The form of life is a secret so secret.What does it mean to initiate life? For the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the question of initiating life concerns how we conceive of and experiment with the how of a form of life. In short, it involves ways of envisaging an absolutely immanent life on the threshold of its political and ethical intensification. Agamben's whole philosophical project can be described as radical mannerism that foregrounds the question of the way of living. To (...) follow Agamben's paradigmatic problematization, an initiated life is thus a life made inextricable from its manner or form—a form-of-life.Initiating life is a complex and multifaceted question. One spontaneous way to approach it is in... (shrink)

When they want to discredit the political relevance of Deleuze's thought, Hallward considers counter-effectuation as a ‘redemptive gesture’, and Rancière describes Deleuze's history of cinema as a ‘history of redemption’. Each time, redemption refers pejoratively to a break ‘out of this world’ and a form of apolitical passivity, in an attempt to reduce Deleuze to be a mere ‘spiritual’ thinker, simply renewing ‘that “Oriental intuition” which Hegel found at work in Spinoza's philosophy’. But is it all that simple? How should (...) we envisage the relationship between creativity and redemption, politics and passivity in Deleuze's work? And in what way does that concern Deleuze's philosophy connection to the Non-West, and namely China? (shrink)