In this paper, I consider Giorgio Agamben's critique of Heidegger's understanding of animality, using Clarice Lispector's novel The Passion According to G.H. as an illustration. I argue that the present (living) moment itself separates the human from the animal for Heidegger, because, as Agamben notes, Heidegger subsumes this moment under the notion of "animal captivation" and thus fails to think the spontaneity of "bare life." But while Agamben goes on to argue that the creation of the human/animal binary is the (...) primary move of the "anthropological machine," I argue that the man/woman dichotomy is equally basic and equally destructive. (shrink)

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language and all but one appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel) and twentieth-century thought (Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, the historian Aby Warburg, and the linguist J.-C. Milner). They also examine several central concerns of Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian (...) theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. (shrink)

The end of human history is an event that has been foreseen or announced by both messianics and dialecticians. But who is the protagonist of that history that is coming—or has come—to a close? What is man? How did he come on the scene? And how has he maintained his privileged place as the master of, or first among, the animals? In The Open, contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers the ways in which the “human” has been thought of as (...) either a distinct and superior type of animal, or a kind of being that is essentially different from animal altogether. In an argument that ranges from ancient Greek, Christian, and Jewish texts to twentieth-century thinkers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, and Kojève, Agamben examines the ways in which the distinction between man and animal has been manufactured by the logical presuppositions of Western thought, and he investigates the profound implications that the man/animal distinction has had for disciplines as seemingly disparate as philosophy, law, anthropology, medicine, and politics. (shrink)

Explores the symbiosis of philosophy and literature in understanding negativity.

In this follow-up to The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy. Beginning with the New Testament and working through to late scholasticism and modern papal encyclicals, Agamben traces the Church's attempts to repeat Christ's unrepeatable sacrifice. Crucial here is the paradoxical figure of the priest, who becomes more and more a pure instrument of God's power, so that his own motives (...) and character are entirely indifferent as long as he carries out his priestly duties. In modernity, Agamben argues, the Christian priest has become the model ethical subject. We see this above all in Kantian ethics. Contrasting the Christian and modern ontology of duty with the classical ontology of being, Agamben contends that Western philosophy has unfolded in the tension between the two. This latest installment in the study of Western political structures begun in Homo Sacer is a contribution to the study of liturgy, an extension of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, and a reworking of Heidegger's history of Being. (shrink)

Unquestionably an influential thinker in Italy today, Giorgio Agamben has contributed to some of the most vital philosophical debates of our time. "The Coming Community" is an indispensable addition to the body of his work. How can we conceive a human community that lays no claim to identity - being American, being Muslim, being communist? How can a community be formed of singularities that refuse any criteria of belonging? Agamben draws on an eclectic and exciting set of sources to explore (...) the status of human subjectivities outside of general identity. From St Thomas' analysis of halos to a stocking commercial shown in French cinemas, and from the Talmud's warning about entering paradise to the power of the multitude in Tiananmen Square, Agamben tracks down the singular subjectivity that is coming in the contemporary world and shaping the world to come. Agamben develops the concept of community and the social implications of his philosophical thought. "The Coming Community" offers both a philosophical mediation and the beginnings of a new foundation for ethics, one grounded beyond subjectivity, ideology, and the concepts of good and evil. Agamben's exploration is, in part, a contemporary and creative response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures. This volume is the first in a new series that encourages transdisciplinary exploration and destabilizes traditional boundaries between disciplines, nations, genders, races, humans, and machines. Giorgio Agamben currently teaches philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata. He is the author of "Language and Death" and "Stanzas". This book is intended for those in the fields of cultural theory, literary theory, philosophy. (shrink)

