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One of Europe’s greatest living philosophers, Giorgio Agamben,
analyzes the life and work of one of Europe’s greatest poets,
Friedrich Hölderlin. What does it mean to inhabit a place or a
self? What is a habit? And, for human beings, doesn’t living
mean—first and foremost—inhabiting? Pairing a detailed
chronology of German poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s years of
purported madness with a new examination of texts often considered
unreadable, Giorgio Agamben's new book aims to describe and
comprehend a life that the poet himself called habitual and
inhabited.  Hölderlin’s life was split neatly in two: his
first 36 years, from 1770 to 1806; and the 36 years from 1807 to
1843, which he spent as a madman holed up in the home of Ernst
Zimmer, a carpenter. The poet lived the first half of his existence
out and about in the broader world, relatively engaged with current
events, only to then spend the second half entirely cut off from
the outside world. Despite occasional visitors, it was as if a wall
separated him from all external events and relationships. For
reasons that may well eventually become clear, Hölderlin chose to
expunge all character—historical, social, or otherwise—from the
actions and gestures of his daily life. According to his earliest
biographer, he often stubbornly repeated, “nothing happens to
me.†Such a life can only be the subject of a chronology—not a
biography, much less a clinical or psychological analysis.
Nevertheless, this book suggests that this is precisely how
Hölderlin offers humanity an entirely other notion of what it
means to live. Although we have yet to grasp the political
significance of his unprecedented way of life, it now clearly
speaks directly to our own. Â
An engaging collection of late-life reflections and quick thoughts,
a book unlike any other Agamben book. What can the senses of an
attentive philosopher see, hear, and learn that can, in turn, teach
us about living better lives? Perhaps it’s less a matter of
asking what and more a matter of asking how. These latest
reflections from Italy’s foremost philosopher form a sort of
travelogue that chronicles Giorgio Agamben’s profound interior
journey. Here, with unprecedented immediacy, Agamben shares his
final remarks, late-life observations, and reflections about his
life that flashed before his eyes. What did he see in that brief
flash? What did he stay faithful to? What remains of all those
places, friends, and teachers? Â
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The Use of Bodies (Paperback)
Giorgio Agamben; Translated by Adam Kotsko
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R753
R705
Discovery Miles 7 050
Save R48 (6%)
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Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer was one of the seminal works of
political philosophy in recent decades. It was also the beginning
of a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition
and scope, investigating the deepest foundations of Western
politics and thought. The Use of Bodies represents the ninth and
final volume in this twenty-year undertaking, breaking considerable
new ground while clarifying the stakes and implications of the
project as a whole. It comprises three major sections. The first
uses Aristotle's discussion of slavery as a starting point for
radically rethinking notions of selfhood; the second calls for a
complete reworking of Western ontology; and the third explores the
enigmatic concept of "form-of-life," which is in many ways the
motivating force behind the entire Homo Sacer project. Interwoven
between these major sections are shorter reflections on individual
thinkers (Debord, Foucault, and Heidegger), while the epilogue
pushes toward a new approach to political life that breaks with the
destructive deadlocks of Western thought. The Use of Bodies
represents a true masterwork by one of our greatest living
philosophers.
What does it mean to be responsible for our actions? In this brief
and elegant study, Giorgio Agamben traces our most profound moral
intuitions back to their roots in the sphere of law and punishment.
Moral accountability, human free agency, and even the very concept
of cause and effect all find their origin in the language of the
trial, which Western philosophy and theology both transform into
the paradigm for all of human life. In his search for a way out of
this destructive paradigm, Agamben not only draws on minority
opinions within the Western tradition but engages at length with
Buddhist texts and concepts for the first time. In sum, Karman
deepens and rearticulates some of Agamben's core insights while
breaking significant new ground.
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 Agamben's new book turns by means of
an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of
Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book
reconstructs in detail the life of the 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" as
such, perhaps for the first time, 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?
In this follow-up to "The Kingdom and the Glory" and "The Highest
Poverty," Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of
duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy. Beginning
with the New Testament and working through to late scholasticism
and modern papal encyclicals, Agamben traces the Church's attempts
to repeat Christ's unrepeatable sacrifice. Crucial here is the
paradoxical figure of the priest, who becomes more and more a pure
instrument of God's power, so that his own motives and character
are entirely indifferent as long as he carries out his priestly
duties. In modernity, Agamben argues, the Christian priest has
become the model ethical subject. We see this above all in Kantian
ethics. Contrasting the Christian and modern ontology of duty with
the classical ontology of being, Agamben contends that Western
philosophy has unfolded in the tension between the two. This latest
installment in the study of Western political structures begun in
"Homo Sacer" is a contribution to the study of liturgy, an
extension of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, and a reworking of
Heidegger's history of Being.
Why has power in the West assumed the form of an "economy," that
is, of a government of men and things? If power is essentially
government, why does it need glory, that is, the ceremonial and
liturgical apparatus that has always accompanied it?
