Download or read book Homo Sacer written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1998-04-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals.
Download or read book The Omnibus Homo Sacer written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 1333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Summary of Giorgio Agamben s Homo Sacer written by Everest Media, and published by Everest Media LLC. This book was released on 2022-05-25T22:59:00Z with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order. If the sovereign is the one who grants the power to proclaim a state of exception, then he stands outside the juridical order, but he belongs to it because it is up to him to decide if the constitution is to be suspended in its entirety. #2 The exception is what cannot be subsumed. It defies general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juridical for mal element: the decision in absolute purity. The exception appears in its absolute form when it is a question of creating a situation in which juridical rules can be valid. #3 The exception is an element of law that transcends positive law in the form of its suspension. What is excluded from the general rule is an individual case, but the most proper characteristic of the exception is that what is excluded in it is not absolutely without relation to the rule. #4 The structure of the juridico-political order is that of an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside it. The exception defines the structure of sovereignty by allowing what is outside to be included through an interdiction, and in this way, the system constitutes itself as an exterior to itself.
Download or read book Politics Metaphysics and Death written by Andrew Norris and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is having an increasingly significant impact on Anglo-American political theory. His most prominent intervention to date is the powerful reassessment of sovereignty and the politics of life and death laid out in his multivolume Homo Sacer project. Agamben argues that in both the modern world and the ancient, politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camps—in which some inmates are reduced to a form of living death—are not a political aberration but instead the place where this essential political decision about life most clearly reveals itself. Engaging specifically with Homo Sacer, the essays in this collection draw out and contend with the wide-ranging implications of Agamben’s radical and controversial interpretation of modern political life. The contributors analyze Agamben’s thought from the perspectives of political theory, philosophy, jurisprudence, and the history of law. They consider his work not only in relation to that of his major interlocutors—Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger—but also in relation to the thought of Plato, Pindar, Heraclitus, Descartes, Kafka, Bataille, and Derrida. The essayists’ approaches are varied, as are their ultimate evaluations of the cogency and accuracy of Agamben’s arguments. This volume also includes an original essay by Agamben in which he considers the relation of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to Schmitt’s Political Theology. Politics, Metaphysics, and Death is a necessary, multifaceted exposition and evaluation of the thought of one of today’s most important political theorists. Contributors: Giorgio Agamben, Andrew Benjamin, Peter Fitzpatrick, Anselm Haverkamp, Paul Hegarty, Andreas Kalyvas, Rainer Maria Kiesow , Catherine Mills, Andrew Norris, Adam Thurschwell, Erik Vogt, Thomas Carl Wall
Download or read book State of Exception written by Giorgio Agamben and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-07-18 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states. The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt. In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.
Download or read book Means Without End written by Giorgio Agamben and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2000-10-12 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential reevaluation of the proper role of politics in contemporary life. In this critical rethinking of the categories of politics within a new sociopolitical and historical context, the distinguished political philosopher Giorgio Agamben builds on his previous work to address the status and nature of politics itself. Bringing politics face-to-face with its own failures of consciousness and consequence, Agamben frames his analysis in terms of clear contemporary relevance. He proposes, in his characteristically allusive and intriguing way, a politics of gesture--a politics of means without end.Among the topics Agamben takes up are the "properly" political paradigms of experience, as well as those generally not viewed as political. He begins by elaborating work on biopower begun by Foucault, returning the natural life of humans to the center of the polis and considering it as the very basis for politics. He then considers subjects such as the state of exception (the temporary suspension of the juridical order); the concentration camp (a zone of indifference between public and private and, at the same time, the secret matrix of the political space in which we live); the refugee, who, breaking the bond between the human and the citizen, moves from marginal status to the center of the crisis of the modern nation-state; and the sphere of pure means or gestures (those gestures that, remaining nothing more than means, liberate themselves from any relation to ends) as the proper sphere of politics. Attentive to the urgent demands of the political moment, as well as to the bankruptcy of political discourse, Agamben's work brings politics back to life, and life back to politics.Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Language and Death (1991), Stanzas (1992), and The Coming Community (1993), all published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Download or read book Giorgio Agamben written by Thanos Zartaloudis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a thorough introduction to, and engagement with, the jurisprudential, political and philosophical thought of the influential Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Critically introducing Agamben's work to both a readership in legal theory, and in the humanities and social sciences more generally, Zartaloudis takes up the three main themes of Agamben's recent work: Power (in its relation to bio-politics, capitalism, social systems, control and political theory); Law (in its relation to philosophy, violence, rights, states of exception and sovereignty); and Humanity (in its relation to theories of ethics, the idea of the human, human rights discourse and the condition of refugees).
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 Giorgio Agamben written by Leland de la Durantaye and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-21 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher well known for his brilliance and erudition, as well as for the difficulty and diversity of his seventeen books. The interest which his Homo Sacer sparked in America is likely to continue to grow for a great many years to come. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction presents the complexity and continuity of Agamben's philosophy—and does so for two separate and distinct audiences. It attempts to provide readers possessing little or no familiarity with Agamben's writings with points of entry for exploring them. For those already well acquainted with Agamben's thought, it offers a critical analysis of the achievements that have marked it.
Download or read book Giorgio Agamben s Homo Sacer Series written by Colby Dickinson and published by EUP. This book was released on 2022-05-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Requiring no prior knowledge of the series, Colby Dickinson provides a guide to understanding why Agamben's Homer Sacer series is one of the most significant philosophical texts of the past century. He explores key concepts including sovereignty, potentiality, form-of-life, the state of exception, inoperativity, glory and the messianic as they appear and reappear throughout the series.
Download or read book STASIS written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giorgio Agamben investigates two founding moments in the formation of European power in its struggle with its most dangerous enemy: internecine civil strife.
Download or read book Creation and Anarchy written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Sovereignty and the Sacred written by Robert A. Yelle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating “states of exception”—that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it—Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism. Developing this close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.
Download or read book The Man Without Content written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He probes the meaning and historical consequences of the indefinite continuation of art in what Hegel called a "self-annulling" mode, in the process offering an imaginative reinterpretation of the history of aesthetics from Kant to Heidegger.
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 The Fire and the Tale written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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.