On Security and Terror

Autor: Giorgio Agamben

Fuente: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung September 20, 2001. Traducido por Soenke Zehle.

Fragmento del original: 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. 

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