Agamben's Philosophical Lineage

Agamben's Philosophical Lineage PDF Author: Adam Kotsko
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474423663
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Istanbul's AemberlitaAY HamamA provides a case study for the cultural, social and economic functions of Turkish bathhouses over time

Agamben's Philosophical Lineage

Agamben's Philosophical Lineage PDF Author: Adam Kotsko
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474423663
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Istanbul's AemberlitaAY HamamA provides a case study for the cultural, social and economic functions of Turkish bathhouses over time

The Highest Poverty

The Highest Poverty PDF Author: Giorgio Agamben
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804786747
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
The acclaimed philosopher and author of Homo Sacer contemplates the possibility of true human freedom through a deep analysis of monastic stricture. What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule? It is to these questions that Giorgio Agamben’s new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The Highest Poverty meticulously reconstructs the lives of monks, with their obsessive attention to temporal articulation and to the Rule, to ascetic techniques and to liturgy. But Agamben’s thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which “life” is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the “highest poverty” and “use” challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today. How can we think a form-of-life, that is, a human life released from the grip of law, and a use of bodies and of the world that never becomes an appropriation? How can we think life as something not subject to ownership but only for common use?

The Political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben

The Political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben PDF Author: German Eduardo Primera
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350081353
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
With the publication of The Use of Bodies (2016), Agamben's multi-volume Homo Sacer project has come to an end, or to paraphrase Agamben, has been abandoned. We now have a new vantage point from which to reread Agamben's corpus; not only his method but his political and philosophical thought can been seen in a clearer light. This timely book both assesses and contributes to the debates on the Homo Sacer project in its entirety. Rethinking the notions of life and power – two of the central themes in Agamben's work – through a reconstruction of his philosophical method and an examination of his critique of Western metaphysics, this book argues that Agamben's thought cannot be fully grasped if we do not account for the intertwining of politics and ontology. This book argues that it is only by revisiting Agamben's critique of signification and metaphysics and examining his reconstruction of the archaeological method that we can understand his notions of life and power. By bringing together the two parts of the Homo Sacer project – the archaeology of the signature of Sovereignty and the archaeology of governmentality – this book provides an analysis of the production of Agambenian 'bare life'. In this sense this project re-articulates Agamben's works on signification, language and ontology with his archaeology of power. Offering an original examination of Agamben's notion of resistance, this is essential reading for any thoughtful consideration of his philosophical legacy.

Creation and Anarchy

Creation and Anarchy PDF Author: Giorgio Agamben
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503609278
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
The acclaimed Italian philosopher interrogates the concept of creation in art, religion, and economics in this collection of five essays. Creation and the giving of orders are closely entwined in Western culture, where God commands the world into existence and later issues the injunctions known as the Ten Commandments. The arche, or origin, is always also a command, and a beginning is always the first principle that governs and decrees. This is as true for theology, where God not only creates the world but governs and continues to govern through continuous creation, as it is for the philosophical and political tradition according to which beginning and creation, command and will, together form a strategic apparatus without which our society would fall apart. The five essays collected here aim to deactivate this apparatus through a patient archaeological inquiry into the concepts of work, creation, and command. Giorgio Agamben explores every nuance of the arche in search of an an-archic exit strategy. By the book’s final chapter, anarchy appears as the secret center of power, brought to light so as to make possible a philosophical thought that might overthrow both the principle and its command.

Agamben's Ethics of the Happy Life

Agamben's Ethics of the Happy Life PDF Author: Ype de Boer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350435252
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Ype de Boer invites you to rethink what you know about the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. In a compelling and original argument, De Boer contends that, in the work of Agamben, ethics takes primacy over politics. Presenting a careful evaluation of Agamben's overlooked contribution to ethics, this book explores his enigmatic yet central concept of the 'happy life'. By reading Agamben's philosophy in terms of a 'poetico-philosophical experiment' – a term coined by the Italian philosopher himself, and one through which he questions our very mode of existence – De Boer assesses the variety of ethical paradigms that Agamben's work offers. This not only challenges the widespread misconception of Agamben as the 'dark prophet' known for his pessimistic, even nihilistic political critiques, but reveals how understanding the various facets of the 'happy life' allows for a better appreciation of his attacks on the ethico-political condition. Agamben's Ethics and the Happy Life demonstrates that ultimately Agamben seeks to formulate an alternative notion of ethics, politics and ontology that will lead us out of nihilism. Tracing Agamben's positive moral philosophy through his key works, including the seminal Homo Sacer series, De Boer uncovers how, for Agamben, a happy life is one directed not by responsibility, guilt, action and duty, but by receptivity, love, use and potentiality.

The Fire and the Tale

The Fire and the Tale PDF Author: Giorgio Agamben
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 150360165X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
What is at stake in literature? Can we identify the fire that our stories have lost, but that they strive, at all costs, to rediscover? And what is the philosopher's stone that writers, with the passion of alchemists, struggle to forge in their word furnaces? For Giorgio Agamben, who suggests that the parable is the secret model of all narrative, every act of creation tenaciously resists creation, thereby giving each work its strength and grace. The ten essays brought together here cover works by figures ranging from Aristotle to Paul Klee and illustrate what urgently drives Agamben's current research. As is often the case with his writings, their especial focus is the mystery of literature, of reading and writing, and of language as a laboratory for conceiving an ethico-political perspective that places us beyond sovereign power.

Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art

Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art PDF Author: Frances Restuccia
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429537336
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
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.

Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation

Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation PDF Author: David Scott
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748695745
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
The first full introduction to Simondon's seminal work. A chapter-by-chapter commentary takes you through the text of Psychic and Collective Individuation, clarifying its complex terminology and structure.

What Is Philosophy?

What Is Philosophy? PDF Author: Giorgio Agamben
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503604055
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
In attempting to answer the question posed by this book's title, Giorgio Agamben does not address the idea of philosophy itself. Rather, he turns to the apparently most insignificant of its components: the phonemes, letters, syllables, and words that come together to make up the phrases and ideas of philosophical discourse. A summa, of sorts, of Agamben's thought, the book consists of five essays on five emblematic topics: the Voice, the Sayable, the Demand, the Proem, and the Muse. In keeping with the author's trademark methodology, each essay weaves together archaeological and theoretical investigations: to a patient reconstruction of how the concept of language was invented there corresponds an attempt to restore thought to its place within the voice; to an unusual interpretation of the Platonic Idea corresponds a lucid analysis of the relationship between philosophy and science, and of the crisis that both are undergoing today. In the end, there is no universal answer to what is an impossible or inexhaustible question, and philosophical writing—a problem Agamben has never ceased to grapple with—assumes the form of a prelude to a work that must remain unwritten.

Deleuze and the Diagram

Deleuze and the Diagram PDF Author: Jakub Zdebik
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441115609
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
An examination of Deleuze's notion of the diagram from philosophical and aesthetic perspectives that develops the concept into a critical touchstone for contemporary multidisciplinary art.