Download or read book Agamben s Joyful Kafka written by Anke Snoek and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to articulate the impact of Kafka on Agamben's thought

Download or read book Agamben and Law written by Thanos Zartaloudis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 1024 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of articles brings together a selection of previously published work on Agamben?s thought in relation to law and gathered from within the legal field and theory in particular. The volume offers an exemplary range of varied readings, reflections and approaches which are of interest to readers, students and researchers of Agamben?s law-related work.

Download or read book Agamben s Philosophical Lineage written by Adam Kotsko and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Istanbul's AemberlitaAY HamamA provides a case study for the cultural, social and economic functions of Turkish bathhouses over time

Download or read book Profanations written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has always been an original reader of texts, understanding their many rich and multiple historical, aesthetic, and political meanings and effects. In Profanations, Agamben has assembled for the first time some of his most pivotal essays on photography, the novel, and film. A meditation on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains, Profanations proves yet again that Agamben is one of the most provocative writers of our times. In ten essays, Agamben rethinks approaches to a series of literary and philosophical problems: the relation between genius, ego, and theories of subjectivity; the problem of messianic time as explicated in both images and lived experience; parody as a literary paradigm; the potential of magic to provide an ethical canon. The range of topics and themes addressed here attest to the very creativity of Agamben’s singular mode of thought and his persistent pursuit to grasp the act of witnessing, sometimes futile, sometimes earth-shattering — the talking cricket in Pinocchio; “helpers” in Kafka’s novels; pictorial representations of the Last Judgment, of anonymous female faces, and of Orson Wells’s infamous object of obsession Rosebud. “In Praise of Profanity,” the central essay of this small but dense book, confronts the question of profanity as the crucial political task of the moment. An act of resistance to every form of separation, the concept of profanation — as both the “return to common usage” and “sacrifice” — reorients perceptions of how power, consumption, and use interweave to produce an urgent political modality and desire: to profane the unprofanable. In short, Agamben provides not only a new and potent theoretical model but also a writerly style that itself forges inescapable links between literature, politics, and philosophy.

Download or read book Figure of This World written by Mathew Abbott and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Profanations written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-10 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by a provocative Italian philosopher on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains.

Download or read book The Coming Community written by Giorgio Agamben and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 (Italy). He is the author of "Language and Death" (Minnesota, 1991) and "Stanzas" (Minnesota, 1992). This book is intended for those in the fields of cultural theory, literary theory, philosophy.

Download or read book Bare life and metamorphic being Nazi propaganda Agamben Coetzee and Kafka written by Johanna Theresa Semler and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation discusses different forms of life, bare life and metamorphic being, and their relationship to identity and sovereignty. Taking Giorgio Agamben's concept of bare life and his discussion of happy life as a starting point, I argue that the potential inherent in the notion for changing out of the condition of bare life must be conceptualized as metamorphic being. Metamorphic being articulates the move from bare life to happy life and bridges the gap between the two notions that Agamben's work has left open. But at the same time, metamorphic being also offers a more extended way of conceiving what Agamben calls happy life. I argue that the move from bare life to happy life, what I call "metamorphic being," is in itself post-sovereign happiness that escapes sovereign politics and reconfigures individual agency as a strange passive-active practice of bodily presence that is entirely sufficient. Metamorphic being is a paradoxical experience of both a state of being and a transformative process that arises out of that state. Taking its cue from both literary metamorphosis, where two opposite poles of a metaphor are molded into one sign and biological metamorphosis, where it signifies a transformation from one species into another, metamorphic being challenges unitary concepts of species and individual identity. I examine texts that traverse the realms through which humanity has distinguished itself from other species–politics, rational thought and language–and in which metamorphic being becomes manifest, even though the term itself does not appear in them. On the face of it these texts are about bare life, but upon closer examination they demonstrate how bare life complicates biological life and changes into a state of continuous transformation: metamorphic being. First, I show how Nazi ideology's ideal of a perfect human form has concomitantly produced the fear of beings that threaten to dissolve this form by formlessness. Nazism externalized this fear and produced 'the Jew' as metamorph. Second, I explicate the connection in Giorgio Agamben's work between his notions of bare life and happy life, being-in-potentiality and profanation. I argue that my term of metamorphic being begins to conceptualize that link by offering a way to avoid the logic of inclusive exclusion, on which both sovereignty and bare life are predicated. Metamorphic being emerges as a practice of being-in-potentiality that reconceptualizes bare life into metamorphic being and represents happy life. Third, I further elaborate metamorphic being as the agency of bodily presence through Coetzee's novels Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man. Metamorphic being in those novels appears as a sort of passive-active 'choice' for a solitary yet sufficient way of being. This 'choice' does not resemble intentional action, however, but simply happens. It is a 'choice' for just being there, being alive. Finally, I argue that Kafka's story The Metamorphosis represents not just metamorphic being as literary metamorphosis but that it relies on biological metamorphosis as well. The embodiment of metamorphic being, which humans share with all other beings, is bound up in natural cycles of growth and decay, embedded in political, philosophical or literary designs. Kafka's story represents two versions of metamorphic being: Gregor's transformation into a bug and Grete's metamorphosis into a mature woman through Gregor's decay and death. Metamorphic being emerges as a practice that brings into focus what all living beings have in common: life in all its constantly mutating forms.