In this book, one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He takes seriously Hegel's claim that art has exhausted its spiritual vocation. He argues, however, that Hegel by no means proclaimed the 'death of art' (as many still imagine) but proclaimed rather the indefinite continuation of art in a 'self-annulling' mode. With astonishing breadth and originality, he probes the meaning, aesthetics, and historical consequences of that self-annulment. He argues that (...) the birth of modern aesthetics is the result of a series of schisms - such as between artist and spectator, genius and taste, and form and matter - that are manifestations of the deeper, self-negating yet self-perpetuating movement of irony. He offers an imaginative reinterpretation of the history of aesthetic theory from Kant to Heidegger. The final chapter offers a dazzling interpretation of Dürer's Melancholia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Image and SilenceGiorgio AgambenTranslated by Leland de la Durantaye (bio)[End Page 94]In the Roman pantheon there is a goddess named Angerona, represented with her mouth bound and sealed (ore obligato signatoque).1 Her finger is raised to her lips as if to command silence. Scholars claim that she represents, in the context of pagan mystery cults, the power of silence, although there is no consensus among them as to how (...) to understand this power. Etymologically speaking, myein, the root of the Greek word mysterion, means “to close the mouth, to silence.” At the beginning of the sacred rites in Eleusis a herald “commanded silence” (epittatei tēn siōpen). It is said that that the initiates into these Eleusinian mysteries were required to maintain absolute silence concerning what they had seen and heard during their initiation. Our question is how to understand this silence. Was it a prohibition aimed at keeping a secret doctrine from the uninitiated? Or did it concern, instead, something truly impossible to say?To begin we might ask what sense there might have been in the obligation to remain silent given that it was possible for anyone—including slaves, and thus, potentially, the entire population of Athens—to be initiated into the mysteries. In his early work, “On Philosophy,” Aristotle affirmed that, “the initiates do not need to learn something (mathein ti), but, instead, to be disposed to something, to experience and to undergo something (pathein kai diatethēnai).”2 It would therefore be possible that in the ancient mystery cults the initiate did not learn a doctrine that could be expressed in words (yet had to remain secret), but, instead, experienced something essentially silent, something impossible to say. “A great awe in face of the gods,” we read in the Homeric ode to Demeter, “silences the voice.”3The impossibility of speaking—and the power of silence—has two forms, one joyful and the other disturbing. In myth muteness is often associated with rape. The Romans tell the story of Lara who was punished for her inclination to gossip by being rendered mute and who was then raped in a sacred wood by Mercury (who took advantage of her impossibility of speaking). Before being transformed into a swallow Philomela was raped by Tereus, who cut off her tongue to prevent her from recounting his misdeed. Persephone, raped, kidnapped, and conducted to Hades, remained there silent as the dead. In every one of these cases silence is the painful experience of a privation of speech, of being unable to say what one wishes to say.In Gnostic mythology, the preexisting, eternal, uncreated God contains within himself a female figure which is his silence, Sigē. From his union with Silence Thought is born. “Sigē,” we read in a Valentinian text, “is the mother of all the beings that have emerged from the Abyss. He who has failed to say the unsayable has silenced it; he who was understood the unsayable, has declared it unsayable.”4 Here too silence appears as the experience of an impossibility of saying, as a privation. It is in opposition to this abyssal figure of silence that the church fathers affirmed the primacy of the logos in which God is revealed. Nevertheless, of the power of silence Heidegger would write: “This primordial silence is more powerful than any human potentiality. No one, on his or her own, has ever invented language—that is, has been strong enough to break the power of this silence.”5 [End Page 95]In Kafka’s parable on Ulysses, we are told that the silence of the Sirens is more perilous than their song, and that Ulysses—who realized, as his ship neared them, that the Sirens were silent—put on an act to protect himself from this silence, plugging his ears with wax and having his men tie him to the mast.6 In Kafka’s retelling of the tale, the silence of the Sirens represents a zero degree of song and, following a stubborn tradition that sees in absence the most extreme form of presence, also represents an at once zero and ultimate degree of reality. In this sense Heidegger could write... (shrink)

