Volume 16, Issue 1, Fall 2011
Giorgio Agamben
Theodore D. George
Pages 37-48
Passive Resistance
Giorgio Agamben and the Bequest of Early German Romanticism and Hegel
The purpose of this essay is to examine Giorgio Agamben’s important but underappreciated debts to the early German Romantics and to Hegel. While maintaining critical distance from these figures, Agamben develops crucial aspects of his approach to radical passivity with reference to them. The focus of this essay is on Agamben’s consideration of the early German Romantics’ notions of criticism and irony, Hegel’s notion of language, and the implications of this view of language for his notion of community.