Giorgio Agamben

In Voyous, Jacques Derrida develops his argument starting from the presupposition that democracy as such is the entity whose integrity and immunity are at stake and, therefore, under investigation. This gesture reflects the setting in which ten years before, in Foi et savoir, he had cast his reasoning about the logic of immunity. There, it was one of the sources of religion, the immunity of the sacred, that operated according to this logic. The hyphen between these two essays, beside Derrida’s (...) own crossed references, is the genealogical reasoning on the meaning and essence of the concept of democracy: contrary to what Derrida claims, it will be maintained that Athenian democracy had a clear immune matrix, whose constant exercise is clearly defined, in spite of himself, by Vernant, and it will be shown how modern democracy has been forced to change policy. Modern democracy is an entity characterized by an immune deficiency. In order to save Derrida’s intuition from both the collapse of different vantage points and from a quite bizarre reticence in taking into account of the immune value of rituals, our starting point will be René Girard’s œuvre and his reading of the role of immune logic in sacred systems and, more generally, in modernity. The threshold between the auto-immune reaction, immune deficiency and auto-immune disease, between the sacrifice who delimits and constitutes the self and the holocauste du peuple en détail, is the space where, constantly exposed to the risk of auto-denial, democracy lives. (shrink)

Political theorists continue to be provoked by Giorgio Agamben’s disturbing diagnosis that ‘bare life’ – human life that is excluded from politics yet exposed to sovereign violence – is not a sign of the malfunction of modern politics but rather a revelation of how it actually functions. However, despite the enormous amount of attention this diagnosis has received, there has been relatively little discussion of Agamben’s proposed ‘cure’ for the problem that he diagnoses. In this article, I analyze the three (...) main concepts of Agamben’s positive philosophical program – ‘infancy,’ ‘potentiality,’ and ‘form-of-life’ – in order to show how he attempts to subvert the sovereignty of law over life with his idea of a life of habit in which life is sovereign over law. In addition to analyzing these concepts, I engage in an immanent critique of Agamben’s philosophy and contrast his vision of politics with those of other influential contemporary political theorists. I find that while Agamben’s philosophical program is almost undone by internal difficulties, it still radically challenges current theories of subjectivity, humanity, and community. (shrink)

This essay experiments with Kant’s writings on rational religion distilled through the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as canonical confrontations with primal problems of evil. It suggests boundaries between Stevenson’s characters and their occupations comparable to the those conflicted in the Kantian university, namely, law, medicine, theology, and philosophy (which makes a short anticipatory appearance in his earlier text on rational religion). With various faculties it investigates diffuse comprehensions—respectively, legal crime, biogenetic transmission, and original sin—of key ethical (...) modes: will, inheritance, incorporation, freedom, duty, obligation, love, living, and killing to conclude on the possible logic of evil (or evils of logic) collateral and possibly innate to Kant’s comprehension of radical evil. (shrink)

Abstract This essay will take a look at the notion of state of exception, ausnahmezustand in german original version, comparing Walter Benjamin’s and Carl Schmitt’s two main books which are Critique of violence and political theology that were written such as a polemic one another. We will also take into consideration an alternative violence form such as a pure violence defined by Benjamin that could be revolutionary to change this schmittian state of exception.

In the beginning of the 1970s, Michel Foucault dismisses the terminology of ‘exclusion’ for his projected analytics of modern power. This rejection has had major repercussions on the theory of neoliberal subject-formation. Many researchers disproportionately stress how neoliberal dispositifs produce entrepreneurial subjects, albeit in different ways, while minimizing how these dispositifs sometimes emphatically refuse to produce neoliberal subjects. Relying on Saskia Sassen’s work on financialization, I argue that neoliberal dispositifs not only apply entrepreneurial norms, but also suspend their application for (...) groups that threaten to harm the population’s profitability. Neoliberal dispositifs not only produce entrepreneurial subjects, but also surplus populations that are expelled from the overall population to maintain its productivity. Here, the concept of ‘exclusion’ is appropriate if understood in Agamben’s sense of an inclusive exclusion. The surplus population is part of neoliberal dispositifs, but only as the element to be abandoned. (shrink)

