Politics, Metaphysics, and Death , livre ebook

321

pages

English

Ebooks

2005

Écrit par
Andrew Norris

Publié par
Duke University Press

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321

pages

English

Ebook

2005

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

11 juillet 2005

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822386735

Langue

English

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

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

11 juillet 2005

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822386735

Langue

English

History of philosophy

p o l i t i c s , m e ta p h y s i c s , a n d d e at h

Edited byn o r r i sa n d r e w

p o l i t i c s , m e ta p h ys i c s , a n d d e at h

Essays on Giorgio Agamben’sHomo Sacer

Duke University Press

durham and london2005

2nd printing, 2005

∫2005 Duke University Press

Printed on acid-free paper$

Typeset in Quadraat by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data and

republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed

page of this book.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead

andrew norris1

Au Hasard

thomas carl wall31

Bare Sovereignty:Homo Sacerand the Insistence of Law

peter fitzpatrick49

S/Citing the Camp

erik vogt74

The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp

andreas kalyvas107

Anagrammatics of Violence: The Benjaminian Ground ofHomo Sacer

anselm haverkamp135

Spacing as the Shared: Heraclitus, Pindar, Agamben

andrew benjamin145

Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agamben’s Critique of Derrida

adam thurschwell173

Linguistic Survival and Ethicality:

Biopolitics, Subjectivation, and Testimony inRemnants of Auschwitz

catherine mills198

Supposing the Impossibility of Silence and of Sound, of Voice:

Bataille, Agamben, and the Holocaust

paul hegarty222

Law and Life

rainer maria kiesow248

The Exemplary Exception:

Philosophical and Political Decisions in Giorgio Agamben’sHomo Sacer

andrew norris262

The State of Exception

giorgio agamben284

Contributors 299

Index 301

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

In the long course of preparing this collection I have

received a lot of help. I owe a special debt to Tom Dumm

for his friendly guidance and unﬂagging support. I should

also like to thank the contributors, my editor Courtney

Berger, Kevin Attell, Adam Bull, Judith Butler, Fred Dolan,

Adam Franklin, Willie Gin, Daniel Heller-Roazen, James

Noggle, Anne Norton, Tom Rockmore, Simona Sawhney,

Hans Sluga, James Wallenstein, Eric Wilson, Meredith

Wooten, and my family. My colleagues at the Department

of Political Science of the University of Pennsylvania

have been extremely generous and helpful throughout, as

have the directors of the Max Planck Institute for European

Legal History in Frankfurt, where much of my own work was

done. My greatest debt, however, is to Yasemin Ok Norris,

whose advice and encouragement helped make this project

possible, and whose love and friendship made it worthwhile.

i n t r o d u c t i o n

a n d r e w n o r r i s

Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead

Death is most frightening, since it is a boundary. —Aristotle,Nicomachean Ethics

And as the same thing there exists in us living and dead and the

waking and the sleeping and young and old: for these things having

changed round are those, and those having changed round are these.

—Heraclitus, Fragment ∫∫

What is politics today? What is its relationship to the tradition from which it emerges? These questions are di≈cult ones to answer, in part because contemporary politics seems so schizophrenic. In a√luent Western countries politics is increasingly a matter of spectacle on the one hand and ∞ managed economies on the other. Hannah Arendt seems quite conﬁrmed in her claim that the once-glorious public realm of appearance is fundamen-tally degraded when it is overrun by concerns more appropriate to the pri-vate realm, such as household management and gossip. If this ‘‘unnatural ≤ growth of the natural’’ inclines us toward nostalgia for a time when the two realms were more decisively separated, such nostalgia is likely intensiﬁed by the ‘‘ethnic cleansing,’’ rape camps, and genocide that we now associate with names such asYugoslaviaandRwanda. But as improbable as any ﬂight to the past may be, it is even less likely that the politics of that past could help us navigate the treacherous waters of our current technological society. I have in mind not only the familiar claim that the attempted genocides of our time are made possible only by quite modern forms of technology, organiza-≥ tion, and experience, but also recent scientiﬁc and ‘‘medical’’ advances. Consider just two: ﬁrst, the corporate-driven and controlled development of biotechnologies, in which huge multinationals are acquiring patents to ge-netic ‘‘information’’ such as ‘‘all human blood cells that have come from the umbilical cord of [any] newborn child.’’ If there are any doubts that such developments will lead us to redeﬁne the human being, these may be laid to rest by the case of John Moore, an Alaskan businessman who found his own body parts had been patented, without his knowledge, by the University of California at Los Angeles and licensed to the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Corpo-

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