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 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 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 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 written by Louis Althusser and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a structuralist Marxist, Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in For Marx (1965), and Reading Capital (1968). These works, along with Lenin and Philosophy (1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship. This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science. Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a humanist and historicist. Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to Andr Daspre, and Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract. The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history.
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 Season of the Body written by Brenda Miller and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The body knows a language the mind never wholly masters." In this remarkable debut collectionessentially a memoir in essay formBrenda Miller creates an autobiography that locates her body as its central reference point. Single and unable to bear children of her own, Miller details a life in relationship to the extended human family, a journey that traverses realms physical, emotional, and spiritual. From her training in massage and reflexology, to her volunteer work in a hospitals infant ward, Miller remains a constant seeker and humble teacher. Raised in a suburban Jewish household in the sixties, Miller grows up to find herself sitting in meditation for hours at a time, both bemused and intrigued by Buddhist precepts. Or she engages in her own ironic brand of mindfulness while caring for two little girls or attending the birth of her godson. She brings us to Portugal, Syria, Israel, and the deserts of southern Utah, but these are no mere travelogues: they become, instead, maps by which to navigate the intricate maze of our lives. These personal essays vary from the lyric to the narrative to the humorous, but always we warm to Millers authentic voice as she explores personal joys and heartbreaks within a larger domain. Organically shaped, never forced, these award-winning essays arrive with the pleasant snap of physical detail and leave with unforgettable insights on birth, prayer, and human resilience. Nurturing, yet uncommonly honest, Season of the Body articulates the unspoken losses, the desires held deep in the mute chambers of the heart.
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 Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. 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 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 Geography Inside Out written by Richard Symanski and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking sharp aim at complacent geography scholars, this irreverent book turns the world of academic geography upside down. The author, a foremost figure in the field, joins forces with his alter ego, the incorrigible Korski, to draw fire from his own personal and professional experience. No one knows better than they the stuffy censorship and skewed logic: that inform the geography establishment and stifle the valiant geographer—and they tell all. With an unsparing eye, Geography Inside Out exposes a discipline soiled by cerebral litter and shamed by intellectual cowardice. Symanski shows no mercy for the pompous, the mediocre, or the hypocritical. And he reveals the devastating truth about a geographer blackballed for life for writing about prostitution and for his intellectual attack of a major figure within the discipline. A shrewd look at high-profile geographers, this book sheds light on how geographers write and think. It also helps explain why geography "has long been seen as the poor and neglected sister of the social sciences." Unprecedented in subject and scope, Geography Inside Out is certain to be as controversial as it is edifying.
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 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 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 Ways a World Might Be written by Robert Stalnaker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-07 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Stalnaker draws together in this volume the extent of his work in metaphysics. The central theme is the role of possible worlds in articulating our various metaphysical commitments. The essays presented reflect on the nature of metaphysics, with two of the essays featured being published for the first time.
Download or read book Pilate and Jesus written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-04 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed philosopher’s penetrating analysis of Pontius Pilate offers provocative and original insight into Western conceptions of judgment and guilt. Pontius Pilate is one of the most enigmatic figures in Christian theology. The only non-Christian to be named in the Nicene Creed, he is presented as a cruel colonial overseer in secular accounts, as a conflicted judge convinced of Jesus’s innocence in the Gospels, and as either a pious Christian or a virtual demon in later Christian writings. Starting with Pilate’s role in the trial of Jesus, Giorgio Agamben investigates the function of legal judgment in Western society and the ways that such judgment requires us to adjudicate the competing claims of the eternal and the historical. Coming just as Agamben is bringing his decades-long Homo Sacer project to an end, Pilate and Jesus sheds considerable light on what is at stake in that series as a whole. At the same time, it stands on its own, perhaps more than any of the author’s recent works. It thus serves as a perfect starting place for readers who are curious about Agamben’s ideas and approach to philosophy.
Download or read book The Transparency Society written by Byung-Chul Han and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-19 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world. Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust. The anxiety to accumulate ever more information does not necessarily produce more knowledge or faith. Technology creates the illusion of total containment and the constant monitoring of information, but what we lack is adequate interpretation of the information. In this manifesto, Byung-Chul Han denounces transparency as a false ideal, the strongest and most pernicious of our contemporary mythologies.