Download or read book A Companion to Literary Theory written by David H. Richter and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-02-16 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces readers to the modes of literary and cultural study of the previous half century A Companion to Literary Theory is a collection of 36 original essays, all by noted scholars in their field, designed to introduce the modes and ideas of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Arranged by topic rather than chronology, in order to highlight the relationships between earlier and most recent theoretical developments, the book groups its chapters into seven convenient sections: I. Literary Form: Narrative and Poetry; II. The Task of Reading; III. Literary Locations and Cultural Studies; IV. The Politics of Literature; V. Identities; VI. Bodies and Their Minds; and VII. Scientific Inflections. Allotting proper space to all areas of theory most relevant today, this comprehensive volume features three dozen masterfully written chapters covering such subjects as: Anglo-American New Criticism; Chicago Formalism; Russian Formalism; Derrida and Deconstruction; Empathy/Affect Studies; Foucault and Poststructuralism; Marx and Marxist Literary Theory; Postcolonial Studies; Ethnic Studies; Gender Theory; Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism; Cognitive Literary Theory; Evolutionary Literary Theory; Cybernetics and Posthumanism; and much more. Features 36 essays by noted scholars in the field Fills a growing need for companion books that can guide readers through the thicket of ideas, systems, and terminologies Presents important contemporary literary theory while examining those of the past The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Literary Theory will be welcomed by college and university students seeking an accessible and authoritative guide to the complex and often intimidating modes of literary and cultural study of the previous half century.

Download or read book The End of the Poem written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking--nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante. The author presents "literature" as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the Commedia Virgil is Dante's guide. The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise. Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).

Download or read book Kafka s Zoopoetics written by Naama Harel and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-05-04 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonhuman figures are ubiquitous in the work of Franz Kafka, from his early stories down to his very last one. Despite their prominence throughout his oeuvre, Kafka’s animal representations have been considered first and foremost as mere allegories of intrahuman matters. In recent years, the allegorization of Kafka’s animals has been poetically dismissed by Kafka’s commentators and politically rejected by posthumanist scholars. Such critique, however, has yet to inspire either an overarching or an interdiscursive account. This book aims to fill this lacuna. Positing animal stories as a distinct and significant corpus within Kafka’s entire poetics, and closely examining them in dialogue with both literary and posthumanist analysis, Kafka’s Zoopoetics critically revisits animality, interspecies relations, and the very human-animal contradistinction in the writings of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s animals typically stand at the threshold between humanity and animality, fusing together human and nonhuman features. Among his liminal creatures we find a human transformed into vermin (in “The Metamorphosis”), an ape turned into a human being (in “A Report to an Academy”), talking jackals (in “Jackals and Arabs”), a philosophical dog (in “Researches of a Dog”), a contemplative mole-like creature (in “The Burrow”), and indiscernible beings (in “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People”). Depicting species boundaries as mutable and obscure, Kafka creates a fluid human-animal space, which can be described as “humanimal.” The constitution of a humanimal space radically undermines the stark barrier between human and other animals, dictated by the anthropocentric paradigm. Through denying animalistic elements in humans, and disavowing the agency of nonhuman animals, excluding them from social life, and neutralizing compassion for them, this barrier has been designed to regularize both humanity and animality. The contextualization of Kafka's animals within posthumanist theory engenders a post-anthropocentric arena, which is simultaneously both imagined and very real.