Among the most controversial aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy is his endorsement of slavery. Natural slaves are excluded from political citizenship on ontological grounds and are thus constitutively unable to achieve the good life, identified with the collective cultivation of logos in the polis. Aristotle explicitly acknowledges their humanity, yet frequently emphasizes their proximity to animals. It is the latter that makes them purportedly unfit for the polis. I propose to use Agamben’s theory of the anthropological machine to make sense of (...) this enigmatic exclusion and suggest a new conception of the good life and community detached from political rule. Aristotle’s distinction between humans and animals condemns slaves to bare life, but also reveals an opportunity for an inoperative form-of-life. (shrink)

Neoliberalism has installed an unending competitive struggle in the economy. Within this context activists have pushed for a reappraisal of laziness and inactivity as forms of resistance. This idea has been picked up by Maurizio Lazzarato and Giorgio Agamben in different ways. I start with explaining the former’s appraisal of laziness as a release of potentialities unrealizable under financial capitalism. Lazzarato’s appraisal of laziness however resembles neoliberal theories of innovation, because both share the conceptual persona of a subject whose potentialities (...) exceed the current status quo. Potentiality is thus not an unambiguous antagonist of capitalism, as Lazzarato suggests. In order to adequately oppose neoliberalism, Lazzarato should question the role of potentiality in capitalism. Agamben has undertaken such a project. In the second part of the essay I consequently argue that Agamben’s philosophy of inactivity as impotentiality is able to circumvent neoliberalism and the society of the spectacle. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by material social relations. In the now extensive literature on biopolitics, our biopolitical era is characterized by the blending and mixing of what were previously thought of as separate realms: life is biologized, politics is biologized and biology is politicized, life and politics have been economized, (...) and making life is intertwined with making death. This article provides a general overview of two strains of these biopolitical entanglements. It begins by examining the largely French and Italian focus on how politics and life have become economized in contemporary neoliberalism. We then turn to the mainly Anglo-American focus on the biologization of life. It concludes by taking up the central problem that arises from the messiness of biopolitics: whither the political of the biopolitical economy of life? Is there such a thing as the political proper in our era? If not, then what type of politics must be deployed to address the issues of our biopolis? (shrink)

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Pedagogies for Social Work traverses new territory by providing a cutting-edge overview of the work of classic and contemporary theorists, in a way that expands their application and utility in social work education and practice; thus, providing a bridge between critical theory, philosophy, and social work. -/- Each chapter showcases the work of a specific critical educational, philosophical and/or social theorist including: Henry Giroux, Michel Foucault, Cornelius Castoriadis, Herbert Marcuse, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Joan Tronto, (...) Iris Marion Young, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci and many others to elucidate the ways in which their key pedagogic concepts can be applied to specific aspects of social work education and practice. The text exhibits a range of research-based approaches to educating social work practitioners as agents of social change. It provides a robust and much needed, alternative paradigm to the technique-driven ‘conservative revolution’ currently being fostered by neoliberalism in both social work education and practice. -/- The volume will be instructive for social work educators who aim to teach for social change, by assisting students to develop counter-hegemonic practices of resistance and agency, and reflecting on the pedagogic role of social work practice more widely. The volume holds relevance for both postgraduate and undergraduate/qualifying social work and human services courses around the world. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben argues that Christian thought provides the paradigm of modern governmental power, which reinforces mundane government by investing it with glory. Agamben claims that Dionysius the Areopagite exemplifies this structure; in his view, Dionysian negative theology serves to sacralize ecclesiastical power. In response, I argue that Dionysius desacralizes every authority, affirming that some things are sacred even as he subjects that affirmation to thoroughgoing critique. Against both dogmatic adherence and pure profanation, Dionysius models a politics that draws on the (...) power of the sacred while holding it open to unpredictable development. (shrink)

