Agamben is not making a “historiographical claim” (10) but ...



In "Nietzsche and the Fascists," Bataille begins with an anecdote about Nietzsche's daughter, Elisabeth Foerster, and her anti-Semitic husband showing

Hitler around the Nietzsche archives in 1935 and giving Nietzsche 's cane to Hitler while asserting that Nietzsche was an anti-Semite. She read a text written by her husband on the occasion of Hitler's visit. Bataille exposes what he

calls this "impudent hoax."

Visions of Excess, 182-96; to 182-84.

Great to use as leverage against Agamben. But it works especially

well because it is a weirdly, quasi-anti-Semitic critique of the Foersters

anti-Semitism. Bataille entitles the first section daughter “Elisabeth Judas-Foerster,” entitles the second section “The Second Judas of the Nietzsche-Archiv,” begins the essay as follows "The Jew Judas betrayed Jesus . . .. " (182) and refers to Nietzsche on "the Weimar Judases" (184). Bataille also goes on to engage Georg Lukacs (185) maintains as “historical fact “that Nietzsche” is “one of the principle ancestors fascism” (185) and Emmanuel Levinas who conflates Nietzsche and racism (192-93).

So to distance Nietzsche from Hitler, assert that “fascism and Nietzscheanism are mutually exclusive, and are even violently mutually exclusive” (185-86), Bataille has to fight a war on three fronts against very different kinds of people using the same map of misreading, one the anti-Semitic German Judas (1935), another the Hungarian Marxist (1935) and the other the French Jew (1933): all read Nietzsche and fascism / racism the same way at almost the same moment. Yet Bataille calls the Foersters “traitors” while ascribing an “error, not . . . prejudice” to Levinas (193).

Saint Jacques

Agamben as structuralist thinker, a transcendental idealist Catholic who masquerades as a Derrida, or as Derrida, the Holy Jew, not a

post-structuralist thinker of genesis and structure Agamben is trapped /

captured by his old school philology, unable to follow the returns to

philology taken by de Man ("anthropomorphism") and, less (anti-)

systematically and less explicitly by Derrida. The open is kind a

like a very large zoo that lets animals roam in what seems to be their native

habitant, while humans go on "safaris" and drive through it.

Agamben’s structuralism takes explicit form in his distinction between an “anthropological machine” that operates and a machine that is rendered inoperative. But his distinction depends on a mode of argument of specular juxtapositions; Agamben uncritically adopts metaphors and uncritically uses supplemental “illustrations” as props and supports (these illustrations are sometimes literal, sometime metaphorical).

The Old Titian-ment versus the New Titian-ment

In the Titian chapter, for example, pp. 85-87 Agamben arrives at his solution, namely, “a human nature rendered perfectly inoperative,” by reading a single painting with two figures as the specular (“inversion”) of one another. His argument rests not only on a supplement in the form of illustrations but rests on a negative supplement (the first painting); he needs a progression from the early simple formulation to “new and more mature formulation” (87). The reading of one painting requires the non-reading of the other, or reading of the good proceeds ]as the negation as the unreading, refutation, “recant[tation\ . . . point for point” (86) or brushstroke for brushstroke, of the earlier one. I think it is striking that the Three Ages painting Agamben likes is not only “late work” but “something of a farewell to painting” (85). It is as if Agamben needs Titian’s good painting to be a last painting (“done many years later” p. 86). The later Three Ages painting is already a theological (recantation) of the earlier, but the earlier one gets jettisoned as the “new” gets (re)installed in relation as a figure of a conceptual opposition (here between body and spirit) and reconciliation (“mutually forgiving,” 87; see also “neutralized” p. 87). The new yet older Three Ages painting gets hung over the early Nymph and the Shepherd, so to speak, and the earlier painting simply gets forgotten. Agamben’s reading of the two paintings is not a reading of their (dialectical) relation but simply of the later painting as the negation and surpassing of the earlier. Interestingly, his turn to illustrations he doesn’t reproduce is a variation of ekphrasis as a “between” zone passing through idolatry and iconoclasm. Agamben relies on images, but, at least in the case of Titian, the later painting effectively smashes the earlier; and the miniature is apocalyptic: “The scene that interests us here is the last in every sense, since it concludes the codex as well as the history of humanity. It represents the messianic banquet on the last day.” (1).

