Best 10 quotes of Giorgio Agamben on MyQuotes

In the eyes of authority - and maybe rightly so - nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man.

Life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision.

Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.

To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality.

As is well known, what characterizes both the Fascist and Nazi regimes is that they allowed the existing constitutions (the Albertine Statute and the Weimar Constitution, respectively) to subsist, and according to a paradigm that has been acutely defined as "dual state" - they placed beside the legal constitution a second structure, often not legally formalized, that could exist alongside the other because of the state of exception.

Every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to 'change the world', but also - and above all - to 'change time'.

If Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not. The Tartarus into which Bartleby, the new savior, descends is the deepest level of the Palace of Destinies, that whose sight Leibniz cannot tolerate, the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where "nothing exists rather than something.