15 * Continental Philosophy

Abstract

This chapter focuses on books published in the field of Continental philosophy in 2009 and is divided in two sections: 1 . Oblique Biopolitics, Post-Fordist Happiness and the Dialectic of Inhumanism: Juxtaposing Hardt, Negri and Badiou. This section, written by Marios Constantinou, discusses Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth against the background of their earlier work, notably, Empire ; it traces critically the nodal points of this trajectory, marking in detail immanent shifts of emphasis but also contradictory displacements, precarious adjustments, delicate equivocations, political evasions and unexploited possibilities. It unpacks the core arguments of the Commonwealth framed by the transition from Negri’s early concept of the ‘constituent republic’ to the current notion of biopolitical governance that terminates any residual autonomy of politics, drawing into the discussion relevant aspects of the work of Antonio Gramsci, Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Paolo Virno and Jacques Rancière. This section concludes by examining Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds , which of course stands in its own right but may also be read as a critical supplement to Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth. It reconstructs, therefore, Badiou’s core arguments in Logics in terms of polemical anti-biopolitics and the Dialectic of Inhumanism. 2 . Giorgio Agamben–In the Meantime. This section is by Maria Margaroni, and focuses on current work by and on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The main threads that bring the books under review together are: philosophy as a vocation in the constellation of the contemporary; Agamben’s philosophy of language; friendship as the experience of a sharing without an object and Agamben’s coming community; faith in ‘the now of knowability’ and the inevitability of betrayal.