Reading Of Agamben Research Articles

Inoperativity as a form of Refusal: On Bonnie Honig’s Reading of Agamben

The aim of this article is to follow Honig's intention of thinking inoperativity as a form of refusal. It demonstrates that Agamben's inoperativity entails an intensification of use that can circumvent the pitfalls associated with the language of 'demands,' or the need to rescue the city as the space of the political par excellence, all while preserving its potential for instituting change. I claim that all destitution entails instituting practices and forms of experimentation that modify the subject, and that, with the help of Agamben, subjects are nothing other than these modifications. The wager of this short intervention, therefore, is that a form of refusal that pays critical attention not only to the suspension but also to the intensification of use that this suspension inherently entails is attainable, all while acknowledging that the city is shaped by anti-blackness.

Reditus into Self-Inflicted Immaturity: Agamben’s Regressions

The article proposes an analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy in the context of the idea of self-inflicted immaturity. If Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as an exit out of the condition of immaturity marks the pinnacle of the human effort of maturation, Agamben’s philosophy locates itself on the opposite pole. This opposition is justified by the fact that the main task of the Italian philosopher is to develop the concept of a “simply human life”: undivided and unproblematic. In Agamben’s books the simply human life emerges in the realm beyond “the world of guilt and justice” as well as beyond God, spirit, and history, that is, beyond any overarching transcendental structure which the human subject used to assume in order to give its life a form and charge it with a task of bringing this form to perfection. It has neither form nor task, nor vocation, nor mission. It just is what it is, like an infant left to itself from the moment of its inception, counting for nothing in great eschatological schemes, and precisely because of that “naturally joyful.” In order to demonstrate the problematic nature of this approach to defining human life, the article offers an analysis of the basic concepts of Agamben’s philosophy in relation to the works of Johann Gottfried Herder, Otto Rank, Jean Laplanche and others. A reading of Agamben’s writings in the context of the psychoanalytic tradition of thought allows us to question the foundations of ethics and the politics of form-of-life, which the last volumes of the Homo Sacer series aim to clarify. As a result, it is possible to show that the underlying motif in Agamben’s work — the reversion of the trauma of birth, now taking the form of living as if this wish could indeed be realized, by putting into operation a “destituent potential,” virtually regressing the psyche to the prenatal bliss — despite its appeal is seen as problematic. Agamben’s philosophy paints an image of life that no livable or attributable life can sustain, yet he tempts us, by putting forward a seemingly possible messianic agent: a perverse de-natus, either un-born (most preferably) or already-dead/dying (as a second option).

On the right to accommodation for Canadians with disabilities: space, access, and identity during the COVID-19 pandemic


 
 
 In this article, I explore the societal reluctance to accommodate and include persons with illnesses/disabilities, which has rendered them “second-class” citizens. This reluctance exists despite several pieces of legislation whose goal is to create an inclusive and accepting social as well as physical environment across Canada. In October 2020, the Ontario government introduced a mask mandate as a non-medical procedure to limit the spread of COVID-19. I argue that this mandate has further reduced civil society’s willingness to accommodate those who are unable to wear a mask due to their disability or medical condition, especially when their illness or disability is not visibly discernible. By making use of the concept of “state of exception” developed by Giorgio Agamben, and the biopower/biopolitics paradigm introduced by Michel Foucault, I attempt to examine what the mask mandate means for persons with disabilities as well as for society at large. My investigation is an effort to uncover why we are finding ourselves in a situation of inaccessibility and exclusion at this moment in time, despite the widespread rhetoric of unity and support for each other throughout the pandemic. Through a reading of Agamben, I aim to uncover why persons with disabilities have been, once again, considered justifiable collateral damage on the altar of necessity (in this case, the necessity to fight COVID- 19 at all costs).
 
 

The Potentiality of Apperception

ABSTRACTIn this article, I present a reading of Kant's notion of apperception in the B-version of the Critique of Pure Reason that is inspired by Giorgio Agamben's reading of Aristotle in “On Potentiality.”My aim is to show that an important characteristic of Kant's understanding (Verstand)—the capacity to judge—can be found by considering it as a specific kind of potentiality, namely, as a potentiality that exists as a mere potentiality instead of as a possible actualization. I argue that this particular notion of potentiality can be found by investigating the notions of empirical and pure apperception and the analytic and synthetic unities of apperception.

Anarchy, Void, Signature: Agamben's Trinity Among Orthodoxy's Remains

This article explores Agamben's revisionist presentation of the anarchy of the Son and the void of power in the Trinity in his genealogy of economy and government in the West. It argues for a reading that sustains the actual self-depiction of orthodox theology on these points of doctrine in order to evaluate and critique orthodoxy's impact on politics in the West. Only after a thorough assessment of orthodoxy's doctrinal self-understanding can Agamben's reading of potential or suppressed meaning in orthodoxy be appreciated and possibly applied.

Form(s)-of-life: agamben's reading of Wittgenstein and the potential uses of a notion

Giorgio Agamben and Ludwig Wittgenstein seem to have very little in common: the former is concerned with traditional ontological issues while the latter was interested in logics and ordinary language, avoiding metaphysical issues as something we cannot speak about. However, both share a crucial notion for their philosophical projects: form of life. In this paper, I try to show that, despite their different approaches and goals, form of life is for both a crucial notion for thinking ethics and life in-common. Addressing human existence in its constitutive relation to language, this notion deconstructs traditional dichotomies like bios and zoé, the cultural and the biological, enabling both authors to think of a life which cannot be separated from its forms, recognizing the commonality of logos as the specific trait of human existence. Through an analogical reading between both theoretical frameworks, I suggest that the notion of form-of-life, elaborated by Wittgenstein to address human production of meaning, becomes the key notion in Agamben's affirmative thinking since it enables us to consider the common ontologically in its relation to Human potentialities and to foresee a new, common use of the world and ourselves.

Agamben's limbos: Robert Walser and the refugee

Giorgio Agamben's reading of the Swiss German writer Robert Walser constitutes an underappreciated corrective to his bleak assessment of the biopolitical catastrophe to which he believes modern sovereignty is headed. Walser, whose characters Agamben himself compares to cartoons for their thoughtlessness and impassibility, provides Agamben with the image of utopia that informs his critique of existing conditions and saves him from both resignation and reformism. Agamben calls this utopia, however, limbo. This limbo has necessarily to be distinguished from the limbo of internment camps in which Agamben sees anticipated the fate of modern politics. The stakes of Agamben's reading of Walser, its role in his political philosophy in general, its heavy-handedness in relation to Walser, and its debts to the earlier interpretations of Benjamin and Kafka are issues addressed in the following paper.

<i>Horkos</i> [oath] and the sacrament of language – The purloined letter

The article will bring a reading of Agamben’s interpretation of horkos [oath] in the Sacrament of language, a reading of Derrida’s faith as the grammar of language, into conversation with Lacan’s interpretation of Poe’s ‘The purloined letter’ by taking into consideration the context of this reading: South Africa. South Africa is a multilingual context in the fullest sense of the word ‘multilingual’, and as such, it is faced with the dilemma of a corrupt postal system. The postal system is a metaphor for the system of communication where messages are sent and received. This postal system is corrupt as the sender and receiver of messages are not sacramentally bound by the same oath, and therefore the letters are doomed to be purloined. Derrida’s différance and the grammar of faith transcends the various languages and the various oaths as the quasi-transcendental condition for the sacrament of language, thereby opening a sacred space to encounter the inevitable corruption of the postal service.

Horizontality and Impossibility in Kafka's Parabolic Quests

In his article Horizontality and Impossibility in Kafka's Parabolic Quests Frank W. Stevenson explores a horizontal-parabolic interpretation of several Kafka narratives. The key idea is that the meaning/truth of a parable is being thrown-beside-itself on the horizontal: thus it is impossible not only to vertically reach any higher meaning/truth but even to cross-over to a truth which has now been horizontally displaced. Noting that Derrida's and Agamben's reading of Before the Law — the narrator cannot enter into the Law because the latter prescribes nothing, is nothing but an opening — not only excludes any vertical-hierarchical dimension but even any horizontal entrance, Stevenson suggests that this impossibility of entering into the is represented indirectly by the figure of a geometric parabola whose two curving sides continually open out without ever reaching. Frank W. Stevenson, Horizontality and Impossibility in Kafka's Parabolic Quests page 2 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.5 (2012): Special issue New Work about the Journey and Its Portrayals. Ed. I-Chun Wang

Rationalization and concealment of violence in American responses to 9/11: Orientalism(s) in a state of exception

This paper aims to contribute to the growing efforts to articulate the governance of violence in the post-9/11 context through a close reading of Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s work. For Foucault, the pre-modern form of levying-on-violence lost its “legitimate” power, and violence became a hidden part of our society. Edward Said applied a Foucauldian framework in Orientalism to articulate its discursive episteme as well as the disciplining processes of the Oriental subjects. Yet postcolonial criticism has not moved forward from the polemics of Said’s alleged “misuse” of Foucault’s framework. This paper draws attention to the relevance of Foucault’s work on violence to Orientalism through a renewed reading of Agamben’s discussion on the state of exception. Agamben’s contention that western law contains certain interpretative/anomic elements poses a curious challenge to a Foucauldian analysis. This essay will pay particular attention to the intricacies of post-9/11 tactics of governing violence, while extending the conceptual coordinates of Foucault’s and Agamben’s work to a wider understanding of the hidden, often contradicting gap between modern discourses of “democracy”, violence and the multiplicities of Othering and Orientalism.

The Life Process And Forgettable Living: Arendt and Agamben

Hannah Arendt makes no secret of her repulsion from what she calls 'the life process'--the folding of individual into species goals that she believes becomes dominant with civil society. The life process for her can only divert the individual's energy toward a reproduction with which the individual may be at odds. (1) Arendt thus reverses Marx's thesis that 'the perfected political state is, by its nature, the [Gattungsleben] of man' when that life is finally able to be taken up for its own benefit by the heretofore alienated individual. (2) In Marx, it is civil society that constricts humanity by placing private interests at the centre of its world (pp34, 43) and so preventing humanity from appearing as it could be. Under these circumstances species-life subsists only in the abstract form of the universal citizen that matches no actual person; when individuals really become universal citizens, human species-life would be actualised. While Arendt seems to agree with Marx that present society prevents the alienated individual from 'absorb[ing] into himself the abstract citizen', (3) for Arendt, it does so precisely by co-opting individuals into a life process that is itself inherently expropriative. For Marx, the alienated individual and species-life are on one side; for Arendt, species-life colludes malignantly with society. On Arendt's account, the possibilities for living are exhausted by a defensive 'humanity'--a protected circle of civilisation in which one can temporarily craft an identity--and an aggressive life process, associated with expropriative labour, that perpetuates itself through society without regard for individuals. As most readings of The Human Condition have seen it, Arendt's repulsion at the life process stems from her denigration of the labour that she associates with it, and this position in turn generates her argument that (cultural) 'work' and (political) 'action' attempt to compensate for coerced labour. Arendt's perception that the life process is not separate from society, and is expropriative, is original and valuable. Caught up in the intensity of her insight, however, she never reflects upon elements of living that are neither species-reproductive nor culturally significant. Such elements are forgettable and incessantly forgotten; Arendt dismisses them as 'meaningless', and overlooks the freedom they offer from life process and civil society alike. The Human Condition thus explores Arendt's version of a dilemma discovered by Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud in different ways--the dilemma of the misdirected organism, burdened with a drive that makes its own existence difficult. The environment she describes there bears the scars of her encounter with such a drive: it is a stark existential landscape in which feelings of shame dominate. If we suspend Arendt's rejection of 'meaninglessness', however, we may notice that The Human Condition suffers from its inability to incorporate the forgettable register of experience: it is the absence of that register that leaves the alternatives sounding so bare. Far from being unique to Arendt, the landscape of The Human Condition is one of the characteristic settings of modern thought about bios and society. In the last part of this essay I'll read passages of texts by Agamben, Adorno, and Claudia Brodsky to indicate how the Arendtian construction of a meaninglessness that is nonhuman leaves tracks in contemporary thought, often continuing to limit it. While Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz and Homo Sacer struggle to defend against meaninglessness--a struggle plausibly inherited from Agamben's reading of Arendt--his Coming Community releases it, and suggests en route that forgettable living furnishes a better figure for freedom from the expropriative life process than Arendt's alternatives of work and action. The Coming Community, however, is the earlier work, and its promising notion of 'whatever being'--along with related strands of Agamben's thought--remains obscurely related to his elevation, elsewhere, of a subjectivity based in consciousness and shame. …

Giorgio Agamben: The signature of all things: on method, Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell (tr.)

Not unlike Foucault’s reflection on his own method in 1969’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, Agamben’s reflection is written almost like a confession. And, like all good confessions, each of the three essays in this work exhibits Agamben’s own practices all while constructing them. Exemplifying this notion of a ‘‘constructivediscovery,’’ the last essay in this collection (‘‘Philosophical Archaeology’’) clarifies, to a greater degree than ever, how Agamben understands research practice and how he believes the researcher is, can, and perhaps even ought to be oriented. Further, the first and second essays serve to retroactively reveal an orientation in Agamben’s entire corpus which, if read attentively, allow us to situate his archival research within and to differentiate it from contemporary trends in critical theory such as anti-humanism, deconstruction, and ecology. In the end, this book will serve to correct the popular reading of Agamben as a specialist of the ‘‘state of exception’’ and solidify his place as a thinker of utmost importance not only for a specialized field of research, not only for the humanities, but for philosophy and for thinking as such.

“Bare Life” and Politics in Agamben's Reading of Aristotle

AbstractGiorgio Agamben's critique of Western politics inHomo Sacerand three related books has been highly influential in the humanities and social sciences. The critical social theory set out in these works depends essentially on his reading of Aristotle'sPolitics. His diagnosis of what ails Western politics and his suggested remedy advert to a “biopolitical paradigm,” at the center of which stand a notion of “bare life” and a purported opposition betweenbiosandzoē. Agamben claims that this distinction is found in Aristotle's text, in ancient Greek, and in a tradition of political theory and political society stemming from fourth-century Athens to the present. However, a close reading of Aristotle refutes this assertion. There is no such distinction. I show that he bases this view on claims about Aristotle by Arendt and Foucault, which are also unfounded.

κλη̃σισ/Beruf: Luther, Weber, Agamben

This essay attempts a rather minimalistic reconstruction of different understandings of the notion of calling (klēsis, vocatio, Beruf) from Paul to Giorgio Agamben in an effort to better understand and more accurately gauge Agamben's reading of Paul's Letter to the Romans. At issue is in part the political and the eschatological dimensions of the Pauline usage of klēsis and of related political-theological concepts at work in Martin Luther, Max Weber, and Agamben. The essay should be read as a point of departure for two considerations that seem of particular interest: the (biopolitical) implications of the emergence of the modern notion of Beruf, and the relevance and possibility of a “secularized” or “postsecular” messianism.

Vulnerabilidade e vida nua: bioética e biopolítica na atualidade

The study had the objective of analyzing the notion of vulnerability that is used by bioethics to debate research involving human beings today, from reflections on biopolitics in contemporary culture. For this, the starting point was Giorgio Agamben's reading of Foucault's model of power (Sovereignty and Biopolitics), with the aim of subsequently analyzing the notion of bare life: "life without any value". If the devices of power in modern democracies conjoin biopolitical strategies with the emergence of the strength of sovereign power that transforms life into bare life, in fact bioethics must be an instrument for protecting people who have become vulnerable. Nevertheless, beyond the territory of the rule of law, bioethics must also penetrate the undifferentiated zones where sovereignty and techniques become mixed, disrespecting the frontiers of biopolitics and questioning the condition of vulnerability itself.

Prolegomenon to a Right to Disappear

As the title suggests, this article takes its motivation from Blanchot's phrase of “a right to disappear.” For Blanchot then, it was a question of a right of disappearing from biopolitics or the subjectivity of the human to a spatial regulation. That question cannot be more urgent for us today. This is so when one takes into account the technics of the global “War on Terror” as directed by the American political-economic-military complex. Through that, the world is seeing but the accelerated intensification and dissemination of military and civilian surveillance technologies. Everything in this world is gradually marked as an electronic signature, so that when any living being in this world at any moment turns imminently dangerous to the global peace and security, it will be located and destroyed swiftly. That is the irresistible twenty-first-century world-picture in which all lives are being regulated. We are made as if citizens of it. The figure of the citizen today, less than being a figure of the future of the human or of future freedom of the human, is more a figure of citizen-as-target. How does one begin to assert “a right to disappear” against this subjectivity then? This article argues, through a reading of Agamben's The Man Without Content, that such a potentiality – near impossible but nonetheless necessary – lies in life itself, when one re-cognizes living as poiesis.

Images malgré tout (review)

Book Review Georges Didi-Huberman. Images malgré tout. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2003. Pp. 235. 22.50 €. In 2001 in Paris, an exhibit displayed photographs of Nazi concentration and extermination camps ("Mémoire des camps," organized by Clément Chéroux). Among them were four snapshots secretly taken in August 1944 by members of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz's crematory V. The film survived its authors by being successfully conveyed outside the camp in a toothpaste tube. It eventually reached the Polish Resistance. Two pictures, taken from within the crematory, show the incineration of gassed bodies. The two next pictures are taken as the unidentified photographer walks out of the crematory and snaps two shots without looking. The art historian and leading Renaissance scholar Georges Didi-Huberman proposed a phenomenological reading of these four previously published photographs. This reading stirred up a violent outburst in Les Temps modernes, ajournai currently edited by Claude Lanzmann. Because the gruesome snapshots were taken despite SS prohibition of photographs and films, in a desperate effort to rescue a visual fragment of the event and to warn the world of Nazi barbarity, DidiHuberman entitled the catalogue of the exhibition Images malgré tout. The catalogue forms the first section of the book published two years after the exhibition. The second section of the book, entitled Malgré l'image toute, is a long and scrupulous response to the accusations launched in Les Temps modernes (56:613 [2001]: 47-108). Didi-Huberman's book explores the ontological, ethical, psychoanalytical and historical status of images in an era of visual bulimia and the destruction of experience, in the wake of Walter Benjamin's reflections on war, trauma and modern life. The author builds upon twenty years of thorough reflection on the visible informed by phenomenology and psychoanalysis and grounded in a superb mastery of ancient, Renaissance and modern aesthetics. This breathtaking inquiry concerning images, as well as the objections expressed by his opponents, help to raise timely and urgent issues. Are we making too much of images? Are we lured by our own voyeurism and iconophilia, numbed as we are by the democracy of the spectacle? Or, on the contrary , do images open the eyes of our conscience? In other words do images merely entertain and anesthetize us or do they shame us and awake our conscience? Such are some of the questions that Didi-Huberman's book addresses. The work ends on a dazzling re-reading of the myth of Medusa, which Primo Levi uses to refer to the horror of Auschwitz and which Giorgio Agamben reads, in Remnants of Auschwitz, as a trope of the impossibility of seeing. Didi-Huberman challenges Agamben's reading of Primo Levi's recourse to the myth of Medusa. By so doing, not only does he invite us to reconsider the question of testimony with respect to Auschwitz and to shatter the dogma of the "unimaginable" promoted in the wake of Lanzmann's film, he also redefines altogether our relation to the real and the visible. This book is probably the most original reflection on our relation to history and representation published in many years. Like all of Didi-Huberman's previous works, this one is informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient and modern aesthetics, phenomenology, psychoanalysis and literature. This knowledge extends from Pliny to Lacan via Vasari, Kant, Hegel. Winckelman , Warburg, Freud and Benjamin. Moreover, the author has a comprehensive awareness of the most recent work on Holocaust studies in Europe and the U.S. References to traditional historians and to postmodern Holocaust theorists abound (Serge Klarsfeld, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Annette Wieviorka, Raul Hillberg, Shoshana Felman, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard, etc.). More important, they are discussed in a way that is refreshingly critical, provocative and polemical. 110 Spring 2005 Book Review The stakes involved in this study pertain to a wide range of fields of inquiry: post-Holocaust ethics of art, post-Holocaust philosophy and theology, the experience of history in the age of mechanical reproduction and virtual reality, trauma studies, testimony theory. Finally, at a moment when post-Heideggerianism and what is called "French thought" seem to have exhausted themselves, Georges Didi-Huberman heralds with this book...