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Invaluable
Having written on Giorgio Agamben myself (in 1999 and again in 2005) and having wanted myself to produce a comprehensive study of Agamben's work as a whole (and not merely his recent and controversial Homo Sacer project) I was delighted to discover this book by the young Harvard scholar.Upon reading the book I at once contacted Professor Durantaye to congratulate him on what I feel is a real achievement.Like me, he sees a profound coherence to Agamben's work as a whole despite the philosopher's extraordinary and intimidating range of interests, readings and scholarly investigations which border on the esoteric.Any future serious discussion of Agamben's work will have to pass through this essential volume.

The volume is less a critical introduction to than a critical magnification of Agamben's work.Whatever the reader thinks of Agamben's daring philosophical, aesthetic, or political conclusions, Durantaye thoroughly elaborates the reasoning, resources, allusions, paradoxes and intellectual proximities with unparalleled clarity and fairness.This is not a polemical text but an unintimidated tracking of the philosopher's investigations wherever they may have led.In addition, numerous corrections of previous publication information concerning Agamben's works are cited. Anyone who wishes to understand Agamben's work in whole or in part must have this volume at hand.
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The Coming Community in Context
The Coming Community by the Italian thinker Agamben, translated by Michael Hardt, is an indispensible work for anyone who is interested in a renewed thinking of a political community without identity.

The Coming Community does not refer to a community that will arrive one day in a fixed form. Such an arrival would only indicate that it is not the community that we are talking about. Rather, it is a community which lacks precisely this fixed identity, and which beings must learn to belong to.

This can be seen as a singular attempt at a renewed thinking of community against the background of Jean-Luc Nancy's work in Inoperative Community and Blanchot's Unavowable Community. Also, the work can be read in the context of Derrida's work on "the democracy-to-come".

The indetermination of limit...
Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community is a quiet and beautifully written confrontation of thinking, an opening onto potentia that the careful reader (as such) will raise heart, head, and hand to meet irreparably.The small book bears its own halo, the words guilty yet of my own inactuality.The world such as, "here I am!"

Gateway
Less an argument and more a constellation or mosaic of insights, formulas, and enigmas, The Coming Community by Giorgio Agamben is both a courageous delineation of political crisis and an intervention in thought that is bothbeautiful and cheerfully destructive.That is, this mosaic (inspired, Ithink, more by the early Heidegger of Sein und Zeit and also WalterBenjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) saves, without naming, thepotential for the uprecedented that comes out of the delineation of theastonishing: the 'whatever' which "always matters" but which isin no wise the result of a process of any kind.Composed of twenty-ninebrief, dense, suggestive sections, this book opens a gateway out of thespace of nihilism that currently enthralls the planet in the form of theDebordian Spectacle.The example of Tianenmen is intended to evoke ascintillating, lawless time--blasted out of history--when everythingmattered exactly such as it is.Since Benjamin, no thinker has moreclearly entered into the threshold of complicity that thought and politicsshare.

Obscuratist
Agamben's book Infancy and History was a superb book, and I was looking forward to reading this book. The book should be twice as big, as seemingly every other sentence calls for further elaboration. To be sure, it is esay to undersatnd that Agamben's language is inspired by the later Heidegger's unfolding of language, particularly through etymology. The grounding of the book is an elaboration of the word "whatever" (qualunque), and perhaps this was more understandable in the original Italian, the point being, for Agamben, that 'being' is not a case of "whatever being" such that it does not matter which, but "such that it always matters". This then becomes his base for human ethics. Fair enough. But who needs the exposition of "whatever" in order to argue for an ethics of understanding? His ultimate argument is that the coming community will not be one of control of the State in politrical terms, but rather a struggle between the State and the non-State. He gives the example of the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, whom, Agamben argues, did not demonstate for concrete demands, or rather, that "democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict". This is incredible! Agamben is more familiar with Italian farmers demanding foreign goods be stopped at the borders. My feeling by the end of the book, was that Agamben's Coming Community would be a community of Intellectuals who a few times a year march for people who are no longer a community, the disposessed, (whom, despite their efforts of solidarity with each other's plight, remain ultimately marginal) but after the demonstration the intellectuals return to their comfortable university-paid jobs. This book left me feeling angry. ... Read more

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Extraordinary
Agamben's State of Exception is an extraordinary work in several ways.It is superbly written, which is critical to the task of conveying such a complex subject.Agamben weaves his topic of 'exception' through philosophical, legal and historical frameworks, and succeeds in demonstrating how the topic must be viewed from multiple angles.Yet it is not simply from different 'view points' that Agamben argues; he presents his thesis with an abundance of knowledge - indeed erudition.This work is clearly of contemporary relevance, and Agamben amply demonstrates this.Yet he instructs the reader on how deeply historical and increasingly diffuse the topic is, extending to the political theory of Roman and Greek thinkers, and tracing the continuity of thought to present thinkers, and to events that bring the topic right into the living rooms of us all.

Rewarding but not easy
State of Exception is not an easy read, but it is rewarding with a little effort.

Since its initial publication in 2003, it has gained in relevance and I believe that the central thesis is still supported by current events.

A Thorough Analysis of the Political and Legal Nature of the State of Exception
Giorgio Agamben provides a thorough historical and legal contextualization of the state of exception, defining its critical nature and development. Defined as the expansion of executive power in response to existential threats to the nation, the state of exception has become the norm of executive power throughout Western democracies. Analyzing the legal and political theory that has given rise to the state of exception, Agamben delivers a highly detailed description of this legal concept. From its origins in Roman law, Agamben traces the evolution of the state of exception through two political scholars, Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Today, the state of exception has allowed the President of the United States to unilaterally expand executive power into legislative and judicial domains.

Response:

While the quality of Agamben's legal analysis and research cannot be questioned, he neglects to analyze the state of exception from a political science lens, specifically in terms of institutions and structural limitations. There are two primarily limitations to any utilization of the state of exception, the complexity of Western political systems and the electorate. Given the highly bureaucratic nature of any Western political system, Presidential decrees will unavoidable reach resistance within the system. Obviously, fervent nationalism (Nazi Germany) or traumatic national events (September 11) can consolidate a political regime and reduce structural resistance but this situation does not represent the norm.

Additionally, the President and his political party ultimately must answer to the electorate. Unless the President is able to subvert this process as well with the state of exception, the electorate may abandon the President in favor of a completely different candidate. The shift from a substantial support for the Bush Administration to the 2006 Democratic Congressional majority and the subsequent election of Barak Obama exemplify this. In short, further empirical evidence and analysis is required before one can emphatically claim that the state of exception has eroded the foundations of democracy and reduced Western democracies to police states.

