agamben

"In the “politicization” of bare life — the metaphysical task par excellence — the humanity of living man is decided. In assuming this task, modernity does nothing other than declare its own faithfulness to the essential structure of the metaphysical tradition. The fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoē/bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion".



"To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the...accomplishments of democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoē, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin".

"If life under the state of exception may be characterized as a “petrified” or “paralyzed” messianism, an “imperfect” nihilism, then this is first of all because, since the end of the First World War, Western societies have become constitutively incapable of even imagining, never mind actually working toward, a future that could look any different from the present. After its ‘pure and simple relinquishment of all historical tasks’, politics has been reduced to ‘simple functions of internal or international policing in the name of the triumph of the economy’, i.e. to the disordered and tautological administration of a social and economic order that has emptied itself of any positive reason for being, yet which continues anarchically to persist, ‘without why".