It has become a commonplace that "images" were central to the twentieth century and that their role will be even more powerful in the twenty-first. But what is an image and what can an image be? _Releasing the Image_ understands images as something beyond mere representations of things. Releasing images from that function, it shows them to be self-referential and self-generative, and in this way capable of producing forms of engagement beyond spectatorship and subjectivity. This understanding of images owes much (...) to phenomenology—the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—and to Gilles Deleuze's post-phenomenological work. The essays included here cover historical periods from the Romantic era to the present and address a range of topics, from Cézanne's painting, to images in poetry, to contemporary audiovisual art. They reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of the project of releasing images and provoke new ways of engaging with embodiment, agency, history, and technology. (shrink)

In his recent book The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben examines the relation between the essence of the human and the living in Martin Heidegger’s thought. Focusing on the treatment of this relation in Heidegger’s 1929/30 lecture course “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” Agamben argues that the dimension of the open, which is central to Heidegger’s understanding of the human essence, can be seen as implicitly dependent upon Heidegger’s account of the essence of animality. In this essay, I argue (...) that Agamben’s reading is insufficient because it has not taken full account of the specifically temporal character of the openness proper to Heidegger’s understanding of the human essence. In conclusion, I present an alternative account of the way in which Heidegger framed his descriptions of animality in the 1929/30 lecture course as articulating the openness characteristic of human being. (shrink)

Agamben maintains that Heidegger continues the work of the anthropological machine by defining Dasein as uniquely open to the closedness of the animal. Yet, Agamben’s own thinking does not so much open up the concept of animal as it attempts to save humanity from the anthropological machine that always produces the animal as the constitutive outside within the human itself. Agamben’s return to religious metaphors at best displaces the binary man-animal with the binary religion-science, and at worst returns us to (...) a discourse at least as violent as the one from which he is trying to escape. Merleau-Ponty’s reanimation of science provides an alternative. (shrink)

The theory of use with which Giorgio Agamben concludes his Homo Sacer-series is introduced as an alternative to the concept of care. This article critically examines the ontological status of use a...

Martin Heidegger's commitment to the idea that _Dasein_ is ultimately gender neutral, as well as several other major aspects of his thought, raises significant questions for feminist philosophers. The fourteen essays included in this volume clearly illustrate the ways in which feminist readings can deepen our understanding of his philosophy. They illuminate both the richness and the limitations of the resources his work can provide for feminist thought. This volume engages the full scope of Heidegger's writings from_ Being and Time (...) _through his latest work, from his readings of the ancient Greek poets to his critique of modern technology. At the same time, it reflects a wide range of contemporary feminist concerns: the significance of gender difference; the role of the body in philosophical thought; the relationship between philosophy and the natural world, and between philosophy and the domestic realm; and the aspiration to move forward into a new, more just, political world. Included in this volume are important new essays by Ellen Armour, Carol Bigwood, Jack Caputo, Tina Chanter, Trish Glazebrook, Jennifer Gosetti, Luce Irigaray, Dorothy Leland, Mechthild Nagel, Gail Stenstad, and the editors—as well as a valuable historical and theoretical Introduction by Patricia Huntington, the first of Jacques Derrida's "Geschlecht" articles, and an important 1997 essay by Iris Marion Young. (shrink)