The first painting has two figures and it is opposed as late, a farewell (85), to the earlier painting (Walter Benjamin is similarly placed at the antipodes from the Gnostic Marcion [81-82] in the preceding chapter).

Judith [pic]Dundas, “ A Titian Enigma,” Artibus et Historiae 12, 1985, pp. 39—55.

[pic]

This chapter also recalls the opening chapter on the Hebrew miniature (“the aslt page is divided into halves” (1) and his similar turn to a scholarly article on the image. (I’m not sure if he is aware that Hebrew Bibles were made by Christians for Christians. He writes as if the miniature were made by Jews for Jews.)

Agamben’s “deconstructive” moves to establish inactivity, the inoperative, the standstill, or the stop always take an unacknowledged negative turn in Agamben’s (non)reading of one of two texts or writers that fuels the construction of a new binary position that takes the rhetorical form of a elevation “a higher stage beyond . . . beyond.. .”

There’s a repetition, sometimes carefully rhetorical, sometimes apparently unconsciously done, in his argument that approaches the structure of a litany. It’s as if he starts to stutter, or as if his record is stuck in a groove.

Other binaries and repetitions:

Historical (destiny; poetry, religion, philosophy) and post-historical (no destiny; cultural spectacles); historical task and no task (76); a Heideggerian humanitas that keeps “itself open to the undisconcealed of the animal” versus a humanitas that forgets itself by seeking “to open and secure the not open in every domain” (77)

19th ct nationalism and imperialism versus twentieth century biopolitics of bare life (76)“it lets it be outside of being” (91)

“To let it be outside of being.” (91)

Knowledge versus “zone of non-knowledge—or of a-knowledge . . . beyond . . . beyond . . . beyond” (91)

“a zone of non-knowledge” (91) versus knowledge

theological versus political and conjunction versus separation. (92)l:

“the solution of the mysterium coniunction is by which the human has been produced passes through an unprecedented inquiry into the practico-political mystery of separation.”(92)

Subdivision of operative and inoperative into stop and idle:

“Understanding how they work so that we might, eventually, be able to stop them.” (38)

“today the machine is idling” (80)

Chaismus (Agamben likes paradox too) is his uncritically examined trope of choice:

“The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man.” (77)

Especially for defining his trope of the “zone” of the “state of exception” at the “center”:

Insofar as the production of man through the opposition man / animal, human / inhuman, is at stake here, the machine necessarily functions by means if an exclusion (which is also already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always already an exclusion). Indeed, precisely because the human is already presupposed every time, the machine actually produces a state of exception, a zone of indeterminacy in which the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an inside and the inside is in turn only the inclusion of an outside. (37)

The paradox of the exception that operates as the norm gets lost. And here is the symmetrical moment of his so-called deconstruction, the matching of one structure to another, describing them as symmetrical (ancient and modern; ape man [missing link] and Jew):

The machine of earlier times works in an exactly symmetrical way. If, in the machine of the moderns, the outside is produced through the exclusion of an inside and the inhuman produced by the animalizing the human, here the inside is obtained through the inclusion of an outside, and the non-man is produced by the humanization of the animal” . . .Both machines are able to function only by establishing a zone of indifference at their centers” (37).

I would call this a Catholic moment, like the move from car accident victims to concentration camps victims in Homo Sacer. Religion has no meaning or place (it goes unmentioned), and the Jew is just one victim or figure among others of a universal problem of animal and human)

The masquerade as Holy Jew comes at the opening and ending of the book:

“risk ourselves to this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man. . . . what will appear in its place will not be a new . . ‘Veronica’ of a regained humanity or animality.”

This turn from Jewish (Shabbat) to anti-Catholic (“Veronica) notion of work of art as resurrection leads to the most theological moment of he book, the last sentence, cited above:

the solution of the mysterium coniunction is by which the human has been produced passes through an unprecedented inquiry into the practico-political mystery of separation.” (92)

Here we supposedly move from theology to politics. But the terms Agamben uses--“passes through” and “unprecedented”--sound messianic to me, like Catholic transubstantiation and miracle, respectively. Agamben sounds less like an idealist, transcendental philosopher than an Old Testament prophet heralding WB as the founding father: “Benjamin has set down something like the hieroglyph of a new in-humanity” (83). Always the new.

And always the last:

“Heidegger was perhaps the last philosopher to believe . . . (75).

