The lawful, the obligatory and the forbidden
According to Arab jurists, human actions are classified into five categories, which they list as follows: obligatory, commendable, lawful, reprehensible, prohibited. The forbidden is opposed to the obligatory, to what deserves praise what is to be reproached. But the most important category is the one that is at the center and which constitutes, so to speak, the axis of the balance that weighs human actions and measures their responsibility (responsibility is called "weight" in Arabic juridical language). If what is commendable, the performance of which is rewarded and the omission of which is not prohibited, and what is reprehensible, the omission of which is rewarded and the performance of which is not prohibited, the licit is that on which the law cannot but remain silent and is therefore not neither obligatory nor forbidden, neither laudable nor reprehensible. It corresponds to the paradisiacal state, in which human actions do not produce any responsibility, are in no way "weighed" by law.
In the society we live in, exactly the opposite is happening. The zone of the lawful is getting smaller every day and an unprecedented normative hypertrophy tends not to leave any area of human life outside the obligation and the prohibition. Gestures and habits that had always been considered indifferent to the law are now meticulously regulated and punctually sanctioned, to the point that there is hardly any sphere of human behavior that can be considered simply lawful. Initially unidentified safety reasons and then, increasingly, health reasons have made an authorization mandatory for carrying out the most habitual and innocent acts, such as walking down the street, entering a public place or going to the workplace.
A society that restricts to such an extent the paradisiacal ambit of behaviors not weighed by law is not only, as Arab jurists believed, an unjust society, but it is truly an unlivable society, in which every action must be bureaucratically authorized and juridically sanctioned and the ease and freedom of customs, the sweetness of relationships and forms of life are reduced until they disappear. Furthermore, the number of laws, decrees and regulations is such that not only does it become necessary to resort to experts to find out whether a certain action is licit or prohibited, but even the officials in charge of applying the rules get confused and contradict each other.
In such a society, the art of life can only consist in reducing to a minimum the part of the obligatory and the forbidden and conversely in widening as much as possible the area of the lawful, the only one in which if not happiness, at least one joy becomes possible. But this is precisely what the unfortunate people who govern us do their utmost to prevent and make it difficult, multiplying the rules and regulations, controls and checks. Until the gloomy machine they have built collapses on itself, jammed by the same rules and by the same devices that were supposed to allow it to function.
November 28, 2022
Giorgio Agamben