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CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE  2001

CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE 2001

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Subject:

[CSL]: Giorgio Agamben: On Security and Terror

From:

John Armitage <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

The Cyber-Society-Live mailing list is a moderated discussion list for those interested <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Wed, 24 Oct 2001 12:35:48 +0100

Content-Type:

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[Unauthorised translation from Autonomedia(http://slash.autonomedia.org/) ... John.]
===============================
http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/20/1552211&mode=nested&thr
eshold=

On Security and Terror
By Giorgio Agamben

Security as the leading principle of state politics
dates back to the the birth of the modern state.
Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of
fear, which compels human beings to come
together within a society. But not until the 18th
century does a thought of security come into its
own. In a 1978 lecture at the CollÈge de France
(which has yet to be published) 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
officials were not primarily concerned with the
prevention of hunger or the regulation of
production, but wanted to allow for their
development to then regulate and "secure" their
consequences. While disciplinary power isolates
and closes off territories, measures of security
lead to an opening and to globalization; while the
law wants to prevent and regulate, security
intervenes in ongoing processes to direct them.In
short, discipline wants to produce order, security
wants to regulate disorder. Since measures of
security can only function within a context of
freedom of traffic, trade, and individual initiative,
Foucault can show that the development of
security accompanies the ideas of liberalism.
Today we face extreme and most dangerous
developments in the thought of security. In the
course of a gradual neutralization of politics and
the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of
the state, security becomes the basic principle of
state activity. What used to be one among several
definitive measures of public administration until
the first half of the twentieth century, now
becomes the sole criterium of political
legitimation. 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 itself terroristic. We should not forget
that the first major organization of terror after the
war, the Organisation de lArmÈe SecrËte
(OAS), was established by a French general,
who thought of himself as a patriot, 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 "science of police" in the eighteenthe century,
reduces itself to police, the difference between
state and terrorism threatens to disappears. In the
end security and terrorism may form a single
deadly system, in which they justify and legitimate
each othetrs 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 makes 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 finds its end in globalization: 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, measure of security work
towards a growing depoliticization 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 finally have to consider the catastrophic
consequences of uncritical general use of this
figure of though. 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. On the contrary, we can say that
politics secretly works towards the production of
emergencies. It is the task of democratic politics
to prevent the development of conditions which
lead to hatred, terror, and destruction != and not
to limits itself to attempts to control them once
they have already occurred.

************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
*************************************************************************************

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