...in a type of what psychoanalysts call “return of the repressed,” religion, magic, and law—and with these, the whole sphere of nonapophantic discourse, which have been driven into the shadows—in reality secretly govern the functioning of our societies that wish to be lay and secular. Indeed, I believe that a good description of the so-called democratic societies in which we live consists in defining them as societies in which the ontology of the command has taken the place of the ontology of assertion, yet not in the clear form of an imperative but in the more underhanded form of advice, of invitation, of the warning given in the name of security, in such a way that obedience to a command takes the form of a cooperation and, often, of a command given to oneself. I am not thinking only of the sphere of advertising and that of the security prescriptions given in the form of an invitation, but also of the sphere of technological apparatuses. These apparatuses are defined by the fact that the subjects who use them believe themselves to command them (and in fact push buttons defined as “commands”), but in truth do nothing but obey a command inscribed in the very structure of the apparatus. The free citizens of democratic technologicals societies are beings who incessantly obey in the very gesture with which they impart a command.
- Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory
