Giorgio Agamben Research Articles

Building: A Possibility for a Post-critical Perspective in Educational Research

Abstract The aim of this article is to give an example of how an exercise in post-critical educational research might be conceptualised. The example refers to an inquiry into building a public sphere around education in Poland. First, a post-critical approach in educational research is defined with reference to the two dominant perspectives of social research, namely the (neo)positivistic and the critical paradigm. Next, and following insights of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, the idea of building is presented in terms of the persistent introduction of a new beginning into a social reality through acting in line with an assumption (an axiom) that, from the point of view of critical knowledge about the current status quo, seems fictional (or impossible). Such a persistent verification of an impossible axiom aims at establishing a sphere of exception from the dominant social order, offering—through the ideas of Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben—a non-dialectical logic of social transformation. Finally, in conclusion the article focuses on the phenomenon of condensation as one of the key results of the exemplary research project analysed throughout the text. This points to the kind of knowledge that post-critical research projects are able to bring about.

Thinking from the Home: Emanuele Coccia on Domesticity and Happiness

Abstract This article traces the idea of domesticity through the work of Emanuele Coccia to explain his conception of happiness. Coccia argues that it is only by taking domestic concerns seriously that philosophy can begin to theorize the possibility of happiness today, claiming that rather than beginning with the polis, “philosophy must think the city from the home, and the home from the kitchen.” The article begins by situating Coccia's work in the tradition of Giorgio Agamben's critical project and then explores the idea of the home from his 2016’s The Life of Plants through 2020’s Metamorphoses to understand the reason for devoting an entire book to the topic in 2021’s Philosophy of the Home. The final sections of this article turn to Philosophy of the Home itself to explain his conception of happiness more concretely, focusing on his conceptions of love and interdependency, as well as the fundamental importance of nourishment and the kitchen.

To Impinge Poetically

Abstract Giorgio Agamben’s claim that the criterion of poetry is the possibility of enjambment helps identify characteristic and deep ways that Beckett’s poems ‘impinge poetically’, particularly the explicitly performative and self-reflective effects they achieve through enjambment-based vacillation between ends and continuities. Conversely, Beckett’s poems help amend Agamben’s overly strong interpretation of the enjambment criterion. It should imply no more than that poetry’s existence depends on the possibility of an absence of lasting accord between sound and sense, and we should acknowledge that enjambment is equally possible for a line if it is preceded by another line. Agamben’s poetry criterion also offers fresh ways to think about the relation between Beckett’s poetry and prose, with implications for his later writings.

“Abiding there Unliving”

Abstract Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer proposes that the public display of power over life and death that Foucault restricts to the 18th century were not displaced by the new disciplinary structures associated with the hospital and the asylum, but remained contemporary with them. This notion of the simultaneity of surveillance and spectacle can be helpful in thinking about Beckett’s novel The Unnamable. Agamben’s work can also demonstrate the centrality of the character of Worm. In this way the broader notion of biopolitics can usefully illuminate the historical and political contexts of the book.

From Face to Facies

Abstract This article considers Beckett’s faces in the light of Giorgio Agamben’s account of the face as a disputed biopolitical marker. Agamben refers to the face both in terms of social and juridical identity in ancient Rome and as an icon of contemporary biopolitics, as social identity gives way to biometric recognition. Beckett’s own face figures prominently in the series of machine-generated Eigenface portraits created by artist Trevor Paglen in 2017, and whose use of the Eigenface method invokes modern facial recognition technologies. The Eigenface is examined here in relation to a gallery of ghostly progenitors: the faces of Beckett’s late plays.

At the End, Writing

Abstract This article reads Beckett’s poems “Mort de A.D.” and “What is the Word” for how they voice and incorporate notions of formal and epistemic endings, or the lack of an ending. These two poems, written in different phases of Beckett’s career, are useful in mapping a shift in Beckett’s ‘problems’ with endings. Putting Beckett in conversation with the contemporary Italian philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Franco Berardi, specifically their analyses of “infancy” and “conjunctions” respectively, this article pays close attention to Beckett’s poetics of ending, or rather the impossibility of writing about the end.