Bottom-line:

For legal scholars or those interested in the expansion of executive power, this book provides a great deal of pertinent analysis. For the majority of readers, finding the book at a library and reading the first chapter as well as the last few pages will be more than enough. Unless the topic of this book deeply resonates with you, there are more important books to spend your money on.

For more reviews and a summary of Agamben's main paints, find us at Hand of Reason.

More great insight from Agamben but incomplete
The subject of this book is incredibly relevant and important for law and politics in the first decade of the 21st century and beyond.This book really got me thinking about constitutional theory two years ago and inspired me to write a paper on the issue as it relates to the U.S. Constitution, executive power, separation of powers, and individual rights during "states of exception" -- more commonly referred to as a state of emergency, during which law does not operate as it would otherwise.Agamben's analysis was/is incredibly relevant to the "war on terror"; indeed, he describes the U.S. war on terror as the most recent manifestation of the state of exception.However, the underlying philosophical and legal issues raised by Agamben are timeless in the modern political world, and the subject matter flows naturally from his earlier work in Homo Sacer.

How liberal democracies can and should respond in times of emergency has challenged legal and political scholars for centuries, and Agamben relies on two of the most notable scholars on the subject: Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin.Agamben does a good job at approaching the big picture and discussing the tension between the "norm" and the state of exception.His fundamental concern is that the state of exception is no long the exception; rather, it is the norm, as modern politics has increasingly used extraordinary political concerns (war, economic depression, civil unrest, and terrorism) to justify extraordinary responses (e.g., infringement of civil liberties, enhanced executive power, and military action).This naturally dovetails with his previous work in Homo Sacer because the "sovereign" (s/he who decides when the legal norm is no longer operative and a state of exception exists) has the power to reduce people to bare life -- life stripped of any political value -- as "security" becomes the paramount value during the state of exception.

Although Agamben raises some interesting and specific examples of the modern state of exception (e.g., Bush's war on terror, Nazi Germany, Roosevelt and the New Deal), he is short on details, somewhat obfuscatory in his terminology and discussion (this may be due in part to translation issues), citations are extremely limited, and as expected, he has little to offer in the way of "solutions" to the dilemma (though this is hardly surprising given his postmodern stance).Accordingly, Agamben's State of Exception is a good starting point, but it's not enough... If you're interested in going beyond Agamben, go back to Schmitt's works, Clinton Rossiter's Constitutional Dictatorship, and Henry Commager's fantastic 1968 article in the New Republic ("Can We Limit Presidential Power?").

State of Exception
An amazing book. It is a must read for anyone who is interested in political processes and the grey lines within 'constitutional' democracy. ... Read more

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La Nuda Vita
The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an absolute fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact entertains an intimate relation with sovereignty. The origins of the dogma of sacred life are shroud in mystery. Classical Greece, to which we owe most of our ethico-political concepts, not only ignored this principle but did not even possess a term to express the complex semantic sphere that we indicate with the single term "life". To the Romans, "the sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide." Ancient Germanic Law was founded on the concept of peace (Fried) and the corresponding exclusion from the community of the wrongdoer, who therefore became friedlos, without peace, and whom anyone was permitted to kill without committing homicide. In Romance languages, the ban signifies both the sacred insignia of sovereignty and expulsion from the community.

Life that cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed is sacred life. By extension, the sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life--life that may be killed but not sacrificed--is the life that has been captured in this sphere. Politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. Not the act of tracing boundaries, but their cancellation by the sovereign ban, is the constitutive act of the city. The relation between the sacred man and the sovereign, the exile and the citizen, bare life and political existence, is more fundamental than the Schmittian opposition between friend and enemy, fellow citizen and foreigner.

At the threshold of the modern era, bare life--the simple fact of living--begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power. This is what Michel Foucault designates by the term of biopolitics: the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a society's political strategies, so that it becomes at once possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust. The politicization of bare life constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political categories of classical thought. Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty ("Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception") is combined to Foucault's concept of biopolitics to open the possibility of a situation of unlimited power where the state of exception has become permanent and human beings are reduced to a condition of ultimate abjection. Here is how Agamben sums up his argument in one key passage:

"Only because politics in our age had been entirely transformed into biopolitics was it possible for politics to be constituted as totalitarian politics to a degree hitherto unknown". Moreover, "only because biological life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact, is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this century's totalitarian states were able to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies...Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction...From this perspective, the camp--as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception)--will appear as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize."

Without denying the brilliance and fecundity of Agamben's insights, I am left with several issues that underscore either important shortcomings in the author's reasoning, or limitations in my own reading that I will be all too ready to confess. First, Agamben's reliance on etymology tends to substitute for both historical analysis and philosophical argument. This is a feature Agamben shares with Heidegger, the philosopher who has probably had the most formative role in his thought. He rejects the theory of the ambivalence of the sacred (meaning both august and accursed, pure and impure) that runs from Durkheim to Benveniste, from Freud to Bataille, as based on failed interpretations by now discredited scholars. But it is not clear why his own understanding of homo sacer--he who may be killed but not sacrificed--, based on a single occurrence in Pompeius Festus, trumps the other interpretation he dismisses as a scientific mythologeme.

Second, Agamben shares with Foucault, his other main source of inspiration, a certain hyperbole, punctuating sober descriptions with lyrical flights into sublimity. He notes that Foucault kept clear of addressing the politics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century, and that "the inquiry that began with a reconstruction of the grand enfermement in hospitals and prisons did not end with an analysis of the concentration camp." But as Dominick LaCapra rightly argues, there may be good reasons to eschew messianic tones and histrionic hyperbole when addressing the unnameable sufferings of the victims of Nazi extermination.

Third, the hyperbolic rhetoric leads to a postapocalyptic perspective of ethical meltdown, a grey zone of indistinction where all preexisting normative and legal orders are suspended. Agamben sees the Schmittian state of exception as generalized or rampant in the post-Auschwitz world, and this perspective allows him to assert that the camp is the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living. According to this extreme contention, Auschwitz is now everywhere, including in "the zones d'attente in French international airports in which foreigners asking for refugee status are detained." There is something profoundly disturbing in the blurring of all legal and ethical categories that can lead to such absurd statements.

Agamben on the Politics of "Life"
This is a must read for any serious student of philosophy, political theory, jurisprudence and international studies. Agamben here displays his mastery of the Greek, Roman, Judaic and modern traditions through his insight into the very heart of our modern understanding of the term "life."

Using a genealogical method, he traces our understanding of "life" back to a break between "bios" and "zoe" itself, a break that is to lead step-by-step, through a series of historical accidents and judicial decisions, eventually to genocide, concentration camps and the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. Believe it or not the roots of this human tragedy can be traced back to as early as Roman antiquity - a point that would have definitely made Heidegger raise his eyebrows.