“The machine is, so to speak, stopped; it is at a “standstill,” and. In the reciprocal suspension of the two terms, something for which we perhaps have no name and which is neither animal Norman settles in between nature and humanity and holds itself in the mastered relation, in the saved night.” (83)

The Agamben claims not to want a third term that wuld represent [a] dialectical synthesis,” (83) he again and again turns to just such a term, which becomes part of yet another specular binary opposition (new inhumanity versus old humanity or old animality). Out of the collapse of the earlier binary comes a transcendental, new third term, even if that term is negative and not synthesis.

What we keep getting are variations of (un)holy trinities:

Bare life is the unholy third zone; whereas the “simply living being,” (70) the unsaved remainder “is an existing, real thing that has gone beyond the difference between being and beings” (92). Bare life is like a demon; letting be is the angel. He can’t get beyond this theological language, to use his terms, because he can only think in terms of symmetrical structures, of structures with centers (defined negatively as indifference) but not of decentering and decentered structures (in-difference for Heidegger, difference for Derrida).

Agamben misses the transformation of Catholic pastoral care into the State’s pastoral care of its population as a problem of secularization (the “secular” State is already theological). Biopolitics is not a secular concept, as he seems to think, and perhaps Foucault did too, which may account both for his leaping over psychoanalysis and religion (continuity between the Inquisition and the camps, as you know from Portbou).

And Agamben cannot then really address Heidegger’s questions of technology and the work of art, instead uncritically using the metaphor of the machine and of the illustration aswell as turning to Benjamin on the work of art. By the same token, he can’t through Judaism (or of Catholicism and the Counter-Reformation, especially) as the overcoming of Judaism through the work of art—overcoming the Bildsverbot in Judaism by representing the hidden wound).

I see what you mean about putting the machine in idle rather than stopping it (his earlier stated desire in the book). I totally agree with his account of the primacy of ontology and of his claim that understanding bare life and biopolitics

trumps that of just affirming a human rights discourse (or PETA, for

that matter). I'm enjoying reading it. Lots of really fascinating

material.

The one thing I thought was odd, and it is also clear in his theses

chapter towards the end, about his notion of being (as an event that

does not end but keeps occurring as the machine operates through a

moving border and caesura) is that he closes down the seemingly open

zone of the exception (and opening) and ends with a monological notion

of bare life rather than the more dialogical conclusion, it seems to

me, of bare lives (or Nancy's being singular plural). But he has this

apparent need to resort to chiasmus--the animalization of man and

humanization of the animal, etc, while "deconstructing" the ancients

versus modern date). He writes these very tight sentences (like about

the exteriorization of the inside and the interiorization of the

outside), but, as a result, he has nowhere to go in terms of

understanding ontology and its political ramifications) as a result

except to equate implicitly the rhetorical structure of chiasmus with

the metaphor of the machine and the metaphors of stopping it / putting

it in idle. Anthropogenesis is a trope, like anthropomorphism.

So I come back to my view of Agamben as a structuralist thinker,

Strange too that Agamben skips over Freud's Rat Man and Wolf Man.

But I like the way he puts Hiedegger into the foreground, and his

reading of Heidegger, especially on boredom, is first-rate.

Agamben is not making a “historiographical claim” (10) but a “historico-philosophical” (10) method is indispensable.

“hidden foundation” (11)

gradually begins to coincide” (11); “nevertheless converge” (9)

“sacred texts of sovereignty but also the very codes of political power will unveil their mysteries” (8)

“Essential structure of the [Western] metaphysical tradition” (8)

“essential function in modern biopolitics’ (8)

“converge” (6); “converge” (6)

“hidden point of intersection” (6)

“concealed nucleus of sovereign power” (6)

“the secret tie uniting power and bare life” (6)

“correspondence” (6)

“the point at which” (6)

“concealment and, at the same time, return thought to its calling’ (5)

“secretly governs” (4)

Critique of Foucault on p. 4 is repeated almost verbatim on p. 1999

Nazisim one DISQUIETING thing among others (4)

“

Notes on Part three (mostly) of Homo Sacer

The book seems to demand a double reading: on the one hand, it moves chronologically-from ancient Rome to Benjamin and Schmitt in part one, then back to Roman law and Kantorowicz in part two, and then to the camp in part three. But in part three he goes back first to 1670 law on habeas corpus then to the French Revolution and the Declarations of the Rights of Man then to Nazi euthanasia, then to scientific experiments (Nazis and American scientists), then to the overcomatose, brain death and Karen Quinlan, and in the last chapter back to the camps.[i]

So the narrative / exposition of the argument is more like an “oscillation” or wavering (“wavers between”186) (especially part three) rather than a forward, chronological movement—after the camp in the last chapter, in the third to last page, Agamben comes back to Quinlan, p. 186.

