Ferraria Crispa

[Original text at Quodlibet.]

Italy, as the political laboratory of the West—in which the strategies of dominant power are elaborated in anticipation of their extreme forms—is today a country humanely and politically in ruin, in which a tyranny—completely and without hesitation—has united with a mass at the mercy of a pseudo-religious terror, ready to sacrifice not only that which was once called constitutional freedom, but also all warmth in human relations.
To really believe that the Green Pass means a return to normal is indeed foolish. Just as a third vaccine is already being required, new states of emergency and new red zones will be imposed and declared once again as long as the government and the rules that it declares prove useful. And indeed, the first to pay the price will be the ones who have rashly complied.
In these conditions, without dismissing other possible instruments of immediate resistance, dissidents will need to try to create something like a society within society, a community of friendship and of closeness inside a society of hostility and distance. The forms of this new secrecy, which will must become as autonomous from institutions as possible, will need to be redesigned and tested from time to time, but only they will be able to guarantee human survival in a world that has devoted itself to a more or less conscious self-destruction.

September 17, 2021
Giorgio Agamben