Download or read book What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is an apparatus? was originally published in Italian in 2006 under the title: Che cos'è un dispositivo?; The friend was originally published in Italian in 2007 under the title: L'amico; and, What is the contemporary? was originally published in Italian in 2008 under the title: Che cos'è il contemporaneo

Download or read book What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three essays collected in this book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben's recent work through an investigation of Foucault's notion of the apparatus, a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on contemporariness, or the singular relation one may have to one's own time. "Apparatus" (dispositif in French) is at once a most ubiquitous and nebulous concept in Foucault's later thought. In a text bearing the same name ("What is a dispositif?") Deleuze managed to contribute its mystification, but Agamben's leading essay illuminates the notion: "I will call an apparatus," he writes, "literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings." Seen from this perspective, Agamben's work, like Foucault's, may be described as the identification and investigation of apparatuses, together with incessant attempts to find new ways to dismantle them. Though philosophy contains the notion of philos, or friend, in its very name, philosophers tend to be very skeptical about friendship. In his second essay, Agamben tries to dispel this skepticism by showing that at the heart of friendship and philosophy, but also at the core of politics, lies the same experience: the shared sensation of being. Guided by the question, "What does it mean to be contemporary?" Agamben begins the third essay with a reading of Nietzsche's philosophy and Mandelstam's poetry, proceeding from these to an exploration of such diverse fields as fashion, neurophysiology, messianism and astrophysics.

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 What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three essays collected in this book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben's recent work through an investigation of Foucault's notion of the apparatus, a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on contemporariness, or the singular relation one may have to one's own time. "Apparatus" (dispositif in French) is at once a most ubiquitous and nebulous concept in Foucault's later thought. In a text bearing the same name ("What is a dispositif?") Deleuze managed to contribute its mystification, but Agamben's leading essay illuminates the notion: "I will call an apparatus," he writes, "literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings." Seen from this perspective, Agamben's work, like Foucault's, may be described as the identification and investigation of apparatuses, together with incessant attempts to find new ways to dismantle them. Though philosophy contains the notion of philos, or friend, in its very name, philosophers tend to be very skeptical about friendship. In his second essay, Agamben tries to dispel this skepticism by showing that at the heart of friendship and philosophy, but also at the core of politics, lies the same experience: the shared sensation of being. Guided by the question, "What does it mean to be contemporary?" Agamben begins the third essay with a reading of Nietzsche's philosophy and Mandelstam's poetry, proceeding from these to an exploration of such diverse fields as fashion, neurophysiology, messianism and astrophysics.

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 Improper Life written by Timothy C. Campbell and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2011-10-28 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How biopolitics can get beyond its obsession with death

Download or read book Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays written by Louis Althusser and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis Althusser has tackled a wide variety of subjects, including philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics and political science. This book contains a selection of his writings.

Download or read book Anarchism and Other Essays written by Emma Goldman and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 77 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 The Kingdom and the Glory written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned philosopher expounds on the ideas he introduced in Homo Sacer with this analysis of the theological foundations of political power. In the early centuries of the Church, in order to reconcile monotheism with God’s threefold nature, the doctrine of Trinity was introduced in the guise of an economy of divine life. It was as if the Trinity amounted to nothing more than a problem of managing and governing the heavenly house and the world. In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben shows that this theological-economic paradigm unexpectedly lies at the origin of many of the most important categories of modern politics. Its influence ranges from the democratic theory of the division of powers to the strategic doctrine of collateral damage, and from the invisible hand of Smith’s liberalism to ideas of order and security. Agamben also demonstrates that modern power is not only government but also glory, and that the ceremonial, liturgical, and acclamatory aspects that we have regarded as vestiges of the past actually constitute the basis of Western power. Through a fascinating analysis of liturgical acclamations and ceremonial symbols of power—the throne, the crown, purple cloth, the Fasces, and more—Agamben develops an original genealogy that illuminates the startling function of consent and of the media in modern democracies.

Download or read book Nudities written by Giorgio Agamben and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his new collection of essays, Giorgio Agamben addresses the most urgent themes of his recent research.

Download or read book Narrative Apparatus Ideology written by Philip Rosen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential anthology presents the most significant and influential writings on film theory from the last twenty years. The book includes many seminal articles by film scholars such as Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, Stephen Heath, Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, and Noel Burch, and by the era's leading cultural thinkers as well: Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, to name a few.