Over the last two decades the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben has attracted widespread attention both within philosophy and more broadly across the human sciences. Central to the thinking of Nancy and Agamben is a shared theory of community that offers a model of resistance to oppressive power through radical passivity. This article argues that this model inherits the inadequacies of Martin Heidegger’s attempts to conceptualize society and history. More specifically, Heidegger’s understanding of collective history in terms of (...) ‘destiny’ implicitly regulates the figure of community proposed by Nancy and Agamben. This alignment with the Heideggerian notion of destiny means that these later thinkers fail to offer a credible model of resistance in terms of concretely determined means of productive counter-practices. As a consequence the usefulness of the thinking of Nancy and Agamben as a conceptual framework for emancipatory politics is at best extremely limited. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical reflection on the experience of time from within exile. Its focus on temporality is unique, as most literature on exile focuses on the experience of space, as exile involves dislocation, and moods of nostalgia and utopia. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback proposes that in exile, time is experienced neither as longing back to the lost past nor as wanting a future to come but rather as a present without anchors or supports. She articulates this present as (...) a "gerundive" mode, in which the one who is in exile discovers herself simply being, exposed to the uncanny experience of having lost the past and not having a future. To explore this, she establishes a conversation among three authors whose work has exemplified this sense of gerundive time: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot, and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. The book does not aim to discuss how these authors understand the relation between time and exile, but presents a conversation with them in relation to this question that reflects new aspects in their work. Attempting to think and express this difficult sense of time from within exile, Time in Exile engages with the relation between thought and language, and between philosophy and literature. Departing from concrete existential questions, Sá Cavalcante Schuback reveals new philosophical and theoretical modes to understand what it means to be present in times of exile. (shrink)

In her last novella, The Hour of the Star, Lispector makes plain that the brilliance of life – any life whatever – lies in its capacity to endlessly contemplate itself and that as such it is inseparable from its mode of contemplation. As we will suggest in this article, Lispector’s view of life as living contemplation resonates with Giorgio Agamben’s conception of being as potentiality. In the last installment of his Homo Sacer series, The Use of Bodies, Agamben tries to (...) offer an alternative paradigm of life to that of Western biopolitics, whose power operates on its separation of bare life from forms of life. Central to this new ontology is Agamben’s notion of a life as inseparable from its mode or form, as he highlights using a hyphen: form-of-life. By form-of-life, Agamben means that one’s living is never reducible to the biological or economic facts of existence because it essentially concerns itself with its potentialities, its singular modes of being. Life that contemplates itself is a life which simply is without being reducible to its function. In The Hour of the Star, Lispector’s heroine, Macabéa is not simply a figure of bare life as some critics have suggested by reducing her life to her factual circumstances. She is rather a figure whose life is affected by its own sensation of existing – its unborn possibilities. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical reflection on the experience of time from within exile. Its focus on temporality is unique, as most literature on exile focuses on the experience of space, as exile involves dislocation, and moods of nostalgia and utopia. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback proposes that in exile, time is experienced neither as longing back to the lost past nor as wanting a future to come but rather as a present without anchors or supports. She articulates this present as (...) a "gerundive" mode, in which the one who is in exile discovers herself simply being, exposed to the uncanny experience of having lost the past and not having a future. To investigate this, the book establishes a conversation among three authors whose work has exemplified this sense of gerundive time: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot, and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. The book does not aim to discuss how these authors understand the relation between time and exile but enters in conversation with them in relation to this question. Attempting to think and express this difficult sense of time from within exile, the book engages with the relation between thought and language, and between philosophy and literature. Departing from concrete existential questions, it opens new philosophical and theoretical modes through which to understand what it means to be present in times of exile. (shrink)

Abstract This paper examines a convergence between Heidegger's reconceptualization of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and some recent work in feminist philosophy on relational autonomy. Both view the concept of autonomy to be misguided, given that our capacity to be self-directed is dependent upon our ability to enter into and sustain meaningful relationships. Both attempt to overturn the notion of a subject as an isolated, atomistic individual and to show that selfhood requires, and is based upon, one's relation to and dependence upon (...) others. The paper argues that Heidegger's notion of authentic Mitsein (being-with) rejects traditional notions of autonomy and subjectivity in favor of a relational model of selfhood. Ultimately, it provides a new point of entry into contemporary debates within feminist philosophy on Heidegger's thinking and defends Heidegger from certain feminist critiques. (shrink)

