HOMMAGE A AGAMBEN
The One (Paradise)We come into
The world
Screaming,
And we leave
In Silence
(Though some
Leave screaming);
And in all
Images of Desire,
One desires
Only one thing:
One’s life
As Holy Word,
Returned to
That world
Where Imagination
Dwells in slow,
Deliberate thought,
And Thought is
That desire
For One Thing
(Paradise) ...
GK (09/23/07)
Pour Giorgio Agamben
The same (as above), Elsewhere (Erodiade) ...
GIORGIO AGAMBEN / SELECT DATAGiorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the Università IUAV di Venezia ... / Bibliography (European Graduate School) / Mixed Data (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Agamben's State of Emergency (12/10/02?) - "This text is an extract from a lecture given at the Centre Roland-Barthes (Université Paris VII, Denis-Diderot)" (Generation Online)
Regarding Paolo Bartoloni's comments on Agamben's Potentialities, cliquez ici ...
Life, or Something Like It: The Philosophical Chiaroscuro of Giorgio Agamben (BookForum, Summer 2004)Biography, "Giorgio Agamben is a unique international scholar whose blending of literary theory, continental philosophy, political thought, religious studies, literature and art has made him one of the most original and challenging thinkers of our time. Grounded in an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and moral philosophy, Professor Agamben's early thinking was influenced particularly by the work of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. Working at the Warburg Institute Library in 1974-75, Professor Agamben researched the conception of the imagination and the theory of melancholy in medieval culture, which resulted in an important work on medieval love poetry, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977). Continuing with his interest in Benjamin, Professor Agamben served as editor of the Italian edition of Benjamin's Complete Works from 1979 through 1994. In this period, Professor Agamben's investigations also focused on language, especially on the articulation between man as a living being and man as a speaking being (Infancy and History, 1978; Language and Death, 1982)." (NYU)
Regarding Agamben's The Man Without Content (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), reviewed in Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000), cliquez ici ...
SELECT TITLES/APPROPRIATIONS
‘Now’ Time (Jetztzeit): “Thus then also in the now time (a) remnant according to (the) election of grace has become; but if by grace, (and) no more from works, then -- grace no more becomes grace.” --St. Paul, “Letter to the Romans”, in Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 161
L'amico (Roma: Nottetempo Edizioni) - "L’amico, che è da sempre così intimamente legato alla filosofia da essere parte del suo stesso nome (filos è il nome greco di amico), è diventato invece oggi qualcosa come un partner scomodo e clandestino, che facciamo fatica a riconoscere e a pensare. Risalendo in un rapido scorcio fino ad Aristotele, Agamben ritrova il luogo dell’amicizia non nel rapporto fra due individui, ma nella sensazione stessa di esistere, come una con-divisione e un co-sentimento che segna con la sua dolcezza il vivere stesso. Con l’amico non condividiamo semplicemente qualcosa (un luogo, una legge, una tradizione) ma la vita stessa. Per questo l’amico è un 'altro io', per questo l’amicizia apre lo spazio di una comunità e di una politica che precedono ogni identità e ogni condivisione." (Nottetempo)
Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone, 2007) - "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 time. In ten essays, Agamben ponders a series of literary and philosophical problems: the relation among genius, ego, and theories of subjectivity; the problem of messianic time as explicated in both images and lived experience; parody as a literary paradigm; and the potential of magic to provide an ethical canon." (MIT Press) / Originally published in Italian as Profanazioni (Roma: Nottetempo Edizioni, 2005) - "'Profanare significa restituire all'uso comune ciò che è stato separato nella sfera del sacro'. Questa definizione è il filo d'Arianna che orienta il lettore nel suo viaggio attraverso le nove prose brevi, felicemente a metà fra la scrittura filosofica e la letteratura, in cui Agamben ha raccolto in una sorta di compendio ultimo i motivi piú urgenti e attuali del suo pensiero. Dalla teoria del soggetto, riformulata come rapporto fra Genio e Io ( Genius ) al problema del tempo messianico, esibito in figure ed esperienze concretissime ( Il giorno del giudizio , Gli aiutanti ); dalla parodia come modello della letteratura ( Parodia ) alla magia come canone dell'etica ( Magia e felicità ); dalla teoria del desiderio ( Desiderare ) a quella del gesto e dell'espressione ( L'essere speciale , L'autore come gesto , I sei minuti piú belli della storia del cinema ). Fino al testo piú lungo, che dà il titolo alla raccolta, in cui la profanazione appare come il vero e proprio compito politico del nostro tempo. E come la profanazione è un atto di resistenza a ogni separazione, cosí l'autore ha cercato in questo libro un nuovo stile del pensiero, una nuova chiarezza, che rifiuta la separazione fra filosofia e letteratura." (Nottetempo)
Verleugnung / Broken Metonymies: "What then is truth? A multiple of metaphors in motion, of metonymies, of anthropomorphisms, in short: a sum of human relations that have been poetically elevated, transposed, adorned, and that, after long use, seem firm, canonical, and binding to a given people … While every metaphor of the intuition is individual and without equal and, because of this, can escape every determination, the great edifice of concepts displays the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and breathes forth in its logic the severity and frigidity that are proper to mathematics. Whoever is impregnated with this frigidity will hardly believe that the concept, bony and octagonal like a die, and, like the die, immovable, is rather nothing more than the residue of a metaphor … Only though the forgetfulness of this primitive world of metaphors, only through the invincible belief that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short only because man forgets himself as a subject of artistic creation, can he live in a world of repose and security." Nietzsche, 'Fragments' from the unpublished/unfinished Das Philosophenbuch: Theoretische Studien [1872-1875], Werke, Vol. X, Ernst Holzer and August Horneffer (eds.) (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1907), in Agamben, "The Proper and the Improper", in Giorgio Agamben, "Oedipus and the Sphinx", Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 150-151 (Note 16)
Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) / "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." (U Minnesota Press)
State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) - "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, Heidegger, Deleuze, Benjamin, and Arendt." (U Chicago Press) - See Malcolm Bull, "States don’t really mind their citizens dying (provided they don’t all do it at once): they just don’t like anyone else to kill them", The London Review of Books, Vol. 26, No. 24 (December 16, 2004), pp. 3-6The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004) - "Giorgio Agamben argues that while the human has always been thought of as the mysterious conjunction of a natural living body and a supernatural, social, or divine element, we must instead learn to think of the human as what results from the practical and political separation of humanity and animality. In his examination, Agamben focuses on that caesura, on that empty interval between man and animal that is neither animal life nor human life. It is this state of 'bare life,' Agamben argues, that we must begin to think of if we are to stop the anthropological machine and make way for the philosophy and politics to come." (SUP)
The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) - "In The Time That Remains, Agamben seeks to separate the Pauline texts from the history of the Church that canonized them, thus revealing them to be 'the fundamental messianic texts of the West.' He argues that Paul’s letters are concerned not with the foundation of a new religion but rather with the 'messianic' abolition of Jewish law. Situating Paul’s texts in the context of early Jewish messianism, this book is part of a growing set of recent critiques devoted to the period when Judaism and Christianity were not yet fully distinct, placing Paul in the context of what has been called 'Judaeo-Christianity.' / Agamben’s philosophical exploration of the problem of messianism leads to the other major figure discussed in this book, Walter Benjamin. Advancing a claim without precedent in the vast literature on Benjamin, Agamben argues that Benjamin’s philosophy of history constitutes a repetition and appropriation of Paul’s concept of 'remaining time.' Through a close reading and comparison of Benjamin’s 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' and the Pauline Epistles, Agamben discerns a number of striking and unrecognized parallels between the two works." (SUP) / Regarding Walter Benjamin, cliquez ici (Samizdat) ...
OUTTAKES
NEO-MARXIST MAGICIAN SLICES BEAUTIFUL ASSISTANT IN TWO - "There are in fact two Agambens. The one holding onto an existential, fated and horrific background, who is forced into a continuous confrontation with the idea of death; the other seizing (adding pieces, manoeuvering and building) the biopolitical horizon through an immersion into philological labour and linguistic analysis: here, in the latter context, Agamben sometimes almost looks like a Warburg of critical ontology. The paradox is that these two Agamben[s] always live together and, when you least expect it, the first re-emerges to darken the second, and the gloomy shadow of death spreads over and against the will to live, against the surplus of desire. Or vice versa." Antonio Negri, trans. Arianna Bove, Il Manifesto (July 26, 2003)AGAMBEN'S TRILOGY / POLITICAL ONTOLOGY - 1 / Il linguaggio e la morte: un seminario sul luogo della negativité, 2a ed. (Torino: Einaudi, 1982) - Published in English as Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); 2/ La comunità che viene (Torino: Einaudi, 1990) - Published in English as The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); 3/ Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Torino: Einaudi, 1995) - Published in English as Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: CA, Stanford University Press, 1998)
SUPPLEMENTAL CRITICISM (C.2003) - Andrew Norris, "The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer", Radical Philosophy 119 (May-June 2003), pp. 6-16; Julie R. Klein, "Nature's Metabolism: On Eating in Derrida, Agamben, and Spinoza", Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 33 (2003), pp. 186-217; Cornelia Vismann, "The Love of Ruins", Perspectives on Science: Historical, Philosophical, Social, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 196-209; Steven D. DeCaroli, "Visibility and History: Giorgio Agamben and the Exemplary", Philosophy Today, Vol. 45 (2001), pp. 9-17; Alexander García Düttmann, "Never Before, Always Already: Notes on Agamben and the Category of Relation", Angelaki, Vol. 6, No. 3 (December 2001), pp. 3-6; Paul Colilli, The Idea of a Living Spirit: Poetic Logic as a Contemporary Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Reginald Lilly (ed.), The Ancients and the Moderns (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) - "Part Two develops a critique of modernity, especially in light of Martin Heidegger's thought. Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Taminiaux, Giorgio Agamben, and Rémi Brague find that Heidegger's thinking about the legacy of Greek and modern philosophy is compelling but that his understanding of philosophy and its history must be questioned." (Indiana University Press)
AGAMBEN/DERRIDA - "In this May 2004 interview, in which he discusses his latest book, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben explicitly aligns his project directly behind (or beyond) that of Foucault. He also makes little effort to conceal his affinity for Benjamin (and in particular -- though in passing -- for Benjamin's reading of N[ie]tzsche, although a sharp interviewer doesn't quite let him get away with it). Agamben is certainly one of the most exciting and important thinkers alive today. Whether or not one subscribes fully to his conception of a sovereignty as opposed to Homo Sacer, there are few thinkers more deserving of serious attention and rigorous debate. One wonders, still, just how long will Agamben be able to keep it up without having to reckon (more fully) with Derrida's seminal readings of Benjamin in "Force of Law" (Acts of Religion), and of Carl Schmitt in Politics of Friendship." Heir to Whom? (Pas au-delà, 01/2005)
Prix Européen de l’Essai "Charles Veillon" 2006 (Fondation Charles Veillon) ...
PDF - No to Bio-Political Tattooing, Le Monde (01/10/04) ...Images from Godard's Eloge de l'Amour ...