Download or read book Negation Subjectivity and The History of Rhetoric written by Victor J. Vitanza and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vitanza introduces his book with the questions: "What Do I Want, Wanting to Write This ('our') Book? What Do I Want, Wanting You to Read This ('our') Book?" Thereafter, in a series of chapters and excursions and as schizographer of rhetorics (erotics), he interrogates three recent, influential historians of Sophists (Edward Schiappa, John Poulakos, and Susan Jarratt), and how these historians as well as others represent Sophists and, in particular, Isocrates and Gorgias under the sign of the negative. Vitanza concludes - rather rebegins in a sophistic-performative excursus - with a prelude to future (anterior) histories of rhetorics. Vitanza asks: "What will have been anti-Oedipalizedized (de-negated) hysteries of rhetorics? What will have they looked like, sounded, read like? Or to ask affirmatively, what, then, will have libidinalized-hysteries of rhetorics looked, sounded, read like?"

Download or read book Work of Giorgio Agamben written by Justin Clemens and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-21 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays, newly available in paperback, seeks to explore Agamben's work from philosophical and literary perspectives, thereby underpinning its place within larger debates in continental philosophy.

Download or read book The Power of Life written by David Kishik and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-11 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giorgio Agamben's work develops a new philosophy of life. On its horizon lies the conviction that our form of life can become the guiding and unifying power of the politics to come. Informed by this promise, The Power of Life weaves decisive moments and neglected aspects of Agamben's writings over the past four decades together with the thought of those who influenced him most (including Kafka, Heidegger, Benjamin, Arendt, Deleuze, and Foucault). In addition, the book positions his work in relation to key figures from the history of philosophy (such as Plato, Spinoza, Vico, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Derrida). This approach enables Kishik to offer a vision that ventures beyond Agamben's warning against the power over (bare) life in order to articulate the power of (our form of) life and thus to rethink the biopolitical situation. Following Agamben's prediction that the concept of life will stand at the center of the coming philosophy, Kishik points to some of the most promising directions that this philosophy can take.

Download or read book Word and Object new edition written by Willard Van Orman Quine and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-01-25 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of Quine's most important work. Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when." As Patricia Smith Churchland notes in her foreword to this new edition, with Word and Object Quine challenged the tradition of conceptual analysis as a way of advancing knowledge. The book signaled twentieth-century philosophy's turn away from metaphysics and what Churchland calls the "phony precision" of conceptual analysis. In the course of his discussion of meaning and the linguistic mechanisms of objective reference, Quine considers the indeterminacy of translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our language's referential apparatus, clarifies semantic problems connected with the imputation of existence, and marshals reasons for admitting or repudiating each of various categories of supposed objects. In addition to Churchland's foreword, this edition offers a new preface by Quine's student and colleague Dagfinn Follesdal that describes the never-realized plans for a second edition of Word and Object, in which Quine would offer a more unified treatment of the public nature of meaning, modalities, and propositional attitudes.

Download or read book Politics by Other Means written by David Bromwich and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberal education has been under siege in recent years. Far-right ideologues in journalism and government have pressed for a uniform curriculum that focuses on the achievements of Western culture. Partisans of the academic left, who hold our culture responsible for the evils of society, have attempted to redress imbalances by fostering multiculturalism in education. In this eloquent and passionate book a distinguished scholar criticizes these positions and calls for a return to the tradition of independent thinking that he contends has been betrayed by both right and left. Under the guise of educational reform, says David Bromwich, these groups are in fact engaging in politics by other means. Bromwich argues that rivals in the debate over education have one thing in common: they believe in the all-importance of culture. Each assumes that culture confers identity, decides the terms of every moral choice, and gives a meaning to life. Both sides therefore see education as a means to indoctrinate students in specific cultural and political dogmas. By contrast, Bromwich contends that genuine education is concerned less with culture than with critical thinking and independence of mind. This view of education is not a middle way among the political demands of the moment, says Bromwich. Its earlier advocates include Mill and Wollstonecraft, and its roots can be traced to such secular moralists as Burke and Hume. Bromwich attacks the anti-democratic and intolerant premises of both right and left--premises that often appear in the conservative guise of "preserving the tradition" on the one hand, or the radical guise of "opening up the tradition" on the other. He discusses the new academic "fundamentalists" and the politically correct speech codes they have devised to enforce a doctrine of intellectual conformity; educational policy as articulated by conservative apologists George Will and William Bennett; the narrow logic of institutional radicalism; the association between personal reflection and social morality; and the discipline of literary study, where the symptoms of cultural conflict have appeared most visibly. Written with the wisdom and conviction of a dedicated teacher, this book is a persuasive plea to recover a true liberal tradition in academia and government--through independent thinking, self-knowledge, and tolerance of other points of view.