Resumo : este artigo analisa a apropriação que Agamben faz das concepções heideggerianas de facticidade e Ereignis. Esta apropriação é analisada dentro do escopo da obra Homo Sacer. O desenvolvimento destas duas seções busca responder a seguinte pergunta: como se explica a passagem da ontologia para dentro da filosofia política em Agamben? Para responder esta pergunta, na primeira seção, busca-se compreender uma ampliação possível dos problemas da dominação da técnica. Na segunda seção, estes problemas são submetidos a uma perspectiva biolítica (...) apresentada por Agamben. A resposta mostra que Agamben aproxima as concepções de Heidegger com o tema da indistinção entre poder constituinte e poder constituído, direcionando-se para uma releitura da relação potência e ato com o poder. (shrink)

Has biopolitics actually become thanatopolitics, a field of study obsessed with death? Is there something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it impossibile to deploy affirmatively? If this is true, what can life-minded thinkers put forward as the merits of biopolitical reflection? These questions drive Improper Life.Campbell argues that a "crypto-thanatopolitics" can be teased out of Heidegger's critique of technology and that some of the leading scholars of biopolitics---including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk---have been substansively (...) influenced by Heidegger's thought, particularly his reading of proper and improper writing. In fact, Campbell shows how all of these philosophers have pointed toward a tragic, thanatopolitical destination as somehow an inevitable result of technology. But in Improper Life he articulates a corrective biopolitics that can begin with rereadings of Foucault, Freud, and Gilles Deleuze. Throughout Improper Life, Campbell insists that biopolitics can become more positive and productively asserts an affirmation techne not thought through thanatos but rather through bios. (shrink)

This paper reports how according to Heidegger, Deleuze, and Agamben, both the notion of thinking and of philosophical activity, far from meaning the same, involve fundamental differences. However, our reading of the three authors also proposes to discover a common affiliation related to the contrast between “doxa” and “thinking”; Heidegger’s, Deleuze’s and Agamben’s are three ways by which we can understand the “birth” or “emergence” of thinking as an experience or activity that should not be understood as stemming from the (...) field of communication or re-presentation. All these considerations converge finally in the subtle quality of thought as liminal “pow-er” that, according to each author, must also be understood in its paradoxical quality of “impotence”, quality much closer to the experience of in-corporation as an event ; to the pre-supposed, non-discursive moment –and simultaneously con- stituent– of either philosophical, artistic, or scientific “creation” ; or to the pure enjoyment of power, as the experience of a type of “deprivation”, both positive and unlimited, as well as eluding any “function”. (shrink)

One of the key concepts in Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Paul is temporality. In this article, Delahaye examines this concept. Delahaye shows that Agamben’s understanding of messianic temporality hinges on the opposition between kairos and chronos, which Agamben takes for granted. He consequently traces this opposition back to Heidegger’s influence on Agamben. This leads Delahaye to conclude that messianic temporality can be understood as a variation on Heidegger’s idea of ecstatic temporality.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the main philosophical roots of Donna Haraway’s thinking, an issue she rarely discusses and which is frequently ignored in the literature, but which will allow us to not only better understand her thinking, but also locate it within the philosophical tradition. In particular, it suggests that Haraway’s thinking emanates from a Cartesian and Heideggerian heritage whereby it, implicitly, emanates from Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysical anthropocentrism to critique the divisions between human, (...) animal, and machine that Descartes insists upon in his Discourse on Method. While suggesting that Haraway is, implicitly, influenced by Heidegger’s critique of the binary logic constitutive of Descartes’ anthropocentrism, I first argue that her support for Jacques Derrida’s, Bruno Latour’s, and Giorgio Agamben’s critical readings of Heidegger lead her to jettison Heidegger’s suggestion that overcoming this logic requires a re-questioning of the meaning of being to, instead, develop an immersed, entwined ontology that aims to call into question the fundamental divisions underpinning Cartesian-inspired anthropocentrism, before, second, concluding by offering a Heideggerian critique of Haraway’s thinking. (shrink)

