Security and Terror

5:4 | © 2002 Giorgio Agamben Translation by Carolin Emcke

1.

Security as the basic principle of state politics dates back to thebirth of the modern state. Hobbes already mentions it as theopposite of the fear which compels human beings to unite andform a society together. But not until the 18th century does theparadigm of security reach its fullest development. In anunpublished lecture at the Collège de France in 1978, MichelFoucault showed how in the political and economic practice ofthe Physiocrats security opposes discipline and the law asinstruments of governance.

2.

Neither Turgot and Quesnay nor the Physiocratic officials wereprimarily concerned with the prevention of famine or theregulation of production, but rather wanted to allow for theirdevelopment in order to guide and "secure" their consequences.While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories,measures of security lead to an opening and globalisation; whilethe law wants to prevent and prescribe, security wants tointervene in ongoing processes to direct them. In a word,discipline wants to produce order, while security wants to guidedisorder. Since measures of security can only function within acontext of freedom of traffic, trade, and individual initiative,Foucault can show that the development of security coincideswith the development of liberal ideology.

3.

Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developmentsof this paradigm of security. In the course of a gradualneutralisation of politics and the progressive surrender oftraditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basicprinciple of state activity. What used to be one among severaldecisive measures of public administration until the first half ofthe twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of politicallegitimation. Security reasoning entails an essential risk. A statewhich has security as its only task and source of legitimacy is afragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to turnitself terroristic.

4.

We should not forget that the first major organisation of terrorafter the war, the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète (OAS) was

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established by a French General who thought of himself aspatriotic and who was convinced that terrorism was the onlyanswer to the guerilla phenomenon in Algeria and Indochina.When politics, the way it was understood by theorists of the"Polizeiwissenschaft" in the eighteenth century, reduces itself topolice, the difference between state and terrorism threatens todisappear. In the end it may lead to security and terrorismforming a single deadly system in which they mutually justifyand legitimate each others' actions.

7.

The risk is not merely the development of a clandestinecomplicity of opponents but that the hunt for security leads to aworldwide civil war which destroys all civil coexistence. In thenew situation -- created by the end of the classical form of warbetween sovereign states -- security finds its end in globalisation:it implies the idea of a new planetary order which is, in fact, theworst of all disorders. But there is yet another danger. Becausethey require constant reference to a state of exception, measuresof security work towards a growing depoliticization of society. Inthe long run, they are irreconcilable with democracy.

8.

Nothing is therefore more important than a revision of theconcept of security as the basic principle of state politics.European and American politicians finally have to consider thecatastrophic consequences of uncritical use of this figure ofthought. It is not that democracies should cease to defendthemselves, but the defense of democracy demands today achange of political paradigms and not a world civil war which isjust the institutionalization of terror. Maybe the time has come towork towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe, andnot merely towards their control. Today, there are plans for allkinds of emergencies (ecological, medical, military), but there isno politics to prevent them. On the contrary, we can say thatpolitics secretly works towards the production of emergencies. Itis the task of democratic politics to prevent the development ofconditions which lead to hatred, terror, and destruction -- andnot to reduce itself to attempts to control them once they occur.

Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the CollègeInternational de Philosophie in Paris and at the University ofVerona in Italy. His books include Language and Death(1991); Stanzas (1992); The Coming Community (1993);Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998); TheMan Without Content (1999); Potentialities: Collected Essaysin Philosophy (1999); The End of the Poem (1999) and MeansWithout End: Notes on Politics (2000).

Copyright © 2002, Giorgio Agamben and The Johns Hopkins University Press

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