"Today, in the era of the complete triumph of the spectacle, what can be reaped from the heritage of Debord? It is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans. This means that a fuller Marxian analysis should deal with the fact that capitalism (or any other name one wants to give the process that today dominated world history) was directed not only toward the expropriation of productive activity, but also and principally toward the alienation of language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of that logos which one of Heraclitus' fragments identified as the Common. The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle of our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle remains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Ch. 18 : Shekinah
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Giorgio Agamben
12 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Giorgio Agamben →
Related Quotes
"In the eyes of authority – and maybe rightly so – nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man."
"God didn't die, he was transformed into money."
"Antoine Meillet also noted that imperatives in European languages are typically the morphological root of the verb, a…"
"Kuhn acknowledges having used the term "paradigm" in two different meanings. In the first one, "paradigm" designates …"
"If human beings were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possib…"
"Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being l…"
"[E]ase names perfectly that "free use of the proper" that, according to an expression of Friedrich Hölderlin's, is "t…"
"Matter that does not remain beneath form, but surrounds it with a halo."
"Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all id…"
"[M]odern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil wa…"