On Security and Terror By Giorgio Agamben

[Claudia Westermann]

http://www.txt.de/b_books/texte/ny911/english/AgambenGiorgio.html

On Security and Terror

By Giorgio Agamben

Security as leading principle of state politics dates back to the the birth 
of the modern state. Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of fear, 
which compels human beings to come together within a society. But not until 
the 18th century does a thought of security come into its own. In a 1978 
lecture at the Collége de France (which has yet to be published) Michel 
Foucault has shown how the political and economic practice of the 
Physiocrats opposes security to discipline and the law as instruments of 
governance.

Turgot and Quesnay as well as Physiocratic officials were not primarily 
concerned with the prevention of hunger or the regulation of production, 
but wanted to allow for their development to then regulate and "secure" 
their consequences. While disciplinary power isolates and closes off 
territories, measures of security lead to an opening and to globalization; 
while the law wants to prevent and regulate, security intervenes in ongoing 
processes to direct them.In short, discipline wants to produce order, 
security wants to regulate disorder. Since measures of security can only 
function within a context of freedom of traffic, trade, and individual 
initiative, Foucault can show that the development of security accompanies 
the ideas of liberalism.

Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of 
security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the 
progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security becomes 
the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several 
definitive measures of public administration until the first half of the 
twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterium of political 
legitimation. The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A 
state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a 
fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself 
terroristic.

We should not forget that the first major organization of terror after the 
war, the Organisation de l¹Armée Secrète (OAS), was established by a French 
general, who thought of himself as a patriot, convinced that terrorism was 
the only answer to the guerrilla phenomenon in Algeria and Indochina. When 
politics, the way it was understood by theorists of the "science of police" 
in the eighteenthe century, reduces itself to police, the difference 
between state and terrorism threatens to disappears. In the end security 
and terrorism may form a single deadly system, in which they justify and 
legitimate each othetrs¹ actions.

The risk is not merely the development of a clandestine complicity of 
opponents, but that the search for security leads to a world civil war 
which makes all civil coexistence impossible. In the new situation created 
by the end of the classical form of war between sovereign states it becomes 
clear that security finds its end in globalization: it implies the idea of 
a new planetary order which is in truth the worst of all disorders.

But there is another danger. Because they require constant reference to a 
state of exception, measure of security work towards a growing 
depoliticization of society. In the long run they are irreconcilable with 
democracy.

Nothing is more important than a revision of the concept of security as 
basic principle of state politics. European and American politicians 
finally have to consider the catastrophic consequences of uncritical 
general use of this figure of though. It is not that democracies should 
cease to defend themselves: but maybe the time has come to work towards the 
prevention of disorder and catastrophe, not merely towards their control. 
On the contrary, we can say that politics secretly works towards the 
production of emergencies. It is the task of democratic politics to prevent 
the development of conditions which lead to hatred, terror, and destruction 
­ and not to limits itself to attempts to control them once they have 
already occurred.

(unauthorized translation by soenke.zehle at web.de, source: FAZ 09/20/01)