In the early centuries of the Church, in order to reconcile
monotheism with God's threefold nature, the doctrine of Trinity was
introduced in the guise of an economy of divine life. It was as if
the Trinity amounted to nothing more than a problem of managing and
governing the heavenly house and the world. Agamben shows that,
when combined with the idea of providence, this
theological-economic paradigm unexpectedly lies at the origin of
many of the most important categories of modern politics, from the
democratic theory of the division of powers to the strategic
doctrine of collateral damage, from the invisible hand of Smith's
liberalism to ideas of order and security.
But the greatest novelty to emerge from "The Kingdom and the Glory
" is that modern power is not only government but also glory, and
that the ceremonial, liturgical, and acclamatory aspects that we
have regarded as vestiges of the past actually constitute the basis
of Western power. Through a fascinating analysis of liturgical
acclamations and ceremonial symbols of power--the throne, the
crown, purple cloth, the Fasces, and more--Agamben develops an
original genealogy that illuminates the startling function of
consent and of the media in modern democracies. With this book, the
work begun with "Homo Sacer" reaches a decisive point, profoundly
challenging and renewing our vision of politics.
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
Durer'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.
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."
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A Performance Cycle - Archiving, Gathering, Exhibiting, Recounting, Remembering, Loving, Desiring, Ordering, Mapping (Paperback)
Giorgio Agamben, Adrian Rifkin, Ryan Gander
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R537
Discovery Miles 5 370
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Giorgio Agamben tackles our crisis-ridden world in a series of
powerful philosophical essays.  “Which house is
burning?†asks Giorgio Agamben. “The country where you live, or
Europe, or the whole world? Perhaps the houses, the cities have
already burnt down—who knows how long ago?—in a single immense
blaze that we pretended not to see.†In this collection of four
luminous, lyrical essays, Agamben brings his characteristic
combination of philosophical acuity and poetic intensity to bear on
a world in crisis. Whether surveying the burning house of our
culture in the title essay, the architecture of pure exteriority in
“Door and Threshold,†the language of prophecy in “Lessons in
the Darkness,†or the word of the witness in “Testimony and
Truth,†Agamben’s insights throw a revealing light on questions
both timeless and topical. Written in dark times over the past
year, and rich with the urgency of our moment, the essays in this
volume also seek to show how what appears to be an impasse can,
with care and attention, become the door leading to a way out.
What does it mean to be responsible for our actions? In this brief
and elegant study, Giorgio Agamben traces our most profound moral
intuitions back to their roots in the sphere of law and punishment.
Moral accountability, human free agency, and even the very concept
of cause and effect all find their origin in the language of the
trial, which Western philosophy and theology both transform into
the paradigm for all of human life. In his search for a way out of
this destructive paradigm, Agamben not only draws on minority
opinions within the Western tradition but engages at length with
Buddhist texts and concepts for the first time. In sum, Karman
deepens and rearticulates some of Agamben's core insights while
breaking significant new ground.
In attempting to answer the question posed by this book's title,
Giorgio Agamben does not address the idea of philosophy itself.
Rather, he turns to the apparently most insignificant of its
components: the phonemes, letters, syllables, and words that come
together to make up the phrases and ideas of philosophical
discourse. A summa, of sorts, of Agamben's thought, the book
consists of five essays on five emblematic topics: the Voice, the
Sayable, the Demand, the Proem, and the Muse. In keeping with the
author's trademark methodology, each essay weaves together
archaeological and theoretical investigations: to a patient
reconstruction of how the concept of language was invented there
corresponds an attempt to restore thought to its place within the
voice; to an unusual interpretation of the Platonic Idea
corresponds a lucid analysis of the relationship between philosophy
and science, and of the crisis that both are undergoing today. In
the end, there is no universal answer to what is an impossible or
inexhaustible question, and philosophical writing-a problem Agamben
has never ceased to grapple with-assumes the form of a prelude to a
work that must remain unwritten.
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 Provencal poets, Mallarme, and Holderlin, among others).
In this follow-up to "The Kingdom and the Glory" and "The Highest
Poverty," Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of
duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy. Beginning
with the New Testament and working through to late scholasticism
and modern papal encyclicals, Agamben traces the Church's attempts
to repeat Christ's unrepeatable sacrifice. Crucial here is the
paradoxical figure of the priest, who becomes more and more a pure
instrument of God's power, so that his own motives and character
are entirely indifferent as long as he carries out his priestly
duties. In modernity, Agamben argues, the Christian priest has
become the model ethical subject. We see this above all in Kantian
ethics. Contrasting the Christian and modern ontology of duty with
the classical ontology of being, Agamben contends that Western
philosophy has unfolded in the tension between the two. This latest
installment in the study of Western political structures begun in
"Homo Sacer" is a contribution to the study of liturgy, an
extension of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, and a reworking of
Heidegger's history of Being.
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 Agamben's new book turns by means of
an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of
Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book
reconstructs in detail the life of the 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" as
such, perhaps for the first time, 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?
It has become a commonplace that "images" were central to the
twentieth century and that their role will be even more powerful in
the twenty-first. But what is an image and what can an image be?
