29 Quotes by Giorgio Agamben

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.

Those who are truly contemporary are those who neither perfectly coincide with their time nor adapt to its demands...Contemporariness, then, is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disconnection.

The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become more terroristic.

The coming being is whatever being.

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

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

God did not die; he was transformed into money

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

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