This article argues that Giorgio Agamben’s conceptions of kairos and messianic time are essentially to be understood in terms of experience. This becomes clear when we identify the methodological similarities between Agamben’s reading of Paulus in The Time That Remains and Heidegger’s lectures on Paulus from 1920-21: the doctrine of kairology is different from any eschatology, insofar as it involves an instantaneous modulation of our factical conditions, rather than a removal of them to come. In this way, I argue that (...) Agamben echoes Heidegger’s conception of formal indication and enactment-sense. But whereas Heidegger understood this modulation as an anticipatory resoluteness, in which Dasein identifies itself with its calling, Agamben emphasizes the very impossibility of such an identification. This is indeed a decisive difference between Agamben and Heidegger. I show, however, that Agamben phrases this difference in a language that recalls Heidegger’s thought, thus implicitly suggesting that the emancipatory potential of his philosophy is to be understood as the experiential enactment of an impotentiality that undermines any factical condition and any social identity. (shrink)

Modern technology and gender relations are deeply intertwined. There has yet to emerge, however, a feminist analysis of modern technology as a phenomenon and this has inhibited the development of a consistent feminist response and theory regarding infertility/reproductive technologies. After taking a look at the character of the ongoing debate surrounding reproductive/infertility technologies, this paper considers how the contributions of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger might add some further insight to the debate and aid in the effort to develop such (...) a feminist framework. (shrink)

Modern technology and gender relations are deeply intertwined. There has yet to emerge, however, a feminist analysis of modem technology as a phenomenon and this has inhibited the development of a consistent feminist response and theory regarding infertility/reproductive technologies. After taking a look at the character of the ongoing debate surrounding reproductive/infertility technologies, this paper considers how the contributions of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger might add some further insight to the debate and aid in the effort to develop such (...) a feminist framework. (shrink)

In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben introduces a particular conception of bearing witness to overcome the problems contained in an account of language that depends on the voice or the letter. From his earlier work, it is clear that his critique of the voice and the letter is not only directed to ancient and medieval metaphysics, but also concerns Heidegger's account of the voice and Derrida's account of the letter and writing. Yet, if Agamben is correct in claiming that bearing witness (...) offers an alternative to Heidegger's voice and Derrida's letter, it is remarkable – a fact unnoticed in the available literature – that Agamben does not discuss how these conceptions of the voice and the letter are intrinsically connected to the problem of testimony for Heidegger as well as Derrida. To show how this lack of attention to bearing witness in Heidegger and Derrida affects Agamben's critique, this article proceeds as follows. First, we interpret Agamben's critique of Heidegger's conception of the voice and Derrida.. (shrink)

At first glance, Clarice Lispector’s An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1969) might read like a regression from her earlier feminist and anti-Hegelian Passion According to G.H. (1964), given the female protagonist Lóri’s deference in large part to the male character Ulisses. I argue in this essay that any suspicion of such a philosophical letdown can be easily dispelled if we attend to Lóri’s attunement to affects and her immersion in them. As will be explicated in this essay, such (...) an affective investment signals, on the one hand, a return to Spinoza’s philosophy, thus suggesting a resistance toward the claim of a Hegelian philosophical system to surpass Spinoza; on the other hand, this investment, which exceeds the parameters of Spinoza’s philosophy as well, allows Lóri to put into practice an affective philosophy that is not only feminist but also nonanthropocentric. (shrink)