Ontology of Necropolitical Governance

The world witnessed one of the most devastating ethnic group exoduses in Southeast Asia in August 2017, with the Rohingya at its core. Enduring generations of repression, rampant sexual assault, and organized devastation implemented by the government of Myanmar, many Rohingya people were forced to flee to adjacent Bangladesh to seek safety. Despite being an integral aspect of Myanmar’s past, the state denies the Rohingya people their rights to citizenship. This omission from citizenship perpetuates their exclusion from Myanmar’s body politic.Employing Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer, this paper uses Habiburahman’s memoir, First, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks, to examine how the state of Myanmar has been instrumental in orchestrating a systematic marginalization of the Rohingya. This process has reduced them to what Agamben terms as “bare life,” thereby ascribing them to a position of what Judith Butler terms as precarity. Utilizing Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, this article theorizes how the state abuses the precarious position of the Rohingya by creating “death worlds,” relegating them to the position of “the living dead,” ultimately culminating in the teleological inevitability of genocide.

Inoperativity and Destituent Power in Benjamin, Agamben and Spinoza

Abstract This paper examines the notion of destituent power in the work of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. In contrast to constituent power's emphasis on the formation of a people relying on the metaphysical presuppositions this entails, including representation and identity, destituent power does away with such categories and renders them inoperative. This paper explores this gesture, together with the idea of a modal ontology that substitutes the “what” in the questions “what is being” for “how”. It is argued here that this reconceptualization has the capacity to reorient the mode of politics functioning to take account of power’s anomie and false promises to ever delay the catastrophe that has already arrived.

IL CORPO VIVO DELLA LINGUA: ALCUNE CONSIDERAZIONI PRATICO-TEORICHE SULLE LINGUE «SPARGĂ» E «LEOPARDĂ» DI NINA CASSIAN E VIRGIL TEODORESCU

This contribution, starting from the studies of Giorgio Agamben, aims to highlight the peculiarity of two poetic languages invented by Nina Cassian and Virgil Teodorescu: the “spargă” language and the “leopardă” languages. The “spargă” and “leopardă” languages, developed during the surrealist period in Bucharest, embody the intrinsic dynamism of language. On the one hand, they reflect the multiplicity and original complexity of poetic language, where meanings are manifold and semantic closure is not definitive. On the other hand, these two fantastic languages highlight the pulsional heterogeneity underlying culture itself, suggesting that the truth of things does not directly coincide with what is explicitly said, but rather requires an act of translation and interpretation by the subject. Moreover, these two experimental idiolects can also be interpreted as poetic explorations that challenge the normative structures of the symbolic order, introducing elements of the semiotic that materially express the unconscious in art. The connection with Lacan’s “lalangue” is evident in their common focus on the pre-linguistic and affective dimensions of language, which transcend the limitations of ordinary communication.

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL MACHINE AND ITS REVERSAL

In this article, I shall outline a thought experiment aimed at reversing the relationship between bíos and zoē established by the anthropological machine. Giorgio Agamben resorts to the notion of “anthropological machine” to define the mechanism that produces the qualified life of human beings (bíos), through the inclusive exclusion of their biological life (zoē). My experiment does not render the exclusionary logic of the anthropological machine inoperative, but reverses the hierarchy it establishes between bíos and zoē. The result is what I shall call the machine of biologism, or simply the biological machine. If the anthropological machine establishes its perimeters of exclusion/inclusion on the grounds of bíos, the biological machine resorts to zoē. Thus, the biological machine does not operate according to the anthropological difference, which deems the human being as essentially not an animal, but according to what I shall define as the biological difference.

The creative act in the studio: A plea for rethinking potentiality in art education

This article outlines three dominant ways in which the concept of potentiality is discussed in art educational literature, and in particular the connections between actualizing potentialities and creation. It then pivots to the works of Giorgio Agamben in order to problematize some of the basic ontological assumptions embedded within the three dominant views of the potentiality–actuality–creativity relationship. Agamben focuses his analysis on the (im)potential remnant of potentiality that remains within any given actualization and highlights the role of such (im)potentiality in creative acts. To illustrate this role, the article offers four ways that (im)potentiality exhibits itself in various art forms before concluding with implications for imagining the artist’s studio as a space and time for (im)potential acts of creation.

