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What Is Real?

Author: Giorgio Agamben

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2018-11-13

Total Pages: 62

ISBN-13: 1503607372

Eighty years ago, Ettore Majorana, a brilliant student of Enrico Fermi, disappeared under mysterious circumstances while going by ship from Palermo to Naples. How is it possible that the most talented physicist of his generation vanished without leaving a trace? It has long been speculated that Majorana decided to abandon physics, disappearing because he had precociously realized that nuclear fission would inevitably lead to the atomic bomb. This book advances a different hypothesis. Through a careful analysis of Majorana's article "The Value of Statistical Laws in Physics and Social Sciences," which shows how in quantum physics reality is dissolved into probability, and in dialogue with Simone Weil's considerations on the topic, Giorgio Agamben suggests that, by disappearing into thin air, Majorana turned his very person into an exemplary cipher of the status of the real in our probabilistic universe. In so doing, the physicist posed a question to science that is still awaiting an answer: What is Real?

State of Exception

Author: Giorgio Agamben

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-07-18

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 0226009262

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Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states. 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, Benjamin, and Arendt. In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.

Profanations

Author: Giorgio Agamben

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-10-20

Total Pages: 71

ISBN-13: 1942130562

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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 times. In ten essays, Agamben rethinks approaches to a series of literary and philosophical problems: the relation between genius, ego, and theories of subjectivity; the problem of messianic time as explicated in both images and lived experience; parody as a literary paradigm; the potential of magic to provide an ethical canon. The range of topics and themes addressed here attest to the very creativity of Agamben’s singular mode of thought and his persistent pursuit to grasp the act of witnessing, sometimes futile, sometimes earth-shattering — the talking cricket in Pinocchio; “helpers” in Kafka’s novels; pictorial representations of the Last Judgment, of anonymous female faces, and of Orson Wells’s infamous object of obsession Rosebud. “In Praise of Profanity,” the central essay of this small but dense book, confronts the question of profanity as the crucial political task of the moment. An act of resistance to every form of separation, the concept of profanation — as both the “return to common usage” and “sacrifice” — reorients perceptions of how power, consumption, and use interweave to produce an urgent political modality and desire: to profane the unprofanable. In short, Agamben provides not only a new and potent theoretical model but also a writerly style that itself forges inescapable links between literature, politics, and philosophy.

Homo Sacer

Author: Giorgio Agamben

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1998-04-01

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780804732178

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The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals.

Where Are We Now?

Author: Giorgio Agamben

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-04-30

Total Pages: 105

ISBN-13: 1538157616

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Renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben presents his fierce, passionate, and deeply personal commentaries regarding the 2020 health emergency as it played out in Italy and across the world. Alongside and beyond accusations, these texts reflect upon the great transformation affecting Western democracies. In the name of biosecurity and health, the model of bourgeois democracy—together with its rights, institutions, and constitutions—is surrendering everywhere to a new despotism where citizens accept unprecedented limitations to their freedoms. The push to accept this new normal leads to the urgency of the volume’s title: Where Are We Now? For how long will we accept living in a constantly extended state of exception, the end of which remains impossible to see?

Potentialities

Author: Giorgio Agamben

Publisher: Stanford Univ Press + ORM

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 0804764077

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This book collects fifteen major philosophical essays spanning more than twenty years by acclaimed Italian philosopher and author of State of Exception. Giorgio Agamben is one of contemporary philosophy’s most influential thinkers on the subjects of language, power, society. This collection of essays opens with an enlightening introduction by the translator Daniel Heller-Roazen, who situates Agamben’s work with respect to both the history of philosophy and contemporary European thought. The essays that follow articulate a series of theoretical confrontations with privileged figures in the history of philosophy, politics, and criticism, from Plato to Spinoza, Aristotle to Deleuze, Carl Schmitt to Benjamin, Hegel to Aby Warburg, and Heidegger to Derrida. Three fundamental concepts organize the collection as a whole: the existence of language; the nature of history; and the problem of potentiality in metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of language. All these topics converge in the final part of the book, in which Agamben offers an extensive reading of Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” as a work that puts potentiality and actuality, possibility and reality, in a new light.

The Highest Poverty

Author: Giorgio Agamben

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2013-04-17

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 0804786747

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The acclaimed philosopher and author of Homo Sacer contemplates the possibility of true human freedom through a deep analysis of monastic stricture. What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule? It is to these questions that Giorgio Agamben’s new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The Highest Poverty meticulously reconstructs the lives of monks, with their obsessive attention to temporal articulation and to the Rule, to ascetic techniques and to liturgy. But Agamben’s thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which “life” is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the “highest poverty” and “use” challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today. How can we think a form-of-life, that is, a human life released from the grip of law, and a use of bodies and of the world that never becomes an appropriation? How can we think life as something not subject to ownership but only for common use?

Giorgio Agamben

Author: Thanos Zartaloudis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-02-25

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1135166765

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This book offers a thorough introduction to, and engagement with, the jurisprudential, political and philosophical thought of the influential Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Critically introducing Agamben's work to both a readership in legal theory, and in the humanities and social sciences more generally, Zartaloudis takes up the three main themes of Agamben's recent work: Power (in its relation to bio-politics, capitalism, social systems, control and political theory); Law (in its relation to philosophy, violence, rights, states of exception and sovereignty); and Humanity (in its relation to theories of ethics, the idea of the human, human rights discourse and the condition of refugees).

Giorgio Agamben

Author: Alex Murray

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-11-23

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1136999639

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Giorgio Agamben is one of the most important and controversial figures in contemporary continental philosophy and critical theory. His work covers a broad array of topics from biblical criticism to Guantanamo Bay and the ‘war on terror’. Alex Murray explains Agamben’s key ideas, including: an overview of his work from first publication to the present clear analysis of Agamben’s philosophy of language and life theories of ethics and ‘witnessing’ the relationship between Agamben’s political writing and his work on aesthetics and poetics. Investigating the relationship between politics, language, literature, aesthetics and ethics, this guide is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex nature of modern political and cultural formations.

Giorgio Agamben

Author: Leland de la Durantaye

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2009-05-21

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 0804771251

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Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher well known for his brilliance and erudition, as well as for the difficulty and diversity of his seventeen books. The interest which his Homo Sacer sparked in America is likely to continue to grow for a great many years to come. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction presents the complexity and continuity of Agamben's philosophy—and does so for two separate and distinct audiences. It attempts to provide readers possessing little or no familiarity with Agamben's writings with points of entry for exploring them. For those already well acquainted with Agamben's thought, it offers a critical analysis of the achievements that have marked it.