If there’s a riddle scholarship has not yet cracked, it is what Clarice Lispector—arguably Brazil’s most notorious writer—meant when she dedicated the entire Chinese nation to a single egg. Lispector’s infatuation with China, by way of the Daodejing, the I-Ching, and the work of philosophers such as Lin Yutang has also not yet been suff iciently explored. Following Lispector’s own evocative—rather than overly analytical—writing style, this article posits that her fascination with Chinese philosophy and mysticism is deeply rooted in a (...) distrust toward mundane and forward-looking notions of success, opting instead for embracing failure as a counterintuitive, “proregressive” politics of resistance—or, as Lin Yuntang would put it: “the Chinese are cynics and poets only when they have failed.” Drawing from the little-explored Chinese inf luences in her writings, this article sheds light on the Daoist roots of Clarice Lispector’s worldview and the role failure plays in her oeuvre. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben emerged in the twenty-first century as one of the most important theorists in the continental tradition. Until recently, 'continental' philosophy has been tied either to the German tradition of phenomenology or to French post-structuralist concerns with the conditions of language and textuality. Agamben draws upon and departs from both these lines of thought by directing his entire corpus to the problem of life political life, human life, animal life and the life of art. Influenced by the work of (...) Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and the broader tradition of critical Marxism, Agamben's work poses the profound question for our time just how exceptional are human beings. This beautifully written book provides a systematic, engaging overview of Agamben's writings on theology, aesthetics, political theory and sovereignty. Covering the full range of Agamben's work to date Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell explain Agamben's theology and philosophy by referring the concepts to some of today's most urgent political and ethical problems. They focus on the audacious way in which Agamben re-conceptualizes life itself. Assessing the significance of the concepts key to his work such as bio-politics, sovereignty, the ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’, they demonstrate his wide-ranging influence across the humanities. They also explore the critical reactions to Agamben's thinking and his reception in philosophical and theoretical circles. This book will be essential reading for students in anthropology, politics, philosophy and related disciplines and anyone interested in finding out more about one of the influential thinkers writing today. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to shed light on the political ambitions of Agamben’s book The Time That Remains. First, the article examines Agamben’s political messianism in The Time That Remains by taking into account the question of political theology. Second, the article elaborates on a number of important concepts and ideas that are at the forefront of Agamben’s political messianism. Third, the author elucidates the general framework within which one has to view Agamben’s political messianism. In the fourth (...) and last part of the article, the author assesses the innovative nature of Agamben’s political messianism by sketching out a comparison between The Time That Remains and Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of Paul the apostle. (shrink)

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben—whose work has influenced intellectuals in political theory, political philosophy, legal theory, literature, and art—stands among the foremost intellectual figures of the modern era. Engaging with a range of thinkers from Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger to Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, Agamben considers some of the most pressing issues in recent history and politics. His work explores the relationship between the sovereign state and the politically marginalized _Homo Sacer_—exiles, refugees, prisoners of war, and others whom the (...) state actively excludes from political participation and full humanity. Further, his critique of the increasing deployment of a “state of exception”—the declaration of a state of emergency that legitimizes the sovereign state’s suspension of law for the public good—as a dominant paradigm for governing has particular power in today’s global political climate. Infused with the spirit of Agamben’s critical self-reflection, this special issue of _SAQ_ examines his seminal works _Homo Sacer_, _The Open_, and _State of Exception_. Some contributors use Agamben’s work to examine the history of abortion law in the West, the history of slavery, and women’s rights. Others analyze the connections between Agamben’s work and that of his contemporaries, including Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Still other essays identify new points of interdisciplinary communication between some of Agamben’s most provocative ideas and popular twentieth-century writing. _Contributors_. Andrew Benjamin, Claire Colebrook, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Penelope Deutscher, Eleanor Kaufman, Adrian Mackenzie, Catherine Mills, Alison Ross, Lee Spinks, Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Krzysztof Ziarek. (shrink)

In Homo Sacer,1 Giorgio Agamben devotes a crucial “threshold” to an extremely compressed reading of Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,”2 a threshold that provides the transition between his elaboration of the logic of sovereignty and his analysis of the concept of homo sacer or “bare life.” That Benjamin's essay should play such a crucial role in Agamben's text is unsurprising. First, Benjamin is arguably the most important authority for Agamben's intellectual project as a whole, rivaled only by Aristotle and Heidegger. (...) More specifically, Agamben's investigations in the eponymous second part of Homo Sacer are prompted by Benjamin's suggestion that it.. (shrink)

