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Title: On security and terror Author: Giorgio Agamben Date: September 20, 2001 Language: en Topics: security, terrorism, 9/11 Source: Retrieved on 11th September 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/on-security-and-terror-giorgio-agamben Notes: Published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Translated by Soenke Zehle.
Security as 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 18^(th) century does a thought of security come into its
own. In a 1978 lecture at the Collége 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 l’Armée Secrète (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 eighteenth 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 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 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, measures 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 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. 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.