Un gran número de comentaristas de Foucault afirman que la biopolítica forma parte de manera fundamental del corpus de su obra. La discusión acerca de esta noción está imbricada en la política contemporánea, pero dicha interpretación se aleja de las ideas mismas de Foucault. En ese sentido, ¿en qué consisten esas modificaciones que se desprenden de la obra foucaultiana? ¿Se trata de movimientos propios de la noción o de innovaciones investigativas ulteriores? ¿Existe una lógica que sigue el concepto y si (...) es así qué lógica interna juega esta noción dentro del pensamiento del filósofo francés? La biopolítica se comprende a partir del sentido y significado de la vida en los siglos XVIII-XIX y, de esa manera, en torno a la estrategia política que circula en esos siglos. Una relación entre la política y la biopolítica o, si se prefiere, un problema discontinuo, es decir, una relación que intenta unir áreas que hasta ahora no han sido consideradas: la discontinuidad y la misma biopolítica. ¿Es posible considerar la biopolítica como un problema discontinuo y como un método en el que la discontinuidad es preeminente? Es una pregunta que pretendemos desplegar en este trabajo. (shrink)

O conceito de homo oeconomicus que Foucault nos apresenta em Nascimento da Biopolítica possui uma lógica econômica da qual se utiliza para agir no mundo e com os outros que receberá atenção especial nesse artigo. A busca por satisfação pessoal direciona esse homo oeconomicus de tal forma que a própria política é vista por ele como um meio para conseguir realizar seus interesses mais particulares. A relação que faço com a ideia de exceção de Agamben é tentar mostrar, nesse momento (...) inicial da pesquisa, que o homo oeconomicus é capaz de avaliar a excepcionalidade de um governo como instrumento para alcançar resultados positivos em sua lógica econômica. O estado de exceção e o homo oeconomicus são passíveis de uma interação que resulta num modo de fazer política onde a violência e a suspensão do ordenamento jurídico se tornam mecanismos para a confecção das vontades particulares pensadas através de um cálculo utilitarista. (shrink)

"[O]ther contributors argue that taste has a clear epistemic function. Brower cites Agamben as claiming that taste is a priveleged locus for knowledge...A phenomenology of taste, then, is no mere trivial or personal matter, but one with wide-ranging consequences. And some of these conseqences are ethical...[D]oes the debasement of taste indeed breed xenophobic oppression, as Brower is sure that it does? [sic:)] These are contentious claims. Surely a person of exemplary aesthetics and gustatory taste can still be a moral monster...aesthetic (...) delicacy does not entail ethical virtue. It has been a long time since beauty was associated with moral good, yet the connection persists...It has been a long time since beauty was associated with truth, as well, and yet, again, the conection endures..." (Eds' Preface, ix-x). (shrink)

Over the last two decades, Giorgio Agamben and Charles Taylor have produced important and influential genealogical works on the philosophical and political conceptions of secularity. Yet in their recent work, both of these thinkers have respectively returned to a prominent theme in their earlier works: Human life. This essay offers a parallel reading of Agamben and Taylor as post-Heideggerian critics of the modern conception of human subjectivity. Through examining these their respective characterizations of modern subjectivity — namely Taylor’s account of (...) the “disengaged self” and Agamben’s conception of the “excluded-included” bare life, this essay seeks to highlight not only the Heideggerian currents underlying the philosophical anthropologies of Agamben and Taylor, but also the ontological paradoxicalities they detect in the conception of human existence and subjectivity in politico-philosophical modernity. After reviewing the different aspects of Agamben’s and Taylor’s critiques of modern subjectivity as well as the traditional metaphysical conception of humans as “language animals”, this essay concludes by sketching a robust and affirmative “paradoxical” conception of human beings as “language animals” which simultaneously takes into account the insights from Taylor’s (post)analytic philosophical renewal of Aristotelianism and Agamben’s critical analysis of contemporary biopolitics in the continental philosophical tradition. (shrink)