Biopolitics in "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil", by George Saunders

In this article, I analyze George Saunders’s novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005) from the perspective of biopolitics, following the theoretical frameworks established by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Frédéric Lordon. I focus on two aspects of biopolitics: one linked to the extermination of the enemy, and the other to the manipulation of the passions of the governed. Regarding the first aspect, I discuss the strategies that Phil, the sovereign dictator in the story, uses to kill or displace the Other. In the second aspect, I study the use of desire and affect as biopolitical technologies that contribute to maintaining and reinforcing power. Finally, I examine the critical position of various characters in relation to Phil’s biopolitical regime and the political dimension of the novella itself.

Inoperative Education as Drift between Eastern and Western Philosophies

“Inoperative Education as Drift Between Eastern and Western Philosophies” expands upon recent notions of “inoperativity” in educational philosophy in the West through an encounter with the Taoist philosophy of Zhuangzi. Thus far, the concept of inoperativity has largely been inspired by Giorgio Agamben, the contemporary Italian critical theorist. Educational theory has taken up inoperativity in order to rethink the school as a space of free time, the student as a studier, and the gymnastic body, to name only a few. Through a comparative, philosophical analysis, inoperativity is rethought in a decisively Taoist register in order to generate three movements of inoperativity: drift as use, drift as use of uselessness, and drift as deactivation of learning (un-learning).

Climate change, planetary biographies, and symbiotic mobility

This paper critically discusses the biopoliticalisation of mobility biographies in the time of climate change with reference to Gi Chang Kim’s cli-fi trilogy. The dystopian work demonstrates how fiction can help us better imagine the lived experience of biopolitics (as theorised by Giorgio Agamben) at this critical juncture, as well as the possibility of an alternative future which resembles Timothy Morton’s notion of the ‘symbiotic real’. By focusing on the mobility biographies of selected characters within the text - those who live within the ‘dome’ and those who are forced to survive outside its walls - this article demonstrates how climate biopolitics aimed at sustainable survival will inevitably be at the expense of large sectors of the world’s population, while showing how everyone’s mobility will be impacted by a politics of adaptation, hence speaking to urgent debates on the topic of mobility justice as advanced by Mimi Sheller and others. Given the ultimately catastrophic consequences of such climate biopolitics, the trilogy’s alternative future prioritising ‘planetary biographies’ is equally crucial. In this way, the fictional biographies in Kim’s texts vividly demonstrate what is at stake in the real-world decisions currently being fought over by policymakers across the globe.

Elementos da Biopolítica Agambeniana na prática dos Direitos Humanos

We highlight in this article the difficulty of critical reflection on Agambenian thought with reference to what the author himself used as a paradigmatic object of exemplification, concretization and conclusion of his concepts that have been constructed for a long time and that had not yet been framed in an expressive practical expression. and contemporary in meaning. Thus, our objective here is to offer an element that integrates, from the perspective of Human Rights, the discussion about the relevance and mainly the materialization of Agabemnian thought. In this way, we carry out a bibliographical review of the works of Giogio Agamben, highlighting his main concepts and we seek to establish, in light of the arguments of José Augusto Lindgren Alves, in his article The opposite of human rights (explaining Zizek) (2002), the possibility of understanding the materialization of the internal contradiction of the Human Rights mechanism. In this way, it is justified by the need to demystify that Agamben's work is difficult to interpret and, mainly, that it does not allow for the practical significance of its own precepts and to demonstrate that, if such a scenario occurs, it is due to the so-called readings hasty and lazy people who seek at all costs this conceptual materialization in what is incompatible with these biopolitical concepts themselves. The result is the correspondence between the practical verifications of José Augusto Lindgren Alves and the theoretical framework of Giorgio Agamben, from the perspective of the opposite of the precepts of Human Rights, precisely in the name – and in the systematics, or in the system – of these same rights, mainly the level of International Human Rights Law, as well as perspectives at the domestic state level.

