Homo Sacer

Download or read book Homo Sacer written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1998-04-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Omnibus Homo Sacer written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 1333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer is one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. A twenty-year undertaking, this project is a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope investigating the deepest foundations of every major Western institution and discourse. This single book brings together for the first time all nine volumes that make up this groundbreaking project. Each volume takes a seemingly obscure and outdated issue as its starting point—an enigmatic figure in Roman law, or medieval debates about God's management of creation, or theories about the origin of the oath—but is always guided by questions with urgent contemporary relevance. The Omnibus Homo Sacer includes: 1.Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life 2.1.State of Exception 2.2.Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm 2.3.The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath 2.4.The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Glory 2.5.Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty 3.Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive 4.1.The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life 4.2.The Use of Bodies

Download or read book Politics, Metaphysics, and Death written by Andrew Norris and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is having an increasingly significant impact on Anglo-American political theory. His most prominent intervention to date is the powerful reassessment of sovereignty and the politics of life and death laid out in his multivolume Homo Sacer project. Agamben argues that in both the modern world and the ancient, politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camps—in which some inmates are reduced to a form of living death—are not a political aberration but instead the place where this essential political decision about life most clearly reveals itself. Engaging specifically with Homo Sacer, the essays in this collection draw out and contend with the wide-ranging implications of Agamben’s radical and controversial interpretation of modern political life. The contributors analyze Agamben’s thought from the perspectives of political theory, philosophy, jurisprudence, and the history of law. They consider his work not only in relation to that of his major interlocutors—Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger—but also in relation to the thought of Plato, Pindar, Heraclitus, Descartes, Kafka, Bataille, and Derrida. The essayists’ approaches are varied, as are their ultimate evaluations of the cogency and accuracy of Agamben’s arguments. This volume also includes an original essay by Agamben in which he considers the relation of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to Schmitt’s Political Theology. Politics, Metaphysics, and Death is a necessary, multifaceted exposition and evaluation of the thought of one of today’s most important political theorists. Contributors: Giorgio Agamben, Andrew Benjamin, Peter Fitzpatrick, Anselm Haverkamp, Paul Hegarty, Andreas Kalyvas, Rainer Maria Kiesow , Catherine Mills, Andrew Norris, Adam Thurschwell, Erik Vogt, Thomas Carl Wall

Download or read book Creation and Anarchy written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed Italian philosopher interrogates the concept of creation in art, religion, and economics in this collection of five essays. Creation and the giving of orders are closely entwined in Western culture, where God commands the world into existence and later issues the injunctions known as the Ten Commandments. The arche, or origin, is always also a command, and a beginning is always the first principle that governs and decrees. This is as true for theology, where God not only creates the world but governs and continues to govern through continuous creation, as it is for the philosophical and political tradition according to which beginning and creation, command and will, together form a strategic apparatus without which our society would fall apart. The five essays collected here aim to deactivate this apparatus through a patient archaeological inquiry into the concepts of work, creation, and command. Giorgio Agamben explores every nuance of the arche in search of an an-archic exit strategy. By the book’s final chapter, anarchy appears as the secret center of power, brought to light so as to make possible a philosophical thought that might overthrow both the principle and its command.

Download or read book State of Exception written by Giorgio Agamben and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-07-18 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Kingdom and the Glory written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned philosopher expounds on the ideas he introduced in Homo Sacer with this analysis of the theological foundations of political power. 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. In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben shows that this theological-economic paradigm unexpectedly lies at the origin of many of the most important categories of modern politics. Its influence ranges from the democratic theory of the division of powers to the strategic doctrine of collateral damage, and from the invisible hand of Smith’s liberalism to ideas of order and security. Agamben also demonstrates 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.

Download or read book STASIS written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giorgio Agamben investigates two founding moments in the formation of European power in its struggle with its most dangerous enemy: internecine civil strife.