This has special significance in relation to the thoughts of Heidegger and Arendt and should provide a shock to those who still, despite our current political and economic crisis, believe that we live in an age of progress and Enlightenment.

Nothing Interesting
I don't understand why this book was even created. The author spends a lot of time mentioning other works and ideas that are key to this book, so why mention them. The author could sum up the message in this book in about 3 or 4 sentences. I guess that's why we have academics--to make simple ideas more complex. That's all you're getting with this book, and the main idea is not even that interesting. Man is sacrificed today too, just think of how many are sacrificed for dubious reasons in war. Wait, maybe i should write a book about this.

Interesting thesis, but...
Agaben has had quite some impact in the English speaking world, since publication of this book (along with Remnants of Auschwitz and the collection of essays Potentialities). Is the impact he has had warranted by his writings?
Well, one can see why his work appeals to some. The problem is that in this book and its companion, Remnants of Auschwitz, which is supposed to offer phenomenological support for the theoretical claims of Homo Sacer, Agamben fails to deliver.
As Phil Hutchinson points out in his Shame and Philosophy Agamben's theory rests upon on a flawed theory of meaning, whereby he gives an etymologically biased rendering of Derrida's notion of Deconstruction. Now, one can stay agnostic as to the merits or otherwise of Derrida (See Chapter Two of Hutchinson for a critique of Derrida) but Agamben's rendition of Deconstruction comes close to committing the genetic fallacy, by appealing to the genesis of concepts ("guilt" as originating in Roman jurisprudence is one example) so as to determine their meaning. Surely, even in Derrida's terms, this is problematic, simply replacing one philosophy of presence with another.
This book is difficult, and that gives it an air of profundity. Don't be misled. It is, I submit, not profound.
There is a live debate in analytic philosophy as to whether or not Derrida had anything of genuine originality and importance to say about meaning (see Section Five of Chapter Two of Hutchinson); however, even if one is inclined to argue that he did one would still have something of a task claiming that Agamben has anything of value to contribute to such debates. For, despite claiming to build upon Derrida's insights, Agamben seems to miss the point Derrida is trying to make. So, whether one is a Derridean or not, whether one is sympathetic to the project of Deconstruction or not, I think one will find this book ultimately deeply flawed. If you've read it and you don't find it so, please read Hutchinson's Shame and Philosophy and let us all now your thoughts then.

"Homo Sacer" and the Problem with the Ancient Model
"Homo Sacer" proposes a succinct thesis: contemporary political regimes, including both liberal democracies and totalitarian governments, have increasingly relied on a juridical space that isolates and rules over the "bare life" (zoe) of their subjects. According to the author, the founding gesture of political sovereignty does not simply grant or restrict the rights of citizens, but wields an absolute power over the life and death of men. As the argument goes, today's biopolitical machinery betrays a hidden complicity with the most detestable forms of domination, exemplified by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Whilst many forms of contemporary sovereignty might seem benign compared to this singularly horrible event, these forms share with Nazism a tendency to expunge mediating political categories such as rights and contracts, and subject biological bodies to the immediate control of a sovereign.

Reviving a forgotten subject of ancient Roman law, Agamben defines the homo sacer (sacred man) as a political unit that can be killed but not sacrificed. Anybody can terminate the life of the sacred man with impunity, and no worth can be conferred upon his being through a ritualistic sacrifice. Although the sacred man is not actually deceased, he inhabits an indeterminate ground between life and death because homicide laws do not apply to him. He lives a virtual death. His "being-toward-death" is not only ontologically implicit but juridically authorized.

The figure that completes this grim picture is the sovereign, who may at any time call for a "state of exception." That is, he may suspend the laws of the land and thus produce a collective of sacred men who occupy a threshold between nature and civilization. Paradoxically, the sacred men are included in a new juridical sphere to the very degree that they are abandoned by the law. With this insight, Agamben subverts the conventional understanding of Hobbes' state of nature. The state of nature does not designate the status of men prior to the advent of political rule. Politics, rather, incorporates the state of nature into its very essence; the setting of Hobbes' "war of all against all" becomes the very terrain on which biopolitical authority is exercised. In Agamben's scheme, there is no chaotic life outside the scope of political sovereignty. On the contrary, sovereignty is sustained by this "zone of indistinction" between law and order on the one hand, and violence and chaos on the other.

Like his intellectual precursors Benjamin, Heidegger and Arendt, Agamben seeks to demonstrate the relevance of seemingly outmoded texts to contemporary political and cultural phenomena. Agamben persuasively illustrates the contemporary manifestation of one attribute of the sovereign/sacred man pair: the sovereign's capacity to kill without being punished and, correlatively, the sacred man's potential exposure to this injustice. I believe Agamben fails, however, to unfold the implications of the other aspect of homo sacer's being, that is, his inability to be sacrificed.

From a contemporary vantage, homo sacer's "unsacrificeable" character seems not simply irrelevant, but downright erroneous. The stringency of Agamben's ancient paradigm precludes an analysis of the insidious logic of sacrifice operative today. Because Agamben detects sacrifice exclusively within the boundaries of religious ceremony, he is unable to discern the manner in which secular political ideology both reinforces the sacrificeablity of the subject and renders him utterly disposable. Agamben tells us "that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, `as lice,' which is to say, as bare life. The dimension in which the extermination took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics." But this dichotomy--between the event of the collective sacrifice on the one hand and the banalized process of extermination on the other--is less stable than Agamben implies. "Sacrifice" functions as a convenient catchword by which the sovereign may, paradoxically, reduce the subject to bare life while recuperating a sense of purpose and meaning in the midst of mass slaughter. (Thus, Truman was able to write, "I think the sacrifice of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was urgent and necessary for the prospective welfare of both Japan and the Allies.") Within the scope of a dubious utilitarian calculus, sacrifice is deemed an investment for a"better future." In this sense, sacrificeability does not mitigate or contradict the sacred man's "capacity to be killed," but makes this capacity seem both palatable and redemptive. While we are beyond an epoch in which religious sacrifice is pervasively practiced, sacrifice is nonetheless transposed into a secular key and thereby used to justify a wide range of biopolitical crimes.

Although this may seem like a minor flaw in this text, it gestures toward Agamben's larger shortcoming, that is, his inability to buttress his most provocative claim: that we, today, collectively embody the ancient figure of homo sacer. His enumeration of contemporary states of exception toward the end of the book does little to remedy this problem. For instance, he squeezes "military interventions on humanitarian grounds" into his conceptual model of the state of exception not by demonstrating a structural coincidence between homo sacer and the subjects involved in contemporary warfare, but by making an unconvincing appeal to "an undecidability between politics and biology." Agamben is at his weakest when adducing such platitudes of deconstruction and passing them off as argument. While the reader cheers for his attempts to graft the structure of ancient Roman law onto the contemporary political landscape, these lines of thought run up against the same impasse, at which Agamben invariably resorts to specious analogical thinking.