The article argues that the contentious and complex concept of ‘authenticity’, which Agamben develops from Heidegger, forms a central continuity between Agamben’s earlier work, which focuses more on language and art, and his later work, which focuses more on politics. Moreover, I suggest that although this concept is often unquestioned and elided in his work, it plays a crucial role in the deep structures of his thought. Moreover, the ‘unthought concept’ of ‘authenticity’ is of concern because, while authenticity might possibly (...) have a role to play in the sphere of how we come to understand and relate to artworks, there are reasons to be suspicious of this concept in the political realm if, indeed, these two ‘realms’ can be understood separately. If these two spheres cannot be clearly separated, as seems more likely, then it is even more important to explore and question the terms and cluster of concepts around ‘authenticity’. (shrink)

Dana S. Belu combines Heidegger's phenomenology of technology with feminist phenomenology in order to make sense of the increased technicization of women's reproductive bodies during conception, pregnancy, and birth.

My dissertation traces key aspects of the conceptual influence of Heidegger's work on feminist poststructuralist theories. This archeology enables me to indicate that poststructualism cannot provide the foundation necessary to forming three normative ideals requisite to a viable feminist theory: personal autonomy, heterogeneous community, and solidarity. I argue that certain versions of poststructuralism repeat Heidegger's abstraction from an hermeneutics of suspicion and his totalizing rejection of modernity. Without a theory of willed ignorance, post-Lacanian feminism undercuts women's agency. And, without (...) tying a vision of Sittlichkeit to ideology critique, feminist ethics falls prey to abstraction and antinormativism. ;In Part I, I recover a dialectical theory of autonomy that can account for the deliberate ways that subjects mediate their environment. In Part II, I flesh out Heidegger's and Irigaray's respective visions of heterogeneous community. In Part III, however, I show how neither Heidegger nor US appropriations of Irigaray yield either a sufficiently complex moral theory or a theory of solidarity. After delineating Heidegger's antinormative tendencies, I reveal similar deficiencies in the works of Irigaray and Drucilla Cornell. I demonstrate that the nominalist underpinnings of post-Lacanian feminism threaten to normalize a fragmented view of pluralism rather than tackle the hard problem of developing interactive models of universalism and of solidarity. ;I conclude by developing features of a feminist methodology that can support solidarity and avoid antinormativism. These features include: a hermeneutic of the symbolic order complex enough to address the overlap between race, class and gender; grounding theory in ideology critique; a model of critical social consciousness rooted in the ability to disdain the immiseration of others and to acknowledge one's own interests; and an interactionist basis for moral theory. (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)

Draws from Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory to explore the concept of selfhood. This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including (...) immigrants, exiles, and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits. Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University and coeditor (with Linda Martín Alcoff) of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

What makes philosophy on the continent of Europe so different and exciting? And why does it have such a reputation for being 'difficult'? Continental philosophy was initiated amid the revolutionary ferment of the 18th century, philosophers such as Kant and Hegel confronting the extremism of the time with theories that challenged the very formation of individual and social consciousness. Covering the great philosophers of the modern and postmodern eras – from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze right to up Agamben and (...) Žižek – and philosophical movements from German idealism to deconstruction and feminism – Christopher Kul-Want and Piero brilliantly elucidate some of the most thrilling and powerful ideas ever to have been discussed. (shrink)

The essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore OOF: a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses--like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialism--that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials. This volume places OOF thought in a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of (...) feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being "in the right" by being "wrong." Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway, and an intriguing diverse array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; and truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an "object" in relation to others in this collection. Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinic, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL. (shrink)

ExcerptGiorgio Agamben's work would seem to be one of the contemporary philosophical projects that has been least hospitable to a feminist reading—least hospitable to posing questions about gender and sexual difference using its resources. But in recent years, a cluster of feminist responses to Agamben has emerged.1 Welcome as they are, they are as interesting for their ambiguity, their differences (thus perhaps their tacit disagreement) about the character, means, or route for a feminist reading, their caution, and often their awareness (...) of the difficulty and possible infelicity of the feminist response. There is much to be said for those feminist…. (shrink)