Opening a Virtual Space before the Door of the Law: The Transnational Togani Effect from Silenced to Angels Wear White

Through an examination of what the author calls the transnational Togani effect, which challenges legislative failures across both screens and borders, the author hopes to show how social justice films are deployed as a mode of critique that directly impacts the criminal justice system. The author's analysis of the transnational Togani effect therefore encompasses and connects the dimensions of virtuality and actuality in their interactive relation in the contemporary media environment. The author situates this interactive relationship between the virtual and the actual within a transnational framework because awareness of sexual assault is raised in cross-border contexts that are intertextual and interconnected. Drawing on the Deleuzian notion of the virtual and the actual and Giorgio Agamben's concept of inclusive exclusion, the author suggests that screen intervention is a virtual layer added to heterotopic space that serves as a possible resistance against the entrapment of human subjects by neoliberal governance, in which the law is “in force without significance.” As Deleuze shows, the virtual and the actual are fully real, and the relationship between them takes the form of a circuit. By exploring how the interlocking of virtuality and actuality comes to bear on the legal sphere, this article poses fundamental questions for cinema, or for audiovisual media in general, such as to what extent cinematic critique is capable of opening an alternative space for social justice.

The Telecommunications Act, 2023: Solidarity Between Democracy and Totalitarianism

ABSTRACT With the coming of a surveillance culture, even minute aspects of human life are being observed, collected, analyzed, and stored by institutions in charge of surveillance. On the other hand, the same does not apply to the institutions which are surveillant of the lives of individuals. Such phenomenon can be observed via various technologies of power prevalent in societies. One such technology of power is legislation passed by the State to access, control, analyze, disseminate, or store the personal information of citizens. This article analyses the Telecommunications Act, 2023 which has been hailed as a move towards decolonization by repealing the former colonial laws over telecom services. The article discusses various attributes of the 2023 Act to analyze the means through which the usage of biometric systems of identification leads to violation of the fundamental right to privacy, as envisaged by the apex court of India in the landmark judgment of Justice K S Puttaswamy (Retd) v Union of India and other judgments before and after. The article also argues how the works of Giorgio Agamben and Didier Bigo on a permanent state of emergency being materialized through surveillance of minute aspects of human life and consequently marks a shift towards totalitarian tendencies of governance.

ADVERSARY CULTURES: THE CASE OF “RELATIONAL AESTHETICS” AND PARTICIPATORY PRACTICES

By applying Bourdieu’s theory of capital on the relational art and participatory practices, the following essay aims to explore the issue of autonomy of arts as introduced by Theodor Adorno while determining the social mechanism under which these practices operate. The purpose of this particular research represents an attempt to achieve an understanding of the relations of power under which relational art practices operate by applying Bourdieu’s theory of capital while at the same time examining the idea of “autonomy of arts” as it was introduced by Theodor Adorno in the late 90’s. As the research is conducted by an artist, it will inevitably be influenced by the empirical as well as the theoretical references applied to the artistic field. However, it is clear that from a disciplinary angle, relational art is directly engaging with society hence it does not only imply terms related to aesthetics, history and theory of arts. The research borrows notions from human sciences such as political philosophy, sociology and anthropology. It is also important to note that one of the main objectives of this research represents a nuanced and sincere clarification of the position from which relational art operates as well as an analytical exercise of the practices as well as its mechanism of infiltration and interaction in the world. Given the neo liberal capitalist structure, can arts gain at least relative autonomy? As I find myself working in the field of socially engaged art, I find it very important as a practitioner to be able to step outside my own field and acquire the role of the observer while analysing as objectively as possible my own position. The research applies the qualitative method as it examines a particular case study while it imports concepts from different fields. The first part of the article indicates the potential of the relational arts in acquiring a relative autonomy, while the second part contests its intentions and set of positions in realising its promise by applying Bourdieu’s theory of capital. The scope of the research is far from comprehensive as several theories that intersect with the field, as well as projects, are not being analysed while a lot of Bourdieu’s writings are left outside. Still, the essay recognises the influence of authors like Claire Bishop, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Terry Smith, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard as well as other historians and art theoreticians.

“God Has Not Died, He Became Government”: Use-of-Oneself and Immanence in Giorgio Agamben’s Work

“God Has Not Died, He Became Government”: Use-of-Oneself and Immanence in Giorgio Agamben’s Work

“Uncle Sam,” India’s Popular Culture Icon: Sam Bahadur

Abstract Sam Bahadur, a new Indian biopic, captures the exceptionalism of Parsis in India, contextualizing it in the rise of exceptionalism in India. It contextualizes South Asian Indian exceptionalism in the context of American exceptionalism and the work of Giorgio Agamben, Donald Pease, George Fredrickson, and new Islamic and Muslim exceptionalisms.