The reduction of man to a bare life is today such a fait accompli that it is now the basis of identity that the state recognizes in its citizins. As the deportees to Auschwitz no longer had a name or a nationality and were by then only the numbers tattooed on their arms, so the contemporary citizens, lost in an anonymous mass and reduced to the level of potential criminals, are defined by nothing other than their biometric data, and ultimately – by means of a sort of ancient fate, which has become all the more opaque and incomprehensible – their DNA…. Like every apparatus biometric identification captures a more or less unconfessed desire for happiness. In this case we are dealing with the will to be freed from the weight of the person, from the moral as much as the juridical responsibility that it carries along with it. The person is also the bearer of guilt, so the ethics implied is necessarily ascetic, since it is founded on a separation (of the individual from the mask, of the ethical person from the juridical person). It is against this separation that the new identity without the person asserts the illusion not of a unity, but of an infinite multiplication of masks. At the moment when individuals are nailed down to a purely biological and asocial identity, they are also promised the ability to assume all of the masks and all the second and third lives possible on the Internet, none of which ever really belong to them. To this one can add the fleeting and almost insolent pleasure of being recognized by a machine, without the burden of the emotional implications that are inseperable from recognition by another human being. The more the citizens of the metropolis have lost intimacy with one another, the more they have become incapable of looking each other in the eye, the more consoling the virtual intimacy with the apparatus becomes…. The more they have lost all identity and all real belonging, the more gratifying it has become for them to be recognized by the Great Machine in its infinite and minute variants: from the turnstile of a subway entrance to an ATM machine, from the video camera that benevolently observes them while they enter a bank to the apparatus that opens the garage door for them, all the way to the future obligatory identity card that will recognize them in any time and any place for what they inexorably are. I am the machine that recognizes me or at least sees me; I am alive if the machine, which knows neither sleep nor wakefulness, but is eternally alert, guarantees that I am alive; I am not forgotten if the great memory has recorded my numerical or digital data.
#Agamben (translation modified)