Download or read book Philosophy and Kafka written by Brendan Moran and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-04-19 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy and Kafka is a collection of original essays interrogating the relationship of literature and philosophy. The essays either discuss specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka’s work, consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, or examine Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom.

Download or read book Infancy and History written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Verso. This book was released on 1993 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and why did experience and knowledge become separated? Is it possible to talk of an infancy of experience, a “dumb” experience? For Walter Benjamin, the “poverty of experience” was a characteristic of modernity, originating in the catastrophe of the First World War. For Giorgio Agamben, the Italian editor of Benjamin’s complete works, the destruction of experience no longer needs catastrophes: daily life in any modern city will suffice. Agamben’s profound and radical exploration of language, infancy, and everyday life traces concepts of experience through Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Benveniste. In doing so he elaborates a theory of infancy that throws new light on a number of major themes in contemporary thought: the anthropological opposition between nature and culture; the linguistic opposition between speech and language; the birth of the subject and the appearance of the unconscious. Agamben goes on to consider time and history; the Marxist notion of base and superstructure (via a careful reading of the famous Adorno–Benjamin correspondence on Baudelaire’s Paris); and the difference between rituals and games. Beautifully written, erudite and provocative, these essays will be of great interest to students of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology and politics.

Download or read book Potentialities written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. The essays consider several figures in the history of philosophy; the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics.

Download or read book Freedom from the Free Will written by Dimitris Vardoulakis and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of Kafka's narratives place their heroes in situations of confinement. Gregor Samsa is locked in his room in the Metamorphosis, and the land surveyor in The Castle is stuck in the village unable either to leave or to gain access to the castle. Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that Kafka constructs these plots of confinement in order to laugh at his heroes' futile attempts to express their will. In this way, Kafka emerges as a critic of the free will and as a proponent of a different kind of freedom: one focused within the confines of one's experience and mediated by one's circumstances. Vardoulakis contends that his sense of humor is the key to understanding Kafka as a political thinker. Laughter, in this account, is the tool used to deconstruct power. By placing Kafka in dialogue with philosophy and political theory, Vardoulakis shows that Kafka can give us invaluable insights into how to be free—and how to laugh.

Download or read book There Is No Unhappy Revolution written by Marcello Tarì and published by . This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a time of ongoing political, economic, and climate crisis, can we afford our collective unhappiness any longer? There is No Unhappy Revolution gives expression to the age of revolution unfolding before us. With equal parts sophistication and raw urgency, Marcello Tarì identifies the original moments as well as the powerful disruptive and creative content haunting our times like a specter. One hundred years after the October Revolution, amidst our current civilizational crisis, is it still possible to think and build communism? Yes, Tarì responds, provided we radically rethink the tradition of revolutionary movements that have followed one century to another. Offering both a militant philosophy and a philosophy of militancy, he deftly confronts the different contemporary movements from the Argentinean insurrection of 2001 to Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, the French movement against the labor law, and the Arab spring, resurrecting and renewing a lineage of revolutionary thought, from Walter Benjamin to Giorgio Agamben, that promises to make life livable.

Download or read book Franz Kafka in Context written by Carolin Duttlinger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accessible essays place Kafka in historical, political and cultural context, providing new and often unexpected perspectives on his works.