Giorgio Agamben
Exile and the Citizen
It is good to reflect on a phenomenon that is both familiar and unknown to us, but which, as it often happens in these cases, can provide us with useful indications for our life among other humans: exile. Historians of law continue to debate whether exileꟷin its original form, in Greece and Romeꟷshould be considered as the exercise of a right or as a penal situation. To the extent that it is presented, in the classical world, as the faculty granted to a citizen to escape a punishment (generally capital punishment) by fleeing, exile seems in fact irreducible to the two great categories into which the sphere of law can be divided from the point of view of subjective situations: rights and punishments. Thus, Cicero, who knew exile, was able to write: “Exilium non supplicium est, sed perfugium portumque supplicii” (“Exile is not a punishment, but a refuge and a way of escape from punishment”). Even when over time the State appropriates it and configures it as a punishment (in Rome this happens with the lex Tullia of 63 BC), exile remains de facto a means of escape for the citizen. Thus, Dante, when the Florentines instituted a process of banishment against him, did not appear in court and, preempting the judges, began his long life as an exile, refusing to return to his city even when offered the opportunity. Significantly, in this perspective, exile does not imply the loss of citizenship: the exiled effectively excludes himself from the community to which, however, he formally continues to belong. Exile is neither a right nor a punishment, but rather escape and refuge. If it were configured as a right, which in reality it is not, exile would be defined as a paradoxical right to place oneself outside the law. From this perspective, the exile enters a zone of indistinction with respect to the sovereign, who, by deciding on a state of exception, can suspend the law; he is, like the exile, both inside and outside the order.
Precisely to the extent that it presents itself as the faculty of a citizen to place himself outside the community of citizens and thus places himself in relation to the legal order on a kind of threshold, exile cannot fail to interest us today in a special way. For anyone with eyes to see, it is indeed evident that the States in which we live have entered into a situation of crisis and of progressive and unstoppable disintegration of all institutions. In these conditions, in which politics disappears and gives way to the economy and technology, it is inevitable that citizens become de facto exiles in their own country. It is this internal exile that must be reclaimed today, transforming it from a condition passively endured into a way of life chosen and actively pursued. Where citizens have lost even the memory of politics, only exiles in their own city will engage in politics. And only in this community of exiles, dispersed in the shapeless mass of citizens, can something like a new political experience become possible here and now.
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