“here life becomes (or least seems to become) pure zoe. (186) “no longer life, bur rather death in motion” (186)

How to read this oscillating yet linear chronology? Is it a rhetorical strategy or a symptom? Perhaps both. As a symptom, it shows that Nazi biopolitics work two ways, both as the final form of a long development in the turn from antiquity to modern democracy (habeas corpus and the declaration being the major movements of in modern biopolitics) and a new development, a novelty, when the state of exception becomes the norm. On the one hand, Nazi biopolitics allows Agamben to trace a continuous development of bare life dated back to Roman law while on the other charting a discontinuous “birth of the camp” (along the lines of Foucault’s Order of Things epistemic shifts).[ii]

Nazi biopolitics as final and new is the most acute figure of a doubleness about sacred life that Agamben locates figuratively in modern democracy—two faced (125) and two edged (121). Nazi biopolitics becomes a kind of double telos, both an end and a beginning in the history of bare life that nevertheless divides the history of bare life in two or, more precisely, turns a division into a continual redrawing and oscillation into extension, penetration, internalization (neoFoucaldian), more or less gradual, so that the state gains more and more power, bare life creeps into more and more areas until the citizen and bare life distinction breaks down absolutely and “we are all virtually hominii sacri.”[iii] Through this double continuous / discontinuous history in which Nazi biopolitics become intelligible because exemplary rather than mysterious because regarded as an anomaly. Nazi biopolitics crystallizes—absolutizes, to use Agamben’s lexicon, a paradox in homo sacer that defines all societies, that deconstructs humanitarianism and sate aid, Right and Left, totalitarianism/ fascism and parliamentary democracies and even explains why democracies s often turn into totalitarian regimes (Weimar to Third Reich). By making the state of the exception the rule or norm, the state takes control over the value of life, or what may regarded as politically irrelevant life. The sovereign’s power is immediate, not mediated by external natural law, not bound by a process of rule and its application: the camp makes such distinctions meaningless. The “birth of the camp” and the immediate politicization of life “make it possible to isolate a sacred life that must be newly defined . . a new living dead man, a new sacred man” (131)

Agamben is narrating the history of a political concept and doing so through a structuralist set of oppositions, moving from mediated to immediate, from temporary state of exception to permanent state of exception, from Kantorowicz’s kings’ two bodies to Fuerhrer’s one body. The camp becomes a structure, not a place, a “hidden matrix,” a “hidden regulator,” a “hidden difference,” a “hidden paradigm” the metamorphoses and topographies of which we “must learn to recognize” (111, 123, 175). Agamben is then also tracing a cognitive problem—the structure of the camp is hidden, opaque.

“The dimension in which the extermination [of the Jews by the Nazis] took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics” (114). What follows for Agamben is the necessity of thinking a new politics (not classical but biopolitical): “There is no return from the camps to classical politics,” 188 (so Arendt and Strauss may be dismissed), p. 187) and we need to be more Foucauldian than Foucault was about biopolitics (the body is immediately bare life and hence can not subvert power. as Foucault thought, through sexuality p. 187). The concentration camps and the Jewish victim are accordingly desacralized, no longer to be regarded as sacrificial victims (p. 114, “sacrificial aura”) but as one instance of modern biopolitics among others comas, car accident injuries) as doctors, jurists, etc become sovereigns (able to decide who can die, what death is, when death happens) able to detain passengers at airports. The camp is not a place but a political space—that space may be a hospital room or a concentration camp. Bare life may be a Jewish prisoner about to be gassed, a criminal about to be executed (waiting on death row) or gain a reprieve, a patient on life support. All are instances of the same biopolitical structure that follows from this conclusion:

“The camp is thus the structure in which the state of exception—the possibility of deciding on which founds sovereign power—is realized normally” (170)

“Inaugurates a new . . . paradigm in which the norm becomes indistinguishable from the exception” (170)

“hidden from the eyes of justice” (37) “we are still living” (37)

The opening Agamben creates is move out of ethical debates that go nowhere or sacrificial auras that veil what the conditions that had to be in place for the camps to become possible and thereby generalize bare life and the space of the camp. And he opens up a useful critique of liberal democracy and a split in the people (patricians and plebians).

