Giorgio Agamben, a classic in Catalan

To bestow the status of a classic on a philosophy text published in 1998 might seem reckless, because this business of the canon demands a lot of dust on books. But this is undoubtedly how one can describe Homo Sacer (Sovereign Power and Bare Life), a culminating work by the thinker Giorgio Agamben that we can now read in Catalan thanks to the stubbornness of Iñaki Martínez Ortigosa. In 2020, Iñaki took advantage of the pandemic to become a one-man band and give birth to the publishing house Pasta de dibuix with the simple (and necessary) goal of offering readers some canonical works of contemporary philosophy in Catalan. Blessed be the colleague, who has decided not to spend time crying due to our persistent drought in the field of essays, but rather to amend it because, apart from editing, he translates his catalog and promotes it as if his life depended on it.

 In a present of very little cultural ambition and with the country's institutions in a perpetual siesta, I take the opportunity to remind that independent (i.e., poor) publishers like Martínez Ortigosa are keeping our stall standing. This is a time of low standards and one must remember very basic things, such as that a vigorous nation needs to have well-muscled thought. This implies, above all, that the essay should not be the eternal younger sibling of what we call Catalan literature, but also that our readers (and writers!) have the conceptual instruments of the contemporary world in our language to be able to traffic and squeeze them at will. It is in this sense that the publication of Homo Sacer is especially timely; great philosophical texts are those that force us to think differently and this book is undoubtedly among a select few.

With unlimited analytical precision and an intelligence that often causes quite a bit of anger (the thinker is Roman in form, but Germanic in method), Agamben wrote Homo Sacer as a kind of B-side to the imaginary of the modern social contract. While most Western thinkers were clouded by conceptualizing politics based on rational agreements and laws, Agamben dedicated himself to unraveling the commonplaces of peace to remind us that power is above all a phenomenon of exclusion and terror. This is how the philosopher reminds us that modern politics violently aims at the preservation of life and, far from a benevolent pact, the basis of sovereignty is that renunciation by which we give the powerful the possibility of establishing a permanent state of exception. Power, this Homo Sacer, is finally the space of one who is within the law only because they can exit it. 

 Everything we had read as young people in this essay (the political normalization of states that suspend the law in order to survive, the progressive transformation of politics into a matter related to biology) and which had seemed like a science fiction world to us, gains an unsettling relevance now that the post-9/11 New York world and the pandemic have condemned us to a present where laws are dead letters and politics operates like a pharmaceutical prescription. After contemplating with impunity the genocides of exiles in the Mediterranean and the systematic impoverishment of European citizens by the continent's technocratic governments, the Italian's prophecy, according to which the future of modern politics would bear many resemblances to concentration camps (a thesis that, it must be said, has been abused by authors much more mediocre than Agamben), gains an inevitable sense of timeliness. 

This Homo Sacer, I will insist until I am mute, should not only be celebrated for the fact of finally being able to read Agamben in Catalan, but because his raw vision of politics can permeate our civic imaginary, frightfully naive and shaped by leaders who have always preferred Boy Scouts to reading Thomas Hobbes. I understand the reckless nature of this my Punyalada today, not only because I ask readers to acquire (and read) a philosophy book, but also because it suggests they immerse themselves in a text that will demand headaches. Readers usually recommend easy books full of light. That's how we are doing. Today I propose a deliciously dark and very difficult book. Because thinking, it's worth remembering, is getting more complicated every day.