"Releasing the Image" understands images as something beyond mere
representations of things. Releasing images from that function, it
shows them to be self-referential and self-generative, and in this
way capable of producing forms of engagement beyond spectatorship
and subjectivity. This understanding of images owes much to
phenomenology--the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and
Merleau-Ponty--and to Gilles Deleuze's post-phenomenological work.
The essays included here cover historical periods from the Romantic
era to the present and address a range of topics, from Cezanne's
painting, to images in poetry, to contemporary audiovisual art.
They reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of the
project of releasing images and provoke new ways of engaging with
embodiment, agency, history, and technology.
It has become a commonplace that "images" were central to the
twentieth century and that their role will be even more powerful in
the twenty-first. But what is an image and what can an image be?
"Releasing the Image" understands images as something beyond mere
representations of things. Releasing images from that function, it
shows them to be self-referential and self-generative, and in this
way capable of producing forms of engagement beyond spectatorship
and subjectivity. This understanding of images owes much to
phenomenology--the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and
Merleau-Ponty--and to Gilles Deleuze's post-phenomenological work.
The essays included here cover historical periods from the Romantic
era to the present and address a range of topics, from Cezanne's
painting, to images in poetry, to contemporary audiovisual art.
They reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of the
project of releasing images and provoke new ways of engaging with
embodiment, agency, history, and technology.
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.
We can no longer speak of a state of war in any traditional sense,
yet there is currently no viable theory to account for the manifold
internal conflicts, or civil wars, that increasingly afflict the
world's populations. Meant as a first step toward such a theory,
Giorgio Agamben's latest book looks at how civil war was conceived
of at two crucial moments in the history of Western thought: in
ancient Athens (from which the political concept of stasis emerges)
and later, in the work of Thomas Hobbes. It identifies civil war as
the fundamental threshold of politicization in the West, an
apparatus that over the course of history has alternately allowed
for the de-politicization of citizenship and the mobilization of
the unpolitical. The arguments herein, first conceived of in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11, have become ever more relevant now
that we have entered the age of planetary civil war.
We can no longer speak of a state of war in any traditional sense,
yet there is currently no viable theory to account for the manifold
internal conflicts, or civil wars, that increasingly afflict the
world's populations. Meant as a first step toward such a theory,
Giorgio Agamben's latest book looks at how civil war was conceived
of at two crucial moments in the history of Western thought: in
ancient Athens (from which the political concept of stasis emerges)
and later, in the work of Thomas Hobbes. It identifies civil war as
the fundamental threshold of politicization in the West, an
apparatus that over the course of history has alternately allowed
for the de-politicization of citizenship and the mobilization of
the unpolitical. The arguments herein, first conceived of in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11, have become ever more relevant now
that we have entered the age of planetary civil war.
Offers Agamben's genealogy of power in terms of political,
philosophical and legal thought. This book investigates the
genealogy of the strife between the Polis and its population with
particular regard to the Greek concept of stasis and the strife
with the commonwealth of Hobbes' Leviathan. It re opens the
questioning of the answers offered from the pre history of the
power of the State all the way to the time after the end of its
power and towards the renewed questioning of the state of power
today. This is an interdisciplinary exploration of the relations
that form historically and theoretically between law and
philosophy. It is a unique simultaneous investigation into the laws
of philosophy and the philosophies of law. It focusses on the
creativity of the legal and philosophical imagination in the face
of the present social situation. It explores legal and
philosophical concepts and modalities in relation to the formation
and intersection of institutional traditions, histories and ideas.
|
Nudities (Paperback)
Giorgio Agamben; Translated by David Kishik, Stefan Pedatella
|
R514
R482
Discovery Miles 4 820
Save R32 (6%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Encompassing a wide range of subjects, the ten masterful essays
gathered here may at first appear unrelated to one another. In
truth, Giorgio Agamben's latest book is a mosaic of his most
pressing concerns. Take a step backward after reading it from cover
to cover, and a world of secret affinities between the chapters
slowly comes into focus. Take another step back, and it becomes
another indispensable piece of the finely nuanced philosophy that
Agamben has been patiently constructing over four decades of
sustained research.
If nudity is unconcealment, or the absence of all veils, then
"Nudities" is a series of apertures onto truth. A guiding thread of
this collection--weaving together the prophet's work of redemption,
the glorious bodies of the resurrected, the celebration of the
Sabbath, and the specters that stroll the streets of Venice--is
inoperativity, or the cessation of work. The term should not be
understood as laziness or inertia, but rather as the paradigm of
human action in the politics to come. Itself the result of
inoperativity, "Nudities" shuttles between philosophy and poetry,
philological erudition and unexpected digression, metaphysical
treatise and critique of modern life. And whether the subject at
hand is personal identity or the biometric apparatus, the slanderer
or the land surveyor, Kafka or Kleist, every page bears the
singular imprint of one of the most astute philosophers of our
time.
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 Provencal poets, Mallarme, and Holderlin, among others).
|
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