At the same time, the pay off of his critique is quite minimal. At the end of chapter seven he makes a rather grand claim “Only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West into account will be able to stop that oscillation and to put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and cities of the earth.” The claim seems merely to reinscribe the problem (how could you put an end except through Nazi biopolitical programs, except by following out their imaginary delusions?) but Agamben pulls way back by the last two pages to his repeated statement that we must “learn to recognize” the metamorphoses of the camp. So reading is bypassed in favor of recognition, which amounts to little more than identification, pattern recognition. Agamben frequently repeats himself and has recourse to a “first” x (first recording,) unprecedented. So the repetition of the camp in different forms and its recognition seems to take a recursive form in which the recognition is always belated. Agamben seems to be tracing a death drive mechanism (hidden) much like Freud’s. It’s hard to see how we “will have learned” (180). His recourse to “only” (only if we understand, p. 183, “only from this perspective” is not so much dogmatic rhetoric as it is evidence of felt pressure to keep in place an absolute moment at which space and time become indistinguishable (extratemporality and extraterrioritoriality).

The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. In the camp, the state of emergency, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order. (168-69)

There is a curious qualification in Agamben’s italicized sentence. He writes “begins to become” rather at the very moment,” as if here were a delay, a mediation between the moment the state of exception is the norm and the opening of the camps. Yet Agamben goes on to note in the very next sentence that “at the time of Hitler’s election . . . the camp was immediately entrusted to the SS and then cites a phrase about the Nazi laws being “an immediate effect of the national Socialist Revolution” (169). The precision of “begins to become” signal a conceptual imprecision, a conflation and confusion of temporal immediacy and legal immediacy, in Agamben’s account of the camp as a “hidden matrix” (166) of “political space” rather than a particular place, “an historical fact and anomaly belonging to the past” (166).

Here we may begin to see that Agamben is a structuralist thinker who works by analogy (two opposite structures are similar, therefore they are the same; what is hidden will be revealed—see part two, “Here the structural analogy between the sovereign exception and sacratio shows its full sense. At the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative . . . . p. 84) and the contradictions that arise from narrating the history of a concept and the history of an epoch (modernity) through spatial metaphors that either conflate temporal metaphors or subordinate them (extraterritoriality and extratemporality; inside the city and everywhere on the planet). In order to make the camp the paradigm of modern biopolitics, Agamben has to absolutize it, make it the paradox of all paradoxes. He maxes out paradoxes to the extreme limits so that that the paradox becomes the absolute structure of bare life. Yet absolutizing involves a strange contradictory movement between virtualization and materialization. To generalize the structure of the camp and make everyone in modernity into homines sacri, virtualize it (“we are all virtually homines sacri”) and yet maintain bare life as a “fundamental referent” (122).[iv]

Consider his conflation of “real” and “virtually” in his concluding sentence of the chapter “The Ban and the Wolf”: “And in modernity life is more and more clearly placed at the center of State politics (which now becomes . . . biopolitics), if in our age all citizens can be said, in a specific but very real sense, to appear virtually as hominii sacri, that is possible only because the relation of ban has constituted the essential structure of sovereign power from the beginning.” (111)

The word “real” (“a specific but very real sense,” a sense not given by Agamben), is followed four words later to the word “virtually,” as if the virtual were somehow real, the real virtual.

Agamben’s and his recourse to “the first” and “unprecedented” and “orginary” –“more original” [than Schmitt’s friend and enemy] . ..”more intimate” 110)

“more internal . . and more external. . . (111)

Shifts from the ambiguity / ambivalence of the sacred to the ambiguity of the sovereign ban (110) to triangulate the space of sovereign (two extreme fields, juridical and religious) with the zone between them of indistinction occupied by bare life.

