Giorgio Agamben has emerged as one of the most perceptive and even prophetic political thinkers of his era. Now that he has completed his career-defining work - the multivolume Homo Sacer series - Adam Kotsko, one of his leading translators, shows how his political concerns emerged and evolved as Agamben responded to contemporary events and new intellectual influences while striving to remain true to his deepest intuitions. Kotsko reveals the trajectory of Agamben's work and shows us what it means to practice philosophy as a living, responsive discipline.
This volume develops the central (though neglected) Agambenian concept of nudity along with its crucial political implications. The book discovers within The Use of Bodies a philosophical path to Agamben's "ontology of nudity," as it is subtended by his notion of the messianic--a dual temporality of form in motion reflected in the image of a whirlpool that is autonomous although no drop of water belongs to it separately. Drawn from Paul and Benjamin (rather than Derrida), Agamben's messianic is elaborated in this study through its embodiment in literature--Woolf's To the Lighthouse, James's The Aspern Papers, Brodsky's Watermark, and Mann's Death in Venice--in response to Agamben's insistence on the wedding of poetry and philosophy. In particular, Coetzee's Disgrace gives poetic form to Agamben's focus on the dissolution of the human/animal border, the salvation of the unsavable, and "nudity"--all to illustrate Agamben's Open without a closedness. This text shows how art serves as the house of philosophy also by taking up the nude in visual art, making the case that, in comprising chronos and kairos (the two messianic components of Agamben's ontology of nudity), art demonstrates the constitution of form-of-life for the viewer. Emphasizing Agamben's privileged non-unveilability/nudity, this book finally examines two major missed encounters, with Heidegger and Lacan, philosophers of the veil. Veiling to Agamben correlates with the sovereignty/bare life structure of the exception, which his ontology of nudity is meant to deactivate--as there is no such thing as a bare life.
These 12 essays give you new perspectives on how Agamben's work is increasingly relevant to economy and political action: the two ideas that frame the most pressing problems of global politics. New analyses of Agamben's recent work on government and his relationship to the revolutionary tradition opening up new ways of thinking about politics and critical theory in the post-financial crisis world. Contributors: Daniel McLoughlin Giorgio Agamben Jason E. Smith Jessica Whyte Justin Clemens Mathew Abbott Miguel Vatter Nicholas Heron Sergei Prozorov Simone Bignall Steven DeCaroli
What if we've been wrong when reading Agamben? Mathew Abbott argues that Agamben's thought is misunderstood when read in terms of critical theory or traditional political philosophy. Instead, he shows that it engages with political ontology: studying the political stakes of the question of being. Abbot demonstrates the crucial influence of Martin Heidegger on Agamben's work, locating it in the post-Heideggerian tradition of the critique of metaphysics. As he clarifies it, Abbott links Agamben's philosophy with Wittgenstein's picture theory and Heidegger's concept of the world-picture, showing the importance of this for understanding - and potentially overcoming - the forms of alienation characteristic of the society of the spectacle.
The secular world may have thought it was done with theology, but theology was not done with it. Recent decades have seen a resurgence of religion on the social and political scene, which have driven thinkers across many disciplines to grapple with the Christian theological inheritance of the modern world. Adam Kotsko provides a unique guide to this fraught terrain. The title essay establishes a fresh and unexpected redefinition of theology and its complex and often polemical relationship with its sister discipline of philosophy. Subsequent essays build on this framework from three different perspectives. In the first part, Kotsko demonstrates the continued vibrancy of Christian theology as a creative and constructive pursuit outside the walls of the church, showing that theological concepts can underwrite a powerful critique of the modern world. The second approaches Christian theology from the perspective of a range of contemporary philosophers, showing how philosophical thought is drawn to theology even despite itself. The concluding section is devoted to the unexpected theological roots of the modern world-system, making a case that the interplay of state and economy and the structure of modern racial oppression both build on theological patterns of thought. Kotsko’s book ultimately shows that theology is not a scholarly game or an edifying spiritual discipline, but a world-shaping force of great power. Lives are at stake when we do theology—and if we don’t do it, someone else will.
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.
Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer is one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. A twenty-year undertaking, this project is a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope investigating the deepest foundations of every major Western institution and discourse. This single book brings together for the first time all nine volumes that make up this groundbreaking project. Each volume takes a seemingly obscure and outdated issue as its starting point—an enigmatic figure in Roman law, or medieval debates about God's management of creation, or theories about the origin of the oath—but is always guided by questions with urgent contemporary relevance. The Omnibus Homo Sacer includes: 1.Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life 2.1.State of Exception 2.2.Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm 2.3.The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath 2.4.The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Glory 2.5.Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty 3.Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive 4.1.The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life 4.2.The Use of Bodies
According to the terms of Aristotle's Politics, to be alive is to instantiate a form of rule. In the growth of plants, the perceptual capacities and movement of animals, and the impulse that motivates thinking, speaking, and deliberating Aristotle sees the working of a powerful generative force come to expression in an array of forms of life, and it is in these, if anywhere, that one could find the resources needed for a philosophic account of the nature of life as such. Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life explores this intertwining of power and life in Aristotle's thought, and argues that Aristotle locates the foundation of human political life in the capacity to share one's most vital activities with others. A comprehensive study of the relationality which shared life reveals tells us something essential about Aristotle's approach to human political phenomena; namely, that they arise as forms of intimacy whose political character can only be seen when viewed in the context of Aristotle's larger inquiries into animal life, where they emerge not as categorically distinct from animal sociality, but as intensifications of it. Tracing the human capacity to share life thus illuminates the interrelation between the zoological, ethical, and political lenses through which Aristotle pursues his investigation of the polis. In following this connection, this volume also examines — and critically evaluates — the reception of Aristotle's political thought in some of the most influential concepts of contemporary critical theory.
The book presents a powerful reminder of adults' responsibility for the development of long-term attention (and thus of maturity) in children, particularly in the face of the techniques of attention-destruction practiced by the programming industries.