In contrast to functionalist explanations of themes of purity and impurity as an expression and affirmation of the social order, Giorgio Agamben considers purity and impurity as comparisons of phenomena with their imputed essence. From the perspective offered by Agamben, judgements regarding purity and impurity can be seen as in part constructing the essence against which they supposedly simply measure phenomena. Agamben’s investigations suggest that on occasions when themes of purity or impurity are invoked within Western discourses on subjectivity, the (...) full human subject tends to be placed as relatively pure: neither too close nor too distant from human essence. FollowingWalter Benjamin, he suggests that such a classification gives the full human subject a certain social protection and inviolability, separating relatively pure and protected human life from impure subjectivities unprotected by social or legal conventions. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin’s writings are often read in terms of their emphasis on undecidability. This article focuses on Benjamin’s view of decision as a philosophic capacity to suspend recognizable myth. Myth is recognizable as closure. Myth becomes recognizable as myth when exceptions and extremes arise in relation to it. Without necessarily following the specific exception or extreme, philosophy is a politics that is attuned to the capacity of an exception or extreme to perform the limit of a specific mythic form. In (...) elaborating philosophically impelled decision as a capacity to take exception to myth, the article compares Benjamin’s works with writings by Agamben, Schmitt, Hiller, Sorel, Derrida and others. At various points in the article, and especially towards the end, the discussion of the notion of philosophic decision includes consideration of ways in which aspects of Benjamin’s enmity to myth might themselves become mythic, unphilosophic. (shrink)

O presente artigo pretende abordar a supressão de direitos fundamentais e a escalada da violência policial em Goiás durante o período pós-ditadura militar. Para tanto, apoiamo-nos em conceitos centrais da filosofia política de Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault e Giorgio Agamben. A partir da percepção da permanência de mecanismos repressores próprios do estado de exceção ditatorial nas regiões marginalizadas de Goiás, pretendemos discutir a amplitude e a efetividade dos direitos políticos e sociais afirmados pela Constituição de 1988, assim como abordar os (...) efeitos políticos da herança de impunidade deixada pela ditadura militar, especialmente no que diz respeito à criminalização dos marginalizados e extermínio de grupos vulneráveis pelo aparelho repressor estatal. (shrink)

This paper addresses the nature and value of Giorgio Agamben’s negative thought, which revolves around the theme of nothingness. I begin by observing the validity of negative thinking, and thus oppose those affirmative philosophies that reject Agamben’s thought simply on the basis of its negativity. Indeed, the importance of negative thought is set forth by Agamben’s attention to the specific biopolitical logic that governs the present. If we are to understand the present, then we must begin by understanding the nothingness (...) inherent in the logic of biopolitics. At the same time, I argue, it is important to distinguish two kinds of negative thought. The first, ultimately limited manner of negative thought follows a strictly Heideggerian path of contemplation. While Agamben shows a certain affinity with this style of thinking, I call for increased focus on a different manner of negative thought, one that turns on the power to think nothingness. I develop this second manner of negative thought by advancing the concepts of love and exile, which provide the means by which the potentiality of nothingness may inhabited in novel ways. (shrink)

This paper offers a deconstructive reading of the pure actuality of the un­moved mover of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda. Aristotle describes this first, unmoved principle of movement as a divine sovereign—the king of the cosmos—and maintains that the good governance of the cosmos depends on its unmitigated unity and pure actuality. It is striking, then, when Giorgio Agamben claims that Aristotle bequeathed the paradigm of sovereignty to Western philosophy not through his arguments for the pure actuality of the unmoved mover but (...) rather through his description of the essence of potentiality. An interpretation of Aristotle’s account of potentiality in Metaphysics Theta therefore prepares the way for a deconstruction of the unity and pure actuality of the divine sovereign. I argue that the repetition of nous in Aristotle’s description of the divine thinking of thinking betrays traces of division and difference at the heart of divine sovereignty. If this is the case, then actuality and potentiality become indis­cernible at the level of the absolute and the sovereign corresponds to the bifurcated site of this indiscernibility. (shrink)

