Aarons (On Agamben)

As Agamben distils it, ‘the unspoken principle which rules our society can be stated like this: every citizen is a potential .terrorist’.5In actual fact, this lawless potentiality projected by securitarian logic into the life of every citizen must be seen as the symmetrical image of that groundless violence to which the reigning order subjects us.6To live under a permanent state of exception is to be perpetually “abandoned” to an unlocalizable authority whose jurisdiction is unlimited, yet whose demands are inscrutable. Sovereign violence hovers like an indeterminate element over its subjects, a powerfully present absence that acts upon them no longer by means of delegation and interdiction but by exposure: to be governed today is to experience a graduated spectrum of vulnerability to a non-localizable potentiality for violence suspended over us…

Kieran Aarons