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<div>A translation of a short intervention by Giorgio Agamben on the
blog<i> Diario della crisi</i> at the website of the<i> Istituto
Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici</i> (23 May 2020). As in many of his
recent blogs, Agamben refers specifically to developments in
Italy.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><font face="Verdana" size="+1" color="#000000">As we foresaw they
would, university lessons next year will be held online [in English].
What was evident to careful observers - namely, that the so-called
pandemic would be used as a pretext for the increasingly pervasive
diffusion of digital technologies - is being duly realized.<br>
We are not so much interested here in the consequent transformation of
teaching, in which the element of physical presence (always so
important in the relationship between students and teachers)
disappears definitively, as we are in the disappearance of group
discussion in seminars, which was the liveliest part of instruction.
Part of the technological barbarism that we are currently living
through is the cancellation from life of any experience of the senses
as well as the loss of the gaze, permanently imprisoned in a spectral
screen.<br>
Much more decisive in what is taking place is something that,
significantly, is not spoken of at all: namely, the end of being a
student [studentato, studenthood] as a form of life. Universities were
born in Europe from student associations - universitates - and they
owe their name to them. To be a student entailed first of all a form
of life in which studying and listening to lectures were certainly
decisive features, but no less important were encounters and constant
exchanges with other scholarii, who often came from remote places and
who gathered together according to their place of origin in nationes.
This form of life evolved in various ways over the centuries, but,
from the clerici vagantes of the Middle Ages to the student movements
of the twentieth century, the social dimension of the phenomenon
remained constant. Anyone who has taught in a university classroom
knows well how, in front of one's very eyes, friendships are made,
and, according to their cultural and political interests, small study
and research groups are formed that continue even after classes have
ended.<br>
All this, which has lasted for almost ten centuries, now ends forever.
Students will no longer live in the cities where their universities
are located. Instead, they will listen to lectures closed up in their
rooms and sometimes separated by hundreds of kilometers from those who
were formerly their classmates. Small cities that were once
prestigious university towns will see their communities of students,
who frequently made up the most lively part, disappear from their
streets.<br>
About every social phenomenon that dies it can be said that, in a
certain sense, it deserved its end; it is certain that our
universities reached such a degree of corruption and specialist
ignorance that it isn't possible to mourn them, and the form of life
of students, consequently, has been equally impoverished. Two points,
however, should remain firm:</font></div>
<div><font face="Verdana" size="+1" color="#000000">1- Professors who
agree - as they are doing en masse - to submit to the new dictatorship
of telematics and to hold their courses only online are the perfect
equivalent of the university teachers who in 1931 swore allegiance to
the Fascist regime. As happened then, it is likely that only fifteen
out of a thousand will refuse, but their names will surely be
remembered alongside those of the fifteen who did not take the
oath.<br>
2- Students who truly love to study will have to refuse to enroll in
universities transformed in this way, and, as in the beginning,
constitute themselves in new universitates, only within which, in the
face of technological barbarism, the word of the past might remain
alive and something like a new culture be born - if it will be
born.</font></div>
<div><font face="Verdana" size="+1" color="#000000">- Giorgio Agamben,
23 May 2020</font><font face="Arial" size="-2" color="#000000"><br>
</font></div>
<div
>https://eutopiainstitute.org/2020/05/requiem-for-the-students-giorgi<span
></span>o-agamben/</div>
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