This paper articulates a ‘political ontology’ by orienting Agamben’s inquiries toward the autonomy of the constituting power. In relation to Agamben’s thought, it clarifies it by drawing a categorical distinction between zōē and bare life, departs from it by using Agamben’s analysis of potentiality to understand the paralysis of the constituting power and develops it by unfolding the category of ‘exigency.’ The paper also sets into play a brief encounter between political ontology and representative politics.

This article explores the influence of Winnicott’s conceptual constellation of early childhood, play, use, transitional phenomena, and transitional object upon Agamben’s thinking of contemporary historical exigency.

The creation of the prison camp at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is part of a historical continuity of colonialism on the island. Over two hundred years before the United States sent the first "enemy combatants" to Cuba, the Spanish Empire began sending "enemy Indians" to the island. The rationales and circumstances that gave rise to the prison complex in Guantánamo share much in common with those that motivated Spain to imprison Apaches and other Native people on (...) Cuba. This essay argues that the policies of both Spain and the United States have roots in a similar logic of colonialism. (shrink)

It is often pointed out that Agamben’s most profound disagreement with Hannah Arendt is his rejection of anything like a “right to have rights” that would guarantee the belonging to a political space. I want to suggest, however, that the subject of rights in Agamben’s thought is more complicated, arguing in this essay that Agamben’s critique is not with the concept of human rights per se, but with the declaration of modern rights. In other words, this essay will explore how (...) Agamben’s analysis of language, especially vis-à-vis the figure standing outside the gates of the city, allows for rethinking the subject of rights. This analysis suggests that when thinking the notion of right, we must move from the declaration of right rooted in logos to the material dimension of language that makes such a declaration possible. Calling into question Aristotle’s claim that the human being is political because the human being is zoon logon echon, Agamben’s analysis shows that there is no place where the “I” can transform itself into speech. There is always a “non-place” of articulation that is not something outside the polis, but at the very heart of the polis itself. This non-place marks the exposure of the human as such. Following Agamben, I argue that human rights are not declared, but are exposed in our very appearance, our very being-manifest. I argue that our being-manifest provides for a new notion of human rights, rooted in the ontological condition of appearance that carries with it the right of exposure, without identity, to appear. In conclusion, I consider the relation of language and law in Agamben’s thought, asking whether Agamben’s critique of the juridical and his call for a politics without law preclude any resurrection of human rights? (shrink)

In The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben makes a few but poignant references to Plato’s understanding of art. Because art’s impact was powerful, Plato deemed art dangerous and subordinated it to politics. In contrast, Agamben argues, modern art enjoys the privilege of formal autonomy at the cost of losing political significance. This essay develops the Platonic dimension in Agamben’s thought: whereas Platonic censorship recognizes art’s power by way of prohibition, the modern culturalist tolerance of art is symptomatic of art’s reduction (...) into commodity and of the public indifference toward it. (shrink)

The article examines the messianic idea in philosophical works of Emmanuel Levinas. It analyzes the continuities and discontinuities between the views of Levinas and philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, and explores the implications of their messianic conception. It suggests that Levinas has offered a conception of messianic thinking as philosophy rather than of messianic philosophy in his Talmudic readings.