Since I haven't read Agamben's entire oeuvre, I'm in no position to comment on the extent to which he has corrected this defect in subsequent publications. But in this book, at least, it is conspicuous. So, while "Homo Sacer" advances a strikingly original thesis, it leaves the reader wishing this critical point had been proven and not merely proclaimed.
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The Signature of All Things is Giorgio Agamben's sustained reflection on method. To reflect on method implies for Agamben an archaeological vigilance: a persistent form of thinking in order to expose, examine, and elaborate what is obscure, unanalyzed, even unsaid, in an author's thought. To be archaeologically vigilant, then, is to return to, even invent, a method attuned to a "world supported by a thick weave of resemblances and sympathies, analogies and correspondences." Collecting a wide range of authors and topics in a slim but richly argued volume, Agamben enacts the search to create a science of signatures that exceeds the attempts of semiology and hermeneutics to determine the pure and unmarked signs that signify univocally, neutrally, and eternally.

Three conceptual figures organize Agamben's argument and the advent of his new method: the paradigm, the signature, and archaeology. Each chapter is devoted to an investigation of one of these concepts and Agamben carefully constructs its genealogy transhistorically and from an interdisciplinary perspective. And at each moment of the text, Agamben pays tribute to Michel Foucault, whose methods he rethinks and effectively uses to reformulate the logic of the concepts he isolates. The Signature of All Things reveals once again why Agamben is one of the most innovative thinkers writing today.

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Method(s) Before & Beyond `Science'
Agamben's book is a homily to ways of approaching the humanities and humanity. A great essay writer in the classical rhetorical sense - instilling a sense of curiosity, lightness and open wonder while offering substantial readings of key ideas. If elegance of knowledge be a virtue, it is here.

wonderfully suggestive but not well grounded
For better or worse, Agamben is now part of the oxygen literary critics need to breathe.That said, this book is marvelously suggestive, and at its best, really helps one to think about how method dictates the content of argument.The weakness is that many of the claims are really grounded in the signature of Agamben, and one would really like historically specific examples for the broad charges levied against, for example, scientific methods of the early modern and modern periods. ... Read more

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Political Science/Critical Theory

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.

Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collge International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Language and Death (1991), Stanzas (1992), and The Coming Community (1993), all published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Vincenzo Binetti is assistant professor of Romance languages and literature at the University of Michigan. Cesare Casarino teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.

Theory Out of Bounds Series, volume 20

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on the way to...
This collection of occasional pieces from the nineteen-nineties can seem slight and derivative by comparison to Agamben's major works of the same decade, coming on the heels of Homo sacer, The Coming Community, The Man Without Content, and The Remaining Time. Means without ends is supercilious about dance, and shows unexpected pietism in the hope for rights "Beyond Human Rights": how meaningful are rights without the conjunction of law and enforcement, i.e. something resembling the state? And there's a puzzling reference to "Beckett's Traum und Nacht" (p. 55). But Means without ends also contains some pearls close to the persistent heart of Giorgio Agamben's uniquely disquieting train of thought: how is it possible to think politics today, in the wake of the Holocaust on the one hand, imposing the heritage of extermination camps that incorporate the state of exception as the essential model of state sovereignty? Agamben's bracing paradoxicalization of politics remains incisively challenging in the "Marginal Notes" on Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, in the dialogue on "The Face" (whose unidentified interlocutor is presumably Emmanuel Levinas), and in the deeply personal reflections on contemporary politics, especially in Italy. Curiously, the initial words of a passage repeated word-for-word on pages 81 & 95 suggests the absent totalization, and perhaps the subtitle of a major new Agamben in the offing: "an integrated Marxian analysis..." ... Read more

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3 1/2 stars is more apt for a half-way amazing book
As a quick note on my position, I have reservations about Agamben's work.Firstly, as an academic with his stated credentials (studying under Heidegger, assisting Italo Calvino, acquaintances with Derrida, Lyotard, Klossowski, etc.) and his professorial position, it is surprising his sparse use of citations.He often incorporates summations and quotations into his own text, which allows for a very fluid reading.It does, however, lead one to take him at his word.Secondly, I find Agamben to be overly abstract and opaque for a practical position for his chosen philosophical problems.He likes to use these general, hopeful terms like 'coming community' to point at some nebulous future state of being that is very unclear as to how it is supposed to come into being.Yes, with the abandonment of the 'state of exception' and for a qualitative approach to life and not simply it's basic needs ('bare life').But how?And I mean exactly how?Why can't he articulate a position on these dire circumstances with their overcoming?Agamben is very willing to diagnose the problem, in rather confusing terms at times, but never, ever to prescribe.I understand that one is solely responsible for defining one's own being, but this is highly dubious at best for any sort of political praxis and leads me to question Agamben's viability and dedication to his own prophetic outcomes.He suffers from some of the same criticisms leveled against Walter Benjamin, Foucault, and Derrida in my eyes.This is more troubling as he should know better as a result.

This being said, "The Open" is a beautifully mind provoking read.Agamben delivers a quick and engaging overview of philosophical and theological debates as to what separates man from animal.It becomes very apparent that there has been a very thin line between the two.His narrative on early scientific classifications of man and other animals is a very fascinating read.The chapters dealing with Heidegger are particularly dense.These suffer too much from Agamben engaging in Heidegger's ontological word games.It can be a rewarding slog though as he points to some very curious moments in Heidegger's thought on the defining ontological basis of animals (this also being where the title of the book comes from).In short, the question "What is animal?" has been repeatedly answered with "All that is not man."Consequently, "What is man?" has never been answered.This book left me with some rather disturbing questions related to my own thinking on the subject and a very critical mindset to bring to previously acquired and, hopefully, soon to always be acquired knowledge.And for this, I'll err on the side of four instead of 3 with no halves.And this book deserves a half as it itself is only a half book.

Meaning that this book didn't appease my reservations about Agamben.Yet again, there is this pointing at - ? or this feeling of arriving at some great breakthrough that propels you through the book to the inevitable let down.I was left seriously wanting more and a little frustrated.And as this is a constant in reading Agamben for me, it unfortunately leads me to doubt the efficacy of his position.Of course, what that position is, exactly, is also very difficult to elucidate.OK, so man has never been adequately defined and therefore it's definition becomes open.Now, how does one define it or even approach a definition to bring that lovely sounding 'coming community'?And yet again, historical and philosophical points are dropped into the text on a faith basis.This leaves the reader to spend, at the very least, several hours in a library researching to verify or further explore the anecdotes Agamben addresses instead of a very quick, simple citation in the text that one could quickly look up.Agamben himself may have considerable credibility with his peers, but his text lacks it.

erudition as art as thought as action
A magisterial meditation on the question of the "human" -- used as an adjective. This short book is Agamben's 'Duino Elegies': thalassically poetic and swirling with thought that hovers, indifferent to the gravity of common sense.

