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"Giorgio Agamben"
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A Farewell to Homo Sacer? Sovereign Power and Bare Life in Agamben’s Coronavirus Commentary
The article addresses Giorgio Agamben’s critical commentary on the global governance of the Covid-19 pandemic as a paradigm of his political thought. While Agamben’s comments have been criticized as exaggerated and conspiratorial, they arise from the conceptual constellation that he has developed starting from the first volume of his Homo Sacer series. At the centre of this constellation is the relation between the concepts of sovereign power and bare life, whose articulation in the figure of homo sacer Agamben traces from the Antiquity to the present. We shall demonstrate that any such articulation is impossible due to the belonging of these concepts to different planes, respectively empirical and transcendental, which Agamben brings together in a problematic fashion. His account of the sovereign state of exception collapses a plurality of empirical states of exception into a zone of indistinction between different exceptional states and the normal state and then elevates this very indistinction to the transcendental condition of intelligibility of politics as such. Conversely, the notion of bare life, originally posited as the transcendental condition of possibility of positive forms of life, is recast as an empirical figure, whose sole form is the absence of form. We conclude that this problematic articulation should be abandoned for a theory that rather highlights the non-relation between sovereign power and bare life, which conditions the possibility of resistance and transformation that remains obscure in Agamben’s thought.
Journal Article
Words Fail
There has been much philosophical speculation on the potential failure of language as well as the search for a presentation of the “thing itself\" beyond representation. Words Fail pursues the writings of a trio of philosophers—Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben—as prime examples of how modern poetry presents us with a profitable vantage point from which to survey the ongoing struggle of living in a highly fragmented world. Alongside these thinkers, this book looks specifically at the form of spirituality that is given shape by this intersection of poetics and theological-philosophical reflection—all of which offer rich suggestions about our spiritual nature.
eBook
Artaud’s Civil War: ‘Theatre and the Plague’ in the Time of Covid-19
This article examines Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theatre and the Plague’ in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic and through the Ancient Greek term stasis, which describes a civil war between domestic and public spaces. Once initiated, it was believed that this conflict would spread from household to household like a contagion; city states thus implemented draconian measures in the name of preventing stasis. Giorgio Agamben argues that such measures were embedded in subsequent theories of the state, fuelling ever more oppressive policies throughout history. Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ energizes a force comparable to this stasis, both in terms of its latency and its contagiousness, activating dormant conflicts in the individual that are expressed through networks of infection and create frontiers of shared resistance to institutional authority. ‘Theatre and the Plague’, read through the lens of stasis, can thus offer valuable contributions to current debates around biopolitics, particularly those seeking collective forms of agency during and beyond the current pandemic.
Journal Article
The State of Exception Between Schmitt and Agamben: On Topographies of Exceptionalism and the Constitutionality of COVID Quarantine Measures (with Examples from the Irish Context)
According to political philosopher Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), the emergency or State of Exception (Ausnahmezustand) is the ultimate test of political power and reveals in whom that power is vested. The State of Exception determines who is truly sovereign in a given state. Schmitt defines the sovereign act as a decision on the question of the exception, and further classifies sovereignty as a liminal term, a borderline concept (Grenzbegriff), suggesting a geometric metaphoricity underlying his conceptualization. On this theoretical basis, he develops the concept of decisionism, whereby the actual content or “what” of a decision is not the germane element, but rather the “who” of the decision and whether a given “who” (or decider) is the proper authority and possessor of the necessary sovereignty. This political philosophy is usually read in (and arguably tainted) by the immediate historical context in which it was conceived, namely 1930s Germany and the rise of National Socialism. Nevertheless, it has been reinvigorated recently as a paradigm used to explain government decisions taken under evolving COVID-19 pandemic conditions. The current use of Schmitt to understand the suspension of the normal order of things coincides with intense controversy about the work of one of his arch-critics—the surprising hero of the anti-lockdown anti-vaccination movement, Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben (1942 – ). The COVID State of Exception will be situated here between the competing philosophies of Schmitt and Agamben, with illustrative examples from, amongst other things, challenges to the Irish Constitution under pandemic conditions, in an attempt to reveal the rhetorical constructions of exceptionalism at work in political theory.
Journal Article
On Agamben, donatism, pelagianism, and the missing links
\"Peter Iver Kaufman shows that, although Giorgio Agamben represents Augustine as an admired pioneer of an alternative form of life, he also considers Augustine an obstacle keeping readers from discovering their potential. Kaufman develops a compelling, radical alternative to progressive politics by continuing the line of thought he introduced in On Agamben, Arendt, Christianity, and the Dark Arts of Civilization. Kaufman starts with a comparison of Agamben and Augustine's projects, both of which challenge reigning concepts of citizenship. He argues that Agamben, troubled by Augustine's opposition to Donatists and Pelagians, failed to forge links between his own redefinitions of authenticity and \"the coming community\" and the bishop's understandings of grace, community, and compassion. On Agamben, Donatism, Pelagianism, and the Missing Links sheds new light on Augustine's \"political theology,\" introducing ways it can be used as a resource for alternative polities while supplementing Agamben's scholarship and scholarship on Agamben\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
A Sacrament of Intellectual Self-Gratification
Abstract Agamben claimed that the experience of language, as it is manifested in the oath, precedes and gives rise to religion, law and politics, and therefore should be seen as a crucial element of the human process. It is my contention to argue here that a particular aspect of Agamben's own language suffers from substantial and conceptual flaws and self-assertive opinions on language and oath. They may put in question his own engagement with the textual evidence and philosophical literature, which makes his own text self-recommending and self-gratifying. In addition, he relied on obscure authors and obsolete interpretations and he failed to engage the relevant issues in the relevant literature that are crucial to his argument. More importantly, Agamben's argument on a certain impotence of language offers little suggestion, except calling upon philosophical obfuscation, to break down the state of exception in the current post-modern condition and avoid the technical apparatuses of the sacrament of power that led first to oath, and then to religion, law and politics.
Journal Article