One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that humanity may eventually manipulate laws not to follow them, but to liberate society from their constraints.
Giorgio Agamben's quote reflects on the evolving relationship between humanity and the laws that govern it. He posits that in the future, people may interact with laws in a playful, almost carefree manner, not to enforce or adhere to them, but rather to dismantle them and move beyond their traditional meanings. This implies a transformation in societal norms and a shift towards a more liberated existence where laws are no longer the controlling force they once were.
In practice
In a debate about the evolving nature of justice, you might quote Agamben to emphasize the need for a re-evaluation of legal constraints.
Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system
To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality.
Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.
If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of Almighty God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
Fools admire everything in an author of reputation.
When human affairs are so ordered that there is no recognition of God, there is a belittling of man. That is why, in the final analysis, worship and law cannot be completely separated from each other. God has a right to a response from man, to man himself, and where that right of God totally disappears, the order of law among men is dissolved, because there is no cornerstone to keep the whole structure together.
Many years ago, our father Ibrahim (AS) made a choice. He loved his son. But He loved God more. The commandment came to sacrifice his son. But it wasn't his son that was slaughtered. It was his attachment to anything that could compete with his love for God. So let us ask ourselves in these beautiful days of sacrifice, which attachments do we need to slaughter?
Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.
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