The title refers to Heidegger's term for the possibility of Dasein but Agamben is not doing a pro-Heidegger critique here. The Italian is thinking against the German: Agamben mentions that Heidegger was in fact the harshest separator of man and animal in modern thought, denying animals the very possibility of ever seeing the OFFEN (Open) that is (supposedly) available to man alone. But forget Heidegger--the book's not about him. Agamben questions the very ground of Western thought that made it possible for Marty to make such an inhumane declaration at all.

Agamben's meditation begins with a medieval illustration that depicts the world after the end of the world (post-judgment) in which all the Saved are shown with various animal heads. Agamben wants to know what to make of this strange, unexplained overlapping of man and animal.
And so he weaves a series of tales -- each only a few pages long and Kafkaesque in their brevity, mysteriousness, and flash of insight -- of how the idea that man and animal are two separate categories of being came to be. He weaves by unraveling the secret codes, the invisible knots that have held, and still hold, the most basic assumptions that drive Western thought, beginning with theology / philosophy and now, the bio-sciences.

I was startled to learn how seemingly silly hair-splitting arguments of the theologians concerning the resurrected body could be so consequential later in the modern age in the formulation (and separation) of man and animal. An example: Would the intestines of the resurrected be full or empty? If full, then what to do about the problem of excrement in the Kingdom of God? If empty, is it because they are no longer needed? And if that is the case, what have them at all? Etc.
(BTW, it was decided that there would be no animals in Heaven.)

Agamben continues here what he began in his earlier works -- namely the meaning and consequence of NAKED or RAW LIFE, devoid of any qualifiers, such as "human" such that a "human" being becomes just a living thing.
Agamben states that his purpose is to expose and figure out a way to stop what he calls the 'anthropological machine' whose rise and history made possible the most "logical" outcome of such thinking: The Holocaust. But Agamben does not limt the phenomenon of the Holocaust only to what happened to the Jews --he extends it the entire spectrum of modern political thinking that permits the stripping of human beings of humanity. (See HOMO SACER.)

Having said all that, I must confess, one cannot possibly do justice to this book by summarizing Agamben's little molecules of thought, so compact and phosphorescent are they.

Great book
This is a pathbreaking book that explores the unstable frontier between what we consider human and what we still define as animal. This book paves the way for other attempts to discuss this crucial difference which has been relatively unexplored. Agamben achieves a genealogy of the anthropological machine (as he calls it) from the Hebrew Bible to Heidegger and Foucault. I wonder why he didn't explore another barrier that this book also leaves open: the difference between human and machine, which usually accompanies the problematization of the diad animal-human (think about Junger's organische konstruktion and
Spengler Der Mensch und die Technik). This is an intelligent and well written book although I wish it would have been longer. Why not an essay on Aristotle's zoon politikon or on Nietszche's blond beast? I guess I will have to wait for his next book. ... Read more

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Agamben's profound and radical meditation on language and philosophy spans the opposition between nature and culture, the appearance of the unconscious and the difference between rituals and games.

How andwhy did experience and knowledge become separated? Is it possible totalk of an infancy of experience, a “dumb” experience? For WalterBenjamin, the “poverty of experience” was a characteristic ofmodernity, originating in the catastrophe of the First World War. ForGiorgio Agamben, the Italian editor of Benjamin’s complete works, thedestruction of experience no longer needs catastrophes: daily life inany modern city will suffice.

Agamben'sprofound and radical exploration of language, infancy, and everydaylife traces concepts of experience through Kant, Hegel, Husserl andBenveniste. In doing so he elaborates a theory of infancy that throwsnew light on a number of major themes in contemporary thought: theanthropological opposition between nature and culture; the linguisticopposition between speech and language; the birth of the subject andthe appearance of the unconscious. Agamben goes on to consider time andhistory; the Marxist notion of base and superstructure (via a carefulreading of the famous Adorno–Benjamin correspondence on Baudelaire'sParis); and the difference between rituals and games.

Beautifullywritten, erudite and provocative, these essays will be of greatinterest to students of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology andpolitics.

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Interesting but not urgent
This relatively short book reads like a collection of essays rather than a unified whole.Agamben is clearly very intelligent and a good writer, but I am not convinced that he is the 'next great critical theorist' many claim him to be.

The best chapter here is about a series of letters between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.Agamben argues in favor of Benjamin's method, a view I'm partial to.There are other interesting moments throughout but also a lot of grappling with the canon, a necessary task for professional Continental Philosophers, perhaps, but not necessarily compelling reading for the rest of us.

This book could be read alongside Derrida's 'The Politics of Friendship'. ... Read more

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To make atheists into believers
This book is one of the most profoundly moving and important I have ever read.And Giorgio Agamben is perhaps the most ethical and committed intellectual of our times.Not only has he refused teaching appointments in the United States in principled opposition to its imperial chicanery, he has been an outspoken critic of the US-right wing and its attack on Christianity.This book attempts to give Christianity back to the people, to restore its revolutionary potential.American politicians like to claim they believe in Jesus.Jesus does not believe in American politicians.

Don't be misled...
By theory types who don't know anything about philology -- it would be a shame if you didn't read so great a book because of uninformed, hasty criticism. (I refer to the review "Another Book on Paul".) 'Christos' isn't a transliteration but a direct translation of the Hebrew 'Messiah.' 'Dunameis' is a technical term of Aristotle's philosophy (Metaphysics Theta) and the distinction between dunameis as 'power' and dunameis as 'potential' is a central interpretive question both in Aristotle and in Paul - not a straightforward question of translation, since both English words line up with one Greek word. Agamben's philological and philosophical case on this point goes well beyond the title of his collected philosophical essays and cannot be dismissed (or even evaluated) without long engagement with the question in some detail. (Except in some very rareified sense, then, you just can't say that this is 'poetic licence,' as if it were a vague question of finding the mot juste.)