The camp was also the most absolute space biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation. This is why the camp is the very paradigm of political space at the point at which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen. (171)

Here the absolute space without mediation is also a space of virtualization. Agamben’s structuralism—time as a spatial condensation, a point at which paradox intensifies the most absolute limit possible—means that he must conflate the essence of the camp with both its materialization and its virtualization. He does this in the very same sentence:

If we admit that essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there and whatever its denomination and specific topography” (174). According to Agamben, Albanian immigrants herded into a stadium in Bari, Italy in 1991; Jews detained in a cycle-racing track in Vichy France, concentration camps for foreigners built in Weimar Germany, and foreigners seeking refugee status held in zone d’attentes of French international airports equally exemplify bare life and the camp. “In all these cases,” Agamben writes:

an apparently innocuous space . . . actually delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and the ethical sense of police who temporarily act as sovereign (for example, in the four days during which foreigners can be held in the zone d’attente before the intervention of the judicial authority). In this light, the birth of the camp in our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself. (174)

Agamben is unable to recognize that his pattern recognition depends on not reading the extension of homo sacralization into citizenship dialectically as a process of secularization, a negation of the theological exception. But more crucially, he can’t see that this concept of the camp equals the routinization of the exception depends on a supplement, an aporia that hides the “hidden paradigm,” reduces the hidden and unintelligible to that which can be revealed and made intelligible. Agamben’s argument goes nowhere in part because he doesn’t distinguish between a route and a circuit. He freezes concepts and historical moments as “points” of indivisibility (like the Muselman, like the Nazis). There is no concept of travel in his account, no account of papers that citizens must use as well as hominem sacri must use (if with forged papers) to count as persons.

“hidden [paradigm]” (123)

“oscillation” (163)

“in modern democracies it is possible to state in public what the Nazi biopoliticians did not dare say” (165)

“birth of the camp” (174)

“Inscription of the order . . . inscribed in that order” (175)

the third use of “the first”(164)

legal historical absolutist—as if judgments of sovereign immediately configurations of purchase.

Agamben reading historical examples not as anecdotes and hermeneutic elucidation but as a way of philosophizing about that by turning them into Kafakaesque parables. (Like Walter Benjamin reading history as a series of emblems that don’t link up to historical events for the sake of philosophizing about them). The text is a pretext. Homo Sacer is lifted out of Roman legal history (as medievalist he goes back to imperial roman law) and turns it into a paradigm. Bataille is also a medievalist who links up to early modern texts.

The Open is a series of parables. It’s simpler than Homo Sacer, uses pretexts for the kinds of the way he wants to read (like Titian painting).

Does he know, is it a rhetorical ruse, or is he crazy, does he believe his own b.s. does he give over himself to his own delirium. He exposes the limits of more respectable New Historicists who want to use history as the ground of interpretation.

Agamben, Means without End

Can Agamben get away from meaning as sacrificial violence. He preserves a sacrificial meaning.

He can’t get away from the sacrificial because his own hermeneutic is theological; not a failure of anthropology (like Bataille) but intrinsic to the logic and rhetoricity of his text—his entire denial of violence is based on a sacrificial model of hermeneutics.

State of Exception a series of historical debates, groundwork for Homo Sacer, much more like an intellectual historical process.

Compare Agamben on before there, pp. 49-50—pitched against Derrida-- and Derrida’s reading of Kaka.

Yet Agamben is wrong about the story, yet willfully so to make a philosophical point; Derrida both gives a reading that makes a philosophical point and that is compellingly right.

Necessity of making absolutist statements to shake things up. He is a religious thinker (especially work on Saint Paul—incredibly close reading about temporality, different kind of temporality outside of time that can be put into narrative)

Judith Butler, Precarious Life—about Gitmo and Agamben

Politics, Metaphysics, and Death ed. Andrew North

Undecidability of Agamben’s writing: how responsible is it—in being revelatory by being inaccurate as opposed to be being accurate and revelatory.

Agamben’s arrogance or priestly innocence?

Yet responsible / irresponsible is another structural opposition in need of deconstruciton, as Derrida writes in several places.

-----------------------

[i] “The hospital room in which the neomort, the overcomatose person, and the faux vivant waver between life and death delimits a space of exception in which a purely bare life, entirely controlled by man and his technology, appears for the first time”(164).

[ii] p. “145 “new biopolitics.” See also: “Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary politics, a line that is as such moving into zoes increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with the biological life of citizens.” (144-15)

[iii] See note two above. The figure of the unbroken line of flight has to be assumed for Agamben to make his neoFoucaldian argument about bare life (a point, a coincidence, a correspondence, a continguity): “gradual expansion . . . gradually moving” (122)

“ever more intimate” (122)

“can easily be extended” extends itself” (139)

“has now moved inside every human life and every citizen. Bare life . . . now dwells in the biological body of every living being.” (139-140)

[iv] “Once the fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those becomes bare life Right and Life, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter a zone of indistinction” (122)

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download