This article examines the post-9/11 policing of points of entry and transfer at US airports and the ways these points become “forbidden places” to those deemed undesirable, in order to expose the ambiguity of forbiddenness with respect to place. It uses Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics to argue that the War on Terror has created a class of expendable non-persons whose legal identities are not acknowledged and Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of “the camp” as a metaphor for the spaces in airports (...) that are neither entirely inside nor outside a national jurisdiction. This discussion takes place, in part, through the case study of suspected terrorist Maher Arar, arguing that his case shows the displacement of our sense of prohibition, away from spaces and onto persons. (shrink)

Recent efforts among environmental theorists to think past human alienation from nature have made the question of the animal central, as Agamben and Derrida have shown. Expanding this question beyond the concern with suffering, Donna Haraway’s investigations of companion species take seriously the interspecies relations of work, play, and joy. The engagement of plant-human coevolution in the work of ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan complicates these questions, revealing the porous boundaries between human cultures and the plant companions that sustain them. This (...) essay proposes Nabhan’s work as a response to Haraway’s questions, exploring four mutually constitutive relations between humans and plants: lures, tricks, grief, and sacrament. (shrink)

This paper seeks to examine the images and discourses that have allowed for the declaration of the state of exception and the use of sovereign power. Examining the Abu Ghraib prison photographs as iconic emblems of the civilizational discourses that allow for exercises of sovereign power, I argue that these photographs articulate a dual interpellation of the Islamic Other as the terrorist/uncivilized Other and the viewer as a normative, national subject. I identify this moment as a perverted conversion in which (...) the Islamic Other is hailed as one who necessitates an imperial crusade yet whose uncivilized state undermines the efficacy of that crusade. (shrink)

"Torture and Photography: Abu Ghraib" attempts to think the mutual relationships between torture and photography, addressingissues of objectivity, publicity, and distance. In a world where bodies have been divested of human rights, the objectification of the camera seems the perfect complement. Exploring the "prophylactic" character of film, the author proposes human "touch" as always in excess of this objectified state of affairs. Along with memoranda from the Bush administration on the issues of detainee rights and the role of torture in (...) interrogation, the essay engages with the theoretical work of Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Erwin Straus, and Giorgio Agamben in staking out the intersection of torture and photography. (shrink)

Nihilism, for Nietzsche, is the nothing that results from the devaluation of the highest values. There is widespread agreement with Nietzsche’s claim that the apostle Paul was the great devaluer of the values of the ancient world, even to the extent of breaking the history of the world in two. Yet the mode of Paul’s devaluating nihilism is contested. Using Nietzsche’s three types of nihilist, I frame this debate over Paul as giving us, respectively, Paul the reactive nihilist , Paul (...) the active nihilist and Paul the overman . I then read Agamben’s messianic Paul as a way to avoid the problem of nihilism tout court, which the two earlier accounts, despite releasing Paul from Nietzsche’s charge of passive nihilism, do not. I finish by arguing that while Agamben’s construction of the Pauline messianic vocation does indeed break with Nietzsche’s categories of nihilism, nihilism remains necessary to a genealogy of both Paul’s and Agamben’s messianism. (shrink)

Enmeshed with Agamben’s critique of metaphysics is his critique of deconstruction. Following the sentiment he first outlined in Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, deconstruction’s alleged attempt to displace the privileging of speech with that of writing to thereby dispel the negativity at the core of Western metaphysics, to the contrary has the effect of reifying this problem by expressing its terms most perfectly. Agamben takes this criticism further in the Homo Sacer series by suggesting that not only does (...) deconstruction reiterate the problem of metaphysics, it mimics the conditions of the state of exception as rule in the temporal suspension of its infinite deferral of signification. As a counter to deconstruction’s “thwarted messianism,” in The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Agamben posits a messianic time immanent to every instant, likening it to both the speech act and the very structure of thought itself. Implicit in this critique is an ongoing concern with temporality and presence that resonates across his corpus, and has grave consequences for his professed fidelity to Walter Benjamin. (shrink)

Giorgio Agambens Frage nach dem ethischen und epistemologischen Status des Zeugnisses im Kontext der Shoah, wie er sie in seiner Arbeit Was von Auschwitz bleibt. Das Archiv und der Zeuge aufwirft, konzentriert sich auf die Analyse einer Figur der nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungslager, die Primo Levi ins Spiel gebracht hat, um die Authentizität seines eigenen Zeugnisses als Überlebender in Frage zu stellen: den Muselmann, stummes Opfer auf der untersten Stufe der Lagerhierarchie. Der Artikel unternimmt eine kritische Analyse des Agambenschen Arguments, das Paradox (...) des sprachlosen Zeugnisses, das der Muselmann repräsentiert, sei der unschätzbare Rest, die Lücke, die weder ganz dem Menschlichen noch ganz dem Nicht-Menschlichen zugeschlagen werden kann. Er versucht zu zeigen, dass dieses mit erheblichem rhetorischen Aufwand entwickelte Argument keinen Erkenntnisgewinn im Zusammenhang der Frage nach Authentizität von Zeugnissen erbringt. Ihm gegenüber wäre eine Sichtweise zu favorisieren, die den Plural aller erreichbarer Zeugnisse betont, die die Perspektivität jedes Einzelnen hervorheben kann, ohne seine Einzigartigkeit zu unterschlagen. (shrink)

Wie kann die italienische Philosophie dazu beitragen, die gegenwärtige Krise der modernen politischen Theorie zu lösen? Der vorliegende Text berücksichtigt die Werke einiger zeitgenössischer italienischer Hauptdenker und betont trotz der verschiedenen Standpunkte die unterschwelligen Verbindungen. Insbesondere lässt sich der Konflikt, oft im Sinne des griechischen Begriffs stasis, als Schlüssel zur Krise des modernen Staates bestimmen. Das Thema Konflikt durchquert alle besprochenen Werke und wirft ein Licht auf die Spannung zwischen der Fortdauer eines politisch-theologischen Rahmens und dem ständigen Verweis auf die (...) Biopolitik. Wie von Esposito vorgeschlagen, ist diese Anpassung von fremden Begriffen seitens einer Philosophie, die konstitutiv entterritorialisiert ist, die beste Möglichkeit, eine wirksame Herangehensweise zu erarbeiten, um aus der gegenwärtigen Lage herauszufinden. -/- Giorgio Agamben: Stasis. La guerra civile come paradigma politico. Torino 2015. Bollati Boringhieri. 84 S.; Massimo Cacciari: Il potere che frena. Mailand 2013. Adelphi. 217 S.; Paolo Virno: Saggio sulla negazione. Per una antropologia linguistica. Torino 2013. Bollati Boringhieri. 204 S.; Roberto Esposito: Da fuori. Una filosofia per l'Europa. Torino 2016. Einaudi. 256 S. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that a reimagining of the notion of silence as more than a sonic phenomenon is needed to address the dominant structural apparati of Western discourse. Silence as an existential medium is where the Foucauldian apparatuses that power the status-quo of the world operate. They forge connections between things like ideology and social organization where one falls into the wake of the other and is shaped in a way that is nearly invisible to the passing glance. (...) It is the indeterminacy within silence as explored by John Cage that that allows this to happen, but it also offers the potential to have an active role in the shaping of these apparatuses toward a more beneficial and culturally aware form of society. This new approach is crucial in helping one learn to embrace the indeterminacy of life and the hazy relational structures that drive our existence. (shrink)

The main concern of Agamben's work, prior to the Homo Sacer project, is how to understand the existence of or potentiality for language. Contemporary philosophy casts language as the unsayable presupposition of discourse. Agamben criticises this as an incomplete nihilism that remains within the horizon of metaphysics, and attempts to think the experience of language without an unsayable ground. I examine Agamben's critique of the role of the ineffable in the theory of the subject, and in the thought of Heidegger (...) and Derrida. I contrast this with his account of infancy as an experience that fully assumes the groundlessness of language. (shrink)