The book is the text of a seminar, and time in seminarss is limited - as indeed it is in life - and the kind of reading Agamben undertakes takes a lot of time. That he doesn't move beyond the first line of the epistle shouldn't be allowed to obscure the very important point that this is Agamben's longest, most explicit, and most detailed statement on the central open question of his positive political project: if, as he writes in the introduction to the Homo Sacer project, "one ends up identifying with an enemy whose structure one does not understand, and the theory of the State (and in particular of the state of exception, which is to say, of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the transitional phase leading to the stateless society) is the reef on which the revolutions of our century have been shipwrecked," then what is missing is just what this book provides: a theory of the vanguard partyand its formation that does not fall prey to the double-binds of the state it hopes to overthrow. You may not like the way Agamben addresses his problems, or the way he writes, but our 'Lacanian' (read: Zizekian) friend's cut-to-the-chase political voluntarism faces no stronger rebuttal than Agamben's work on the structure of law and no stronger alternative than this new book provides.

Another Book on Paul
Agamben's book is yet another offering in an ever growing list of books on Christian Theology and specifically Saint Paul. What this book endeavors to argue is that Paul was the first in the tradition of thought called Messianism. Agamben claims to give a close reading of Romans in order to theorize what Messiantic time meant for Paul. Interestingly, Agamben only offers a "close" reading of the opening line of Romans and then argues that this opening line contains Paul's entire theory of Messianism in it. Of course the argument is flimsy, and Agamben must be aware of this too, because he fills the rest of his book with citations to other Pauline epistles. He, at least, gives the opening line of Romans a word by word reading. But this too leaves much to be desired as he takes poetic license with the words themselves. For example, he argues that an entire Church tradition has been aimed at erasing the word Messiah from Paul's letters thus when Paul writes "Christos," it is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Messiah. True enough. But then he himself attempts the same feat: for example, he reads the Greek "dynameis" as "potential" rather than the more logical "power." Of course this fits in with another of his books entitled "Potentialities." I suppose Agamben is interested in erasing "power" from the pauline epistles. After much arguing, Agamben demonstrates the relevance of Paul's messianism by using it to read a poem. If Pauline Messianism is supposed to be important, I would think it should have implications for politics and society, not simply reading a poem. In the end, Agamben's Paul turns out to be some academic who was interested in philology, not in creating the church. This book takes the radicalness out of Paul, just as his other books take the radicalness out of Walter Benjamin.
Interestingly, many books are being written on Paul. Each of these book have the same argument: Paul is important for today, and we must read him provocatively, which is code for: read him as if he were not a believer in Jesus. It turns out that all of these books--Agamben's included--are more interested in taking Jesus out of Paul. I am still waiting for the truly provocative book on Paul to come out that would argue: we must read Paul as a fanatic believer in Jesus. ... Read more

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Giorgio Agamben is one of the most important and controversial figures in contemporary continental philosophy and critical theory. His work covers a broad array of topics from biblical criticism to Guantanamo Bay and the ‘war on terror’.

Alex Murray explains Agamben’s key ideas, including:

• an overview of his work from first publication to the present
• clear analysis of Agamben’s philosophy of language and life
• theories of ethics and ‘witnessing’
• the relationship between Agamben’s political writing and his work on aesthetics and poetics.

Investigating the relationship between politics, language, literature, aesthetics and ethics, this guide is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex nature of modern political and cultural formations.

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Potentialities and not Potential
This is one of the most significant collections of Agamben's writings on philosophy. Covering a wide ranging topics from the almost phenomenological opening "The Thing Itself" to Benjamin, Warburg, Hegel and Heidegger, the essays outline in different ways a fundamental and decisive break between metaphysical and post-metaphysical thinking.

The chapter on Deleuze "Absolute Immanence" is especially profound as it sets out to explain Deleuze's idea of "life" in the context of other thinkers such as Kant, Spinoza, Husserl and Heidegger. This short chapter merits a detailed study and interpretation as it represents one of the most succinct and penetrating thought into the heart of Deleuze's philosophy of life.

There are potentialities, not just one potential for each being (Aristotle).

On the Existence of Non-Being and more
This is a collection of essays written over a period of twenty years. This book is as stunning in its unexpected insights as it is diffcult to summarize. Agamben's mastery of classical philosophy and philology gives him the advantage of discussing pressingly modern issues in philosophy, history, politics and criticism as personified in the works of everyone from Aristotle to Heidegger, Benjamin, and Derrida. And that advantage is apparent not only in the ease with which he brings Aristotle's discussion of dynamis (potentiality) on the issue of redemption and Being, but also in the vividness of ancient philosophy's immediate relevance to the discussion of the messianic notion of time and history as transmitted to our age through figures such as Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem.
This collection of essays is divided into three parts: Language, History, Potentiality. Each section has under it a number of essays loosely pertaining to that category. Under the section on Histroy, for example, we have essays on Aby Warburg and the man's legacy in the refiguration of the study of art history; on Tradition; on Hegel's Absolute and Heiddeger's Ereignis; on Walter Benjamin's Angel of History; and on Benjamin's rumination on the Messiah in realtion to the Sovereign.
Heiddeger looms, as always, over much of Agamben's writing, but here so does that which has no name except as a tradition that partakes of the kabbalistic power of deep vision. The content of the book is offered here like so many spores of light, shedding light on so much of what constitutes the abyss/ground of modernity, but resisting capture in the stiff net of unimaginative academic argumentativeness. The prose is as dense as usual, reflecting the very density of the topics the author is trying to analyse. A most head-on collision of a reading.

Potenzia is the name of a Hyundai
Potentialities, or more precisely, potentia passiva. Reception and capability go together: the hand is the gift that gives itself (handshake) and receives: catch! The chapter on Heidegger and Stimmung is for me themost interesting. The word "facticity" is confusing because itimplies making (factum est verum), but is the very opposite of any making(ie, thrownness). Agamben traces in the word the common root of both fetishand faktish, and finds in the notion of Stimmung a weise, a face, or guise.There too is a passivity, and the passivity of "affect" as bothreception and potential (the ability to receive: endexetai). Heideggerwould perhaps find there xeir-, or hand: VorHANDenheit and ZuHANDenheit).Aisthesis as both an activity (-is) and a passivity (think of all the playson the word horen in S&Z). The introduction by the translator iscurious. As for the distinction of intentio prima and intentio secunda, itis the very basis of modern science and Descartes' geometry: not this conicsection (intentio prima) but every conic section (intentio secunda taken asintentio prima). That is the origin of Husserl's "sedimentation,"and hence the return to the "things themselves." In sum, much canbe learned from this book. ... Read more

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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 ... Read more

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Difficult to read, but worth it
Remnants of Auschwitz is one of Agamben's earlier works, but his cutting intelligence definitely still shows. The subject matter is the concentration camp, and more specifically, the language of the experience that follows the survivors back into the civilized world. Drawing extensively on the memoirs of Primo Levi, Agamben examines the Musselman (the Muslim), the most desperate of those interred at the concentration camps. He examines the shame of the survivors for having survived, and the powerful sympathy that they felt towards those who had to clean up the bodies in the gas chambers. Among all these threads of inquiry are the heart wrenching stories that will stay with you long after you put down this book.

