth century,

    contrary, we can say that politics secretly works towards the production of

    now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. The thought of security

    emergencies. It is the task of democratic politics to prevent the development of

    entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source

    conditions which lead to hatred, terror, and destruction and not to limit itself to

    of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to

    attempts to control them once they occur.

    become itself terrorist.


    We should not forget that the rst major terror organisation after the war, the

    Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20.09.2001, Nr. 219 / Seite 45.


    Translation: Soenke Zehle (2009).

    Organisation de lArme Secrte (OAS), was established by a French general,


    who considered himself a patriot and was convinced that terrorism was the only
    answer to the guerrilla phenomenon in Algeria and Indochina. When politics, the
    way it was understood by theorists of the police science (Polizeiwissenschaft) in
    the eighteenth century, reduces itself to police, the difference between state and
    terrorism threatens to disappear. In the end security and terrorism may form a
    single deadly system, in which they justify and legitimate each others actions.
    The risk is not merely the development of a clandestine complicity of opponents,
    but that the search for security leads to a world civil war which renders all civil
    coexistence impossible. In the new situation created by the end of the classical
    form of war between sovereign states it becomes clear that security nds its end
    in globalisation: it implies the idea of a new planetary order which is in truth
    the worst of all disorders. But there is another danger. Because they require
    constant reference to a state of exception, measures of security work towards a
    growing depoliticisation of society. In the long run, they are irreconcilable with
    democracy.
    Nothing is more important than a revision of the concept of security as basic
    principle of state politics. European and American politicians nally have to
    consider the catastrophic consequences of uncritical general use of this gure of
    thought. It is not that democracies should cease to defend themselves: but maybe
    the time has come to work towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe,
    not merely towards their control. Plans exist today for all kinds of emergencies
    24

    25

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