Disclaimer: this is an unofficial translation.
Giorgio Agamben
Freedom and Insecurity
December 8, 2022
John Barclay, in his prophetic novel Argenis (1621), defined in these terms the security paradigm that would be progressively adopted by European governments later on: “Either you give men their freedom or you give them their security, for which they will abandon freedom.” Freedom and security are thus two antithetical paradigms of governing, among which the state has to operate its choice every time. If it wants to promise security to its subjects, the sovereign will have to sacrifice their security. Michel Foucault, on the other hand, has shown how the security (the sureté publique) that the physiocratic governments, starting from Quesnay, were the first to adopt explicitly among their tasks in XVIII century France, must be intended. It was not — then as today — to prevent catastrophes, which in the Europe of those years were essentially famines, but to let them produce themselves and then immediately intervene to govern them in the most useful direction. To govern here reacquires its etymological meaning, which is “cybernetic”: a good pilot (kibernes) cannot avoid storms, but, when these happen, it must nevertheless be capable to govern its ship according to its interests. Essential, in this perspective, was to spread a sense of security among the citizens, through the conviction that the government was watching on their tranquility and on their future.
What we are witnessing today is an extreme development of this paradigm and, together, its punctual reversal. The primary task of governments seems to have become the capillary spreading of a sense of insecurity and even panic among the citizens, which coincides with an extreme compression of their freedom, and which finds in such insecurity its justification. Today, the antithetical paradigms are no longer freedom and security; rather, in Barclay’s terms today it should be said: “give men insecurity and they will renounce freedom.” It is no longer necessary, therefore, that governments show themselves capable to govern problems and catastrophes: insecurity and emergency, which now constitute the only foundation of their legitimacy, cannot ever be eliminated, but — as we are seeing today with the substitution of the war between Russia and Ukraine to the one against the virus —only articulated according to converging modalities, but different every time. A government of this kind is essentially anarchic, in the sense that it has no principle to abide to, if not the emergency which itself produces and entertains. It is likely, however, that the cybernetic dialectic between anarchy and emergency will reach a point beyond which no pilot will be able to govern the ship and humans, in the now inevitable shipwreck, will have to go back to questioning themselves about the freedom which they have so incautiously sacrificed.
