We do not pay enough attention to Philosophy

First of all, I would like to reiterate that we do not pay enough attention to our philosophers, thinking that their discipline is outdated and do not bring any profit to our society (that’s why in my country we do not teach any longer philosophy to our high school students).

Having said that, I would also like to add that professor Giorgio Agamben does an extraordinary job studying how our current society works and how the concepts of “Stato di Eccezione” and “normality” combine, making it complicated to distinguish them. And that idea helped me a lot to understand correctly George W. Bush’s speech in pages 482-484 form the Iraq Papers. 

When he is asked on page 483 «How much of a sacrifice are ordinary Americans going to have to be expected to make in their daily lives, in their daily routines?», he responds on page 484: «Our hope, of course, is that they make no sacrifice whatsoever […], We would like to see life return no normal in America.».

As Agamben remarks, the problem is that the state of exception becomes so justified and it settles so permanently in our political and social structures that it becomes normal. 

And with that speech, George W. Bush is justifying a drastic change of action (as it is mentioned by Dudziak in her text on page 104 when she talks about the PATRIOT Act, or the use of military force), to keep normality. 

So, as Agamben insists, what this introduction of the state of exception created during the Bush Administration is doing, is changing things so everything can be normal again. That has made me reflect a lot about Niccolò Machiavelli and his famous quote «The ends justify the means». What is the prize of normality?

And also although it is not directly mentioned in this paragraph, in his original Italian book (Stato di Eccezione. Homo sacer, 2,1, 2003), Agamben explains that current global wars should be defined, from a juridic perspective, as if they were civil wars. Even if it is a contradiction: because it is almost impossible to distinguish between civilians and the military. And I think this concept is also important, because, it is what in the end has justified those new rules and exceptions in our current governments and has nourished the idea that we need to protect ourselves, that we need to be safe and accept those laws  and exceptional laws mentioned again by Dudziak in her article, War Time.