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.
God’s sovereign will is not at the whim and mercy of our person and individual responses to it.
Let every man and woman count himself immortal. Let him catch the revelation of Jesus in his resurrection. Let him say not merely, "Christ is risen," but "I shall rise."
All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment freshly-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless new-born infants.
Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.
I feel most alive, most electric with faith, breath, and courage, when I think of God as a current that runs through all that is. Not by will or by choice. Not as a benediction but because there are laws even God must obey.
Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.
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