10/15/20 Agamben intervention

Which house is burning? The country where you live, or Europe, or the whole world?

https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2020/10/15/when-the-house-burns-giorgio-agamben-on-the-coronavirus-crisis/

‘Everything I do makes no sense if the house burns.’ Yet even as the house is burning, it is necessary to continue as always, to do everything with care and precision, perhaps even more studiously — even if no one should notice. It may be that life disappears from the earth, that no memory remains of what has been done, for better or for worse. But you continue as before, it is too late to change, there is no more time.

‘What’s happening around you / is no longer your business.’ Like the geography of a country that you have to leave forever. Yet how does it still affect you? Right now, when it’s no longer your business, when everything seems over, everything and every place appear in their truest guise, somehow touch you more closely, just as they are: splendour and misery.

Philosophy, a dead language. The language of poets is always a dead language . . . Curious to say: a dead language that is used to give more life to thought.’¹ Maybe not a dead language, but a dialect. That philosophy and poetry speak in a language that is less than the language, this is the measure of their rank, of their special vitality. Weighing, judging the world by the measure of a dialect, of a language that is dead and yet springs anew, in which not even a comma can be changed. Keep speaking this dialect, now that the house is burning.