When the House Burns Down Quotes

“In the burning house you continue to do what you had done before—but you cannot avoid seeing that the flames now show you bare. Something has changed, not in what you do but in the way in which you let it go in the world. A poem written in the burning house is truer, more right, because no one can hear it, because nothing ensures that it can escape the flames. But if, by chance, it finds a reader, then that reader will in no way be able to draw back from the apostrophe that calls out from that helpless, inexplicable, faint clamor.

Only someone who is unlikely ever to be heard can tell the truth, only someone who speaks from within a house that the flames are relentlessly consuming.”
― Giorgio Agamben, When the House Burns Down: From the Dialect of Thought

“Those who realize that the house is burning can be led to look with disdain and contempt upon their peers who seem not to realize it. And yet won’t these people who do not see and do not think be precisely the lemurs to whom you will have to answer on the last day? Realizing that the house is burning does not raise you above the others: on the contrary, they are the ones with whom you will have to exchange a last glance when the flames draw nearer. What will you be able to say to justify your supposed conscience to these people who are so unknowing that they almost seem innocent?”
― Giorgio Agamben, When the House Burns Down: From the Dialect of Thought

“There can be no salvation for us as individuals; there is salvation because there are others.”
― Giorgio Agamben, When the House Burns Down: From the Dialect of Thought

“Civilizations—barbarisms—have gone under never to rise again, and historians are used to marking and dating caesuras and wrecks. But how does one bear witness to a world that goes to its ruin with blindfolded eyes and its face covered, a republic that collapses without lucidity or pride, in fear and abjection? The blindness is all the more desperate, for the doomed believe they can steer their own wreck, swear that everything can be kept under control technically, that there is no need for a new god or a new heaven—merely prohibitions, experts, and doctors. Panic and deceit.”
― Giorgio Agamben, When the House Burns Down: From the Dialect of Thought

“There is no sense in anything I do, if the house burns down.” And yet it is exactly while the house is burning that one must carry on as always, must do everything with care and precision, perhaps even more diligently—even if no one notices. Perhaps life will disappear from Earth leaving no memory of what was done, for better or for worse. But you must carry on as before; it is too late to change; there is no more time.”
― Giorgio Agamben, When the House Burns Down: From the Dialect of Thought

“Which house is burning? The country where you live, or Europe, or the whole world? Perhaps the houses, the cities have already burned down—who knows how long ago?—in a single immense blaze that we pretended not to see. Some are reduced to just bits of frame, a frescoed wall, a roof beam, names, so many names, already eaten by the flames. And yet we cover them over so carefully with white plaster and false words that they seem intact. We live in houses, in cities burned to the ground, as if they were still standing; the people pretend to live there and go out into the streets masked amid the ruins as if these were the familiar neighborhoods of times past. And now the form and nature of the flame has changed; it has become digital, invisible, and cold—but exactly for this reason closer still; it encircles and envelops us at every moment.”
― Giorgio Agamben, When the House Burns Down: From the Dialect of Thought