I will not lie to you - this book is difficult to read. It's subject matter is the most powerful experience of the 20th century. However, Agamben's demystification of the concentration camp serves its purpose; we, as humans, should learn from this tragedy, not bury it in the past.

lost-lacanian truly lost
Having read Lost-Lacanian's review of Agamben's 'Remnants' and then read the book, I must say that Agamben did not live up to his reviewers opinion of him. The book's argument is compelling in places, but by no means intruiging overall, and far from new. If Agamben aims to adjust ethical terms by using auschwitz as limit situation (which is by no means wrong) he can only do so by 'correcting' actual survivors' testimony, and placing himself in a position of having a truer knowledge of life in the camps than those who were actually there. Auschwitz is by no means simple to write about, and Agamben's book is not worthless, though something of a bad first step towards his proposed project.

Haunting, Captivating, Unspeakable
I read this book after having read Agamben's big book "Homo Sacer." I found the analysis of bare life (homo sacer) in that book to be so fascinating that I picked up "Remnants," to see where else Agamben might go. This book is some of the most compelling theory I have read to date. The book has three major categories of analysis: the witness, the musselman (literally, the muslim), and shame. Each of these three categories have to do with the inhuman quality of being human and the speakability of that which is unspeakable. Indeed, Agamben deploys subtle thought in order to construct these internal contradictions that actually played on in the extreme case of Auschwitz. As one might expect from the title, this book is haunting. The testimonials given of the Musselman are particularly disturbing. Indeed, the experiences of Auschwitz is unspeakable. Perhaps, most startling is that Agamben argues our modern political paradigm is basically a sedated Auschwitz in which all of us can be turned into Musselmen, indeed, the musselman is that inhuman potential within our humanity. In short, this book is haunting, captivating, yet, unspeakable in the topics it tackles and the issues with which it wrestles. If you are not acquainted with Agamben, then, you might first be taken off guard by his verse and thesis style. But once you get in the flow, the form of his writing adds to its content. ... Read more

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An expensive fireside chat
First off, I've always enjoyed reading Agamben's work. But something's off here.

I heard the first essay "What is an Apparatus?" when Agamaben "read" it for a lecture 3 years ago. (A work in progress, etc, so I suppose everyone cut him a lot of slack for the sketchiness of the idea. At least, I did.)
It was exciting to hear at the time because some of the ideas seemed fresh and cogent. Since hearing the lecture, I've looked forward to reading a fully developed version later in a book form. Well, this is exactly the same lecture, not a fully fleshed out version. What a disappointment!
Agamben's ideas here are not put forward as arguments. The logic is either weak or non-existent. No footnotes, no citations. At best, there is the beginning of an attempt at an "archeology" with regard to the notion of Oikonomia/economy. "Are ya ready to rock!? A one, a two, three, and... goodnight!!"

Here, Agamben begins to, and only begins to, say something about the word 'dispositif' that Foucault used without ever explicitly defining. So, Agamben translates it into English as 'apparatus'. The word, as Foucault used it, more or less means -- if I may translate -- something like a 'reticule/web/net of conduits of power distribution/circulation'. Like a net(work), it is used to trap and entangle one in a complex web of obligations, submissions, etc. In a word, it is precisely that which makes one unfree, while giving one the means to figure that fact out.

'Dispositif' is not a thing but a webbing of things that artificially creates a system of relationship among things as Power sees fit. Thus, 'dispositif' includes just about anything and everything mad-made, and used to construct civilization: laws, architecture, religion, morality, education, etc. Not surprisingly, language itself is the first, and the most universal dispositif. In that sense, 'dispositif' is something like Power "Meridians" (as in acupuncture) that courses through the Political Body of the State. All well and good, but all that was Foucault. (Nor is the word all that mysterious if one thinks about it. Just because some Frenchmen made their careers out of being obfuscating does not mean we all must wallow in the same turgid turbidity.)

OK, so, where does Agamben want to take this? That we must figure out how to free ourselves from all forms of entrapment that dispositif has to offer. One more to add to the list of the "political tasks of the future". (Roll eyes. WTF? Didn't people like Jesus and Siddhartha do this gig already?)

Agamben, by way of expressing his hatred for the ubiquitous cellphone, introduces the idea that 'Economy' as such is the most extensive and dominant form of 'dispositif' today.
Enter the Church Fathers who coined the term 'Oikonomia' -- as a theological concept to explain how God "manages" his "household" consisting of the Trinity. It is this word, and the "Globalatinized" world that came to be structured accordingly, that ultimately came to be transmogrified into our world's obsession with "It's the Economy, stupid!" over all other concerns that affect the possibility of a well-lived life as a mortal.

Agamben is skillful with words: he pulls out obscure concepts from classical texts, and often stacks the deck to weave a story that 'seem' convincing because he tells it so well. That's first time around. But upon more critical reading, you can see that what he has to offer are 'Wouldn't-it-be-great-IF' sort of scenarios. The same kind of "fireside chat" can be found in his 'Profanations'.

My feeling is that people who like Agamben's work are now so favorably tilted to agree with him on just about everythingthat he and his publisher think he can get away with this sort of publication. Or he's just tired, needs the money, etc.

As an aside: Among musicians, instrumentalists tend to get better with age. Vocalists, on the other hand, must endure the humiliation of failure that bodily decay brings. Perhaps this is the price that must be paid by all whose fame was obtained through the sorcery of (insincere use of) words.

And now for something entirely irrelevant:

This whole 'Theory business' ("radical" thinking, etc) is in itself a 'dispositif', and of a rather insidiously deleterious kind. So many people cling to it as if it were a religion. So many people make a point of being "radical"... about thinkin' -- so they can land a university job, and collect a check every month. Sheesh, how liberating is that?

My 2 cents: Theory as a road map? OK, but where to? Roads all look like lines on a map, whatever part of the map. One line is as good as another. Stop clinging to "professional thinkers" to show you the way. BE the path YOU want to be on.

Support your local library
Agamben's latest, "What is an Apparatus?", is problematic for a number of reasons.

The first reason has to do with it as a commodity. It has become common in academic book publishing to print what are essentially essays in book form, and then to ask for an unequal price in exchange. This book is a collection of three essays. But even that is generous. The essays, so-called, are extremely short and resemble more notations than anything else. They have very little to do with each other thematically, which gives the suspicion that they were chosen haphazardly to put out this book. The 80 pages is generous, seeing the page is the size of an index card, and the font is extremely large. I venture to guess that it could have been a 30 page book. However, Stanford is asking almost $16 for it. The decision to move forward with the publication of this book owes to one of two reasons: either, the press feels Agamben's name is so recognizable that it can get away with it, or, Agamben or his associates feels he is so important that there is a clamor for his latest rough drafts.

The second real problem is theoretical. The title essay wants to make one point. Biopolitics is an analysis that has on one hand "living substance" and on the other hand "apparatuses." The application of appartassuses to living substance produces a third category "subject," but the application itself is inherently violent and trecherous. Theoretically, to believe in something called "living substance" is to point to an ahistorical phenomenon. Such a thing does not exist. Life was never this "living substance." From the moment God put Adam in the Garden of Eden, life was always "formed." Life is always itself an apparatus. If biopolitics is ultimately a justification and defense of "living substance," then it is difficult to see why anyone should get involved.

The third problem is Agamben's opinion that the worst apparatus in history is not the concentration camp or the asylum, but rather, the cell phone. Agamben admits he has murderous desires whenever he sees someone using a cell phone. This is the worst kind of argument. Only a highly compensated, globe trodding, academic would utter such ridiculous nonsense. It is indeed sad that the man who came to fame by being the most astute analyst of the camp has been reduced to a grumpy old man complaining about the new generation and their noisy technology.

Save your money, and support your local library. ... Read more

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La Nuda Vita
The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an absolute fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact entertains an intimate relation with sovereignty. The origins of the dogma of sacred life are shroud in mystery. Classical Greece, to which we owe most of our ethico-political concepts, not only ignored this principle but did not even possess a term to express the complex semantic sphere that we indicate with the single term "life". To the Romans, "the sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide." Ancient Germanic Law was founded on the concept of peace (Fried) and the corresponding exclusion from the community of the wrongdoer, who therefore became friedlos, without peace, and whom anyone was permitted to kill without committing homicide. In Romance languages, the ban signifies both the sacred insignia of sovereignty and expulsion from the community.

Life that cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed is sacred life. By extension, the sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life--life that may be killed but not sacrificed--is the life that has been captured in this sphere. Politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. Not the act of tracing boundaries, but their cancellation by the sovereign ban, is the constitutive act of the city. The relation between the sacred man and the sovereign, the exile and the citizen, bare life and political existence, is more fundamental than the Schmittian opposition between friend and enemy, fellow citizen and foreigner.

At the threshold of the modern era, bare life--the simple fact of living--begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power. This is what Michel Foucault designates by the term of biopolitics: the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a society's political strategies, so that it becomes at once possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust. The politicization of bare life constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political categories of classical thought. Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty ("Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception") is combined to Foucault's concept of biopolitics to open the possibility of a situation of unlimited power where the state of exception has become permanent and human beings are reduced to a condition of ultimate abjection. Here is how Agamben sums up his argument in one key passage:

"Only because politics in our age had been entirely transformed into biopolitics was it possible for politics to be constituted as totalitarian politics to a degree hitherto unknown". Moreover, "only because biological life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact, is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this century's totalitarian states were able to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies...Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction...From this perspective, the camp--as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception)--will appear as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize."

Without denying the brilliance and fecundity of Agamben's insights, I am left with several issues that underscore either important shortcomings in the author's reasoning, or limitations in my own reading that I will be all too ready to confess. First, Agamben's reliance on etymology tends to substitute for both historical analysis and philosophical argument. This is a feature Agamben shares with Heidegger, the philosopher who has probably had the most formative role in his thought. He rejects the theory of the ambivalence of the sacred (meaning both august and accursed, pure and impure) that runs from Durkheim to Benveniste, from Freud to Bataille, as based on failed interpretations by now discredited scholars. But it is not clear why his own understanding of homo sacer--he who may be killed but not sacrificed--, based on a single occurrence in Pompeius Festus, trumps the other interpretation he dismisses as a scientific mythologeme.

Second, Agamben shares with Foucault, his other main source of inspiration, a certain hyperbole, punctuating sober descriptions with lyrical flights into sublimity. He notes that Foucault kept clear of addressing the politics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century, and that "the inquiry that began with a reconstruction of the grand enfermement in hospitals and prisons did not end with an analysis of the concentration camp." But as Dominick LaCapra rightly argues, there may be good reasons to eschew messianic tones and histrionic hyperbole when addressing the unnameable sufferings of the victims of Nazi extermination.

Third, the hyperbolic rhetoric leads to a postapocalyptic perspective of ethical meltdown, a grey zone of indistinction where all preexisting normative and legal orders are suspended. Agamben sees the Schmittian state of exception as generalized or rampant in the post-Auschwitz world, and this perspective allows him to assert that the camp is the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living. According to this extreme contention, Auschwitz is now everywhere, including in "the zones d'attente in French international airports in which foreigners asking for refugee status are detained." There is something profoundly disturbing in the blurring of all legal and ethical categories that can lead to such absurd statements.

Agamben on the Politics of "Life"
This is a must read for any serious student of philosophy, political theory, jurisprudence and international studies. Agamben here displays his mastery of the Greek, Roman, Judaic and modern traditions through his insight into the very heart of our modern understanding of the term "life."

Using a genealogical method, he traces our understanding of "life" back to a break between "bios" and "zoe" itself, a break that is to lead step-by-step, through a series of historical accidents and judicial decisions, eventually to genocide, concentration camps and the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. Believe it or not the roots of this human tragedy can be traced back to as early as Roman antiquity - a point that would have definitely made Heidegger raise his eyebrows.

This has special significance in relation to the thoughts of Heidegger and Arendt and should provide a shock to those who still, despite our current political and economic crisis, believe that we live in an age of progress and Enlightenment.

Nothing Interesting
I don't understand why this book was even created. The author spends a lot of time mentioning other works and ideas that are key to this book, so why mention them. The author could sum up the message in this book in about 3 or 4 sentences. I guess that's why we have academics--to make simple ideas more complex. That's all you're getting with this book, and the main idea is not even that interesting. Man is sacrificed today too, just think of how many are sacrificed for dubious reasons in war. Wait, maybe i should write a book about this.

Interesting thesis, but...
Agaben has had quite some impact in the English speaking world, since publication of this book (along with Remnants of Auschwitz and the collection of essays Potentialities). Is the impact he has had warranted by his writings?
Well, one can see why his work appeals to some. The problem is that in this book and its companion, Remnants of Auschwitz, which is supposed to offer phenomenological support for the theoretical claims of Homo Sacer, Agamben fails to deliver.
As Phil Hutchinson points out in his Shame and Philosophy Agamben's theory rests upon on a flawed theory of meaning, whereby he gives an etymologically biased rendering of Derrida's notion of Deconstruction. Now, one can stay agnostic as to the merits or otherwise of Derrida (See Chapter Two of Hutchinson for a critique of Derrida) but Agamben's rendition of Deconstruction comes close to committing the genetