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Giorgio Agamben: The signature of all things: on method, Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell (tr.)

Zone Books, 2009, 124 pp, ISBN: 1890951986 (hbk), US $ 24.95

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Notes

  1. Agamben has written several essays with titles taking the same form, including “What is an Apparatus?,” “What is a People?,” and “What is the Contemporary?”.

  2. Agamben's argument consciously or unconsciously parallels Kant's defense (in the Prolegomena in particular) of analogy as a method for guiding empirical discovery, and both of their arguments (Kant's and Agamben's) could serve as a defense against the accusation that the employment of analogy implicates one in a form of anthropomorphism. While Kant was responding to Hume's critique of theism, Agamben may be responding to Hardt and Negri's accusation that Agamben is engaged in an “anthropology” (more on this below). See Kant (1950, p. 99–113).

  3. See Gutting (1994, pp. 1–28).

  4. Cf. Agamben (2006, pp. 102–103).

  5. For Castoriadis' view of “insignificance,” see the forthcoming English translation of Cornelius Castoriadis, Post-Scriptum: Sur L'insignifiance (New York: Continuum).

  6. See Benjamin (1999, p. 722).

  7. Foucault (1998, p. 370).

  8. Deleuze (1983, p. 2).

  9. Ibid., p. 8.

  10. See Han-Pile (1998).

  11. Agamben's aguments on the whole could be taken as a response to Reiner Schurmann's claim (which expresses the views of many in continental philosophy) that an anti-humanist epoch is emerging. See Schurmann (1979, pp. 160–177).

  12. Hardt and Negri (2001, p. 421).

  13. Agamben (2006, pp. 102–103).

References

  • Agamben, Giorgio. 2006. The time that remains: a commentary on the letter to the Romans (trans: Patricia Dailey). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  • Benjamin, Walter. 1999. On the mimetic faculty. In Selected writings, Vol. 2, 1927–1934 (trans: Rodney Livingstone). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

  • Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and philosophy (trans: Janis Tomlinson). New York: Columbia University Press.

  • Foucault, Michel. 1998. Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In Aesthetics, method, and epistemology (trans: Robert Hurley). New York: New Press.

  • Gutting, Gary. 1994. Introduction: Michel Foucault: a user’s manual. In The Cambridge companion to Michel Foucault, ed. G. Gutting. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge.

  • Han, Béatrice. 1998. L’ontologie manquée de Michel Foucault. Paris: Millon.

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  • Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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  • Kant, Immanuel. 1950. Prolegomena to any future metaphysics (trans: Lewis White Beck). Upper Saddler River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

  • Schürmann, Reiner. 1979. Anti-humanism: reflections of the turn towards the post-modern epoch. Man and World 12(2): 160–177.

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  1. Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA

    John V. Garner

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Garner, J.V. Giorgio Agamben: The signature of all things: on method, Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell (tr.). Cont Philos Rev 43, 579–588 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9158-1

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