The Agamben Effect (special issue of SAQ) [made in istanbul]

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben-whose work has influenced intellectuals in political theory, political philosophy, legal theory, literature, and art-stands among the foremost thinkers of the modern era. Engaging with a range of thinkers from Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger to Jacques Ranciegrave;re and Alain Badiou, Agamben considers some of the most pressing issues in recent history and politics. His work explores the relationship between the sovereign state and the politically marginalized Homo sacer-exiles, refugees, prisoners of war, and others whom the state actively excludes from political participation and full humanity. Further, his critique of the increasing deployment of a "state of exception"-the declaration of a state of emergency that legitimizes the sovereign state's suspension of law for the public good-as a dominant paradigm for governing has particular power in today's global political climate. Infused with the spirit of Agamben's critical self-reflection, this special issue of SAQ examines his seminal works Homo Sacer (1995), The Open (2002), and State of Exception (2003). Some contributors use Agamben's work to examine the history of abortion law in the West, the history of slavery, and women's rights. Others analyze the connections between Agamben's work and that of his contemporaries, including Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Other essays identify new points of interdisciplinary communication between some of Agamben's most provocative ideas and popular twentieth-century writing.


http://www.mediafire.com/file/oubwtynynym/THE_AGAMBEN_EFFECT.pdf

FREE THE TARNAC 9 + A statement of support by Giorgio Agamben

This e-mail is from semiotext(e).

[note about the blog: due to my busy engagements I couldn't post anything for 2 months, I'll post a 50 book set sometime in this week.]

Nine friends in France have been arrested and accused of terrorism, although no proof has been brought against them. Attached please find a petition written by the publisher Eric Hazan, which can be signed (name, occupation, city) and returned to: lafabrique@lafabrique.fr

A statement of support by Giorgio Agamben is pasted in below.

Thanks very much.

TERRORISM OR TRAGICOMEDY?

On the morning of November 11, 150 police officers, most of which belonged to the anti-terrorist brigades, surrounded a village of 350 inhabitants on the Millevaches plateau, before raiding a farm in order to arrest nine young people (who ran the local grocery store and tried to revive the cultural life of the village). Four days later, these nine people were sent before an anti-terrorist judge and “accused of criminal conspiracy with terrorist intentions.” The newspapers reported that the Ministry of the Interior and the Secretary of State “had congratulated local and state police for their diligence.” Everything is in order, or so it would appear. But let’s try to examine the facts a little more closely and grasp the reasons and the results of this “diligence.”

First the reasons: the young people under investigation “were tracked by the police because they belonged to the ultra-left and the anarcho autonomous milieu.” As the entourage of the Ministry of the Interior specifies, “their discourse is very radical and they have links with foreign groups.” But there is more: certain of the suspects “participate regularly in political demonstrations,” and, for example, “in protests against the Fichier Edvige (Exploitation Documentaire et Valorisation de l'Information Générale) and against the intensification of laws restricting immigration.” So political activism (this is the only possible meaning of linguistic monstrosities such as “anarcho autonomous milieu”) or the active exercise of political freedoms, and employing a radical discourse are therefore sufficient reasons to call in the anti-terrorist division of the police (SDAT) and the central intelligence office of the Interior (DCRI). But anyone possessing a minimum of political consc
ience could not help sharing the concerns of these young people when faced with the degradations of democracy entailed by the Fichier Edvige, biometrical technologies and the hardening of immigration laws.

As for the results, one might expect that investigators found weapons, explosives and Molotov cocktails on the farm in Millevaches. Far from it. SDAT officers discovered “documents containing detailed information on railway transportation, including exact arrival and departure times of trains.” In plain French: an SNCF train schedule. But they also confiscated “climbing gear.” In simple French: a ladder, such as one might find in any country house.

Now let’s turn our attention to the suspects and, above all, to the presumed head of this terrorist gang, “a 33 year old leader from a well-off Parisian background, living off an allowance from his parents.” This is Julien Coupat, a young philosopher who (with some friends) formerly published Tiqqun, a journal whose political analyses – while no doubt debatable – count among the most intelligent of our time. I knew Julien Coupat during that period and, from an intellectual point of view, I continue to hold him in high esteem.

Let’s move on and examine the only concrete fact in this whole story. The suspects’ activities are supposedly connected with criminal acts against the SNCF that on November 8 caused delays of certain TGV trains on the Paris-Lille line. The devices in question, if we are to believe the declarations of the police and the SNCF agents themselves, can in no way cause harm to people: they can, in the worst case, hinder communications between trains causing delays. In Italy, trains are often late, but so far no one has dreamed of accusing the national railway of terrorism. It’s a case of minor offences, even if we don’t condone them. On November 13, a police report prudently affirmed that there are perhaps “perpetrators among those in custody, but it is not possible to attribute a criminal act to any one of them.”

The only possible conclusion to this shadowy affair is that those engaged in activism against the (in any case debatable) way social and economic problems are managed today are considered ipso facto as potential terrorists, when not even one act can justify this accusation. We must have the courage to say with clarity that today, numerous European countries (in particular France and Italy), have introduced laws and police measures that we would previously have judged barbaric and anti-democratic, and that these are no less extreme than those put into effect in Italy under fascism. One such measure authorizes the detention for ninety-six hours of a group of young – perhaps careless – people, to whom “it is not possible to attribute a criminal act.” Another, equally serious, is the adoption of laws that criminalize association, the formulations of which are left intentionally vague and that allow the classification of political acts as having terrorist “intentions” or “inclinat
ions,” acts that until now were never in themselves considered terrorist.

— Giorgio Agamben
Libération, November 19, 2008

ATTACHMENTS THAT CAME WITH THE MAIL
photo by koudelka (it is there, in the event's haunting we are -a community, we remember- experiencing a particular twilight. we are the threshold of resistance [bauman "modernity and the holocaust"] to stop this)

Agamben - The Open: Man and Animal

The Open: Man and Animal
by Giorgio Agamben
Kevin Attell (Translator)

# Hardcover: 120 pages
# Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (October 29, 2003)

The end of human history is an event that has been foreseen or announced by both messianics and dialecticians. But who is the protagonist of that history that is coming—or has come—to a close? What is man? How did he come on the scene? And how has he maintained his privileged place as the master of, or first among, the animals?

In The Open, contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers the ways in which the “human” has been thought of as either a distinct and superior type of animal, or a kind of being that is essentially different from animal altogether. In an argument that ranges from ancient Greek, Christian, and Jewish texts to twentieth-century thinkers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, and Kojève, Agamben examines the ways in which the distinction between man and animal has been manufactured by the logical presuppositions of Western thought, and he investigates the profound implications that the man/animal distinction has had for disciplines as seemingly disparate as philosophy, law, anthropology, medicine, and politics.

link
our thanks to "tblythe"

Agamben - Infancy and History

Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience
by Giorgio Agamben
# Paperback: 256 pages
# Publisher: Verso (January 19, 2007)

Argues that contemporary existence is marked by a denial of experience. Through explorations of the work of Kant, Hegel and Husserl, Agamben addresses the question of language and experience. His chapter on childhood and games explores the notion of "dumb", pre-linguistic experience.

here

Agamben - The Coming Community

The Coming Community (Theory Out of Bounds, Vol 1)
by Giorgio Agamben
# Paperback: 105 pages
# Publisher: University of Minnesota Press (March 1993)

In this extraordinary and original philosophical achievement, Agamben develops the concept of community and the social implications of his philosophical thought. Agamben's exploration is, in part, a contemporary response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures.

"This book needs to be sampled for its purity and effervescence. There is an antic humor that I experience reading Agamben as well, and that occurs in acrobatic leaps from popular culture to writers like Aquinas. Beautifully translated by Michael Hardt, with the help of Brian Massumi, Mike Sullivan, and the author, Agamben comes through clearly in English, with an incandescence that is to be treasured, especially when it crops up in the realm of questions that point us in the direction of the very ground/lessness of our being—beings in the same spaces, yet not together." —SubStance

"A superb introduction to English-speaking readers of this important thinker and writer." —Rebecca Comay

"Giorgio Agamben, Italy's leading philosopher and essayist, is one of the most delicate and probing writers I have encountered in recent years. His work, which belongs to the type of writing we tend to associate with Walter Benjamin, is elegant, cheerful and--to resurrect a somewhat exhausted term--utterly revolutionary." —Avital Ronell

"Agamben's text is a rare philosophical meditation on community as a kind of linguistic belonging that moves beyond both identity and universality. Erudite and expansive, yet delivered with epigrammatic ease, this writing brings forth the most promising equivocations of meaning in Talmudic tales, Plato, Spinoza, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein to avow the contingency and communal 'being' within a history whose value is its irreparability. This is a moving and disruptive work that brings what is most dynamic in ontological thought to bear on what is most difficult to think about: contemporary forms of sociality." —Judith Butler

"The Coming Community tries to designate a community beyond any conception available under this name; not a community of essence, a being-together of existences; that is to say: precisely what political as well as religious identities can no longer grasp. Nothing less." —Jean-Luc Nancy

here

Agamben - The Man Without Content

The Man Without Content
(Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)
by Giorgio Agamben
# Paperback: 144 pages
# Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (June 1, 1999)

From the Inside Flap
In this book, one of Italy’s most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He takes seriously Hegel’s claim that art has exhausted its spiritual vocation, that it is no longer through art that Spirit principally comes to knowledge of itself. He argues, however, that Hegel by no means proclaimed the “death of art” (as many still imagine) but proclaimed rather the indefinite continuation of art in what Hegel called a “self-annulling” mode.
With astonishing breadth and originality, the author probes the meaning, aesthetics, and historical consequences of that self-annulment. In essence, he argues that the birth of modern aesthetics is the result of a series of schisms—between artist and spectator, genius and taste, and form and matter, for example—that are manifestations of the deeper, self-negating yet self-perpetuating movement of irony.
Through this concept of self-annulment, the author offers an imaginative reinterpretation of the history of aesthetic theory from Kant to Heidegger, and he opens up original perspectives on such phenomena as the rise of the modern museum, the link between art and terror, the natural affinity between “good taste” and its perversion, and kitsch as the inevitable destiny of art in the modern era. The final chapter offers a dazzling interpretation of Dürer’s Melancholia in the terms that the book has articulated as its own.
The Man Without Content will naturally interest those who already prize Agamben’s work, but it will also make his name relevant to a whole new audience—those involved with art, art history, the history of aesthetics, and popular culture.

link

Agamben - State of Exception

State of Exception (Paperback)
by Giorgio Agamben
# Paperback: 104 pages
# Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (January 15, 2005)

From the Inside Flap
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 working 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.

except me

Agamben - Remnants of Auschwitz

Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive
by Giorgio Agamben
# Paperback: 176 pages
# Publisher: Zone Books (January 1, 2002)

In this book the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben looks closely at the literature of the survivors of Auschwitz, probing the philosophical and ethical questions raised by their testimony.

"In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a consequence, commenting on survivors' testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it. Listening to something absent did not prove fruitless work for this author. Above all, it made it necessary to clear away almost all the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, have been advanced in the name of ethics."
--Giorgio Agamben

here is the link

Agamben - Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

[I haven't seen such a jerkest thing ever! (agamben photo taken from an italian website claimed it is their "private property",and banned blog to use it) what on earth made them act as such? bullshit. I go berserk]

Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Paperback)
by Giorgio Agamben

# Paperback: 328 pages
# Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (January 4, 2000)

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author’s interests, appear in English for the first time.

The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (such as Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel) and twentieth-century thought (most notably Walter Benjamin, but also Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, the historian Aby Warburg, and the linguist J.-C. Milner). They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality.

In the first part of the book, Agamben brings philosophical texts of Plato and Benjamin, the literary criticism of Max Kommerell, and the linguistic studies of J.-C. Milner to bear upon a question that exposes each discipline to a limit at which the possibility of language itself is at stake. The essays in the second part concern a body of texts that deal with the structure of history and historical reflection, including the idea of the end of history in Jewish and Christian messianism, as well as in Hegel, Benjamin, and Aby Warburg. In the third part, the issues confronted in the first and second parts are shown to be best grasped as issues of potentiality. Agamben argues that language and history are structures of potentiality and can be most fully understood on the basis of the Aristotelian theory of dynamis and its medieval elaborations. The fourth part is an extensive essay on Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

go!

Agamben - Language and Death

Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Theory and History of Literature) (Paperback)
by Giorgio Agamben

# Paperback: 136 pages
# Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (September 10, 2006)

A formidable and influential work, Language and Death sheds a highly original light on issues central to Continental philosophy, literary theory, deconstruction, hermeneutics, and speech-act theory. Focusing especially on the incompatible philosophical systems of Hegel and Heidegger within the space of negativity, Giorgio Agamben offers a rigorous reading of numerous philosophical and poetic works to examine how these issues have been traditionally explored. Agamben argues that the human being is not just “speaking” and “mortal” but irreducibly “social” and “ethical.” Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Means without End (2000), Stanzas (1993), and The Coming Community (1993), all published by the University of Minnesota Press. Karen E. Pinkus is professor of French and Italian at the University of Southern California. Michael Hardt is professor of literature and romance studies at Duke University.

death/that word

Agamben - The End of the Poem

This book, by one of Italy’s most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking—nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante.

The author presents “literature” as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the Commedia Virgil is Dante’s guide.

The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante’s poem is a “comedy,” and it concludes with a discussion of the “ends of poetry” in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry “end” does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise.

Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).

go!

Agamben - Means Without End

Means without End

Notes on Politics

Giorgio Agamben
Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino

An essential reevaluation of the proper role of politics in contemporary life.

A critical rethinking of the categories of politics within a new sociopolitical and historical context, this book builds on the previous work of the distinguished political philosopher Giorgio Agamben to address the status and nature of politics itself. Bringing politics face-to-face with its own failures of consciousness and consequence, Agamben frames his analysis in terms of clear contemporary relevance. He proposes, in his characteristically allusive and intriguing way, a politics of gesture-a politics of means without end.

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

hmmm

Agamben - Homo Sacer

Giorgio Agamben - Homo Sacer

tr by: Daniel Heller-Roazen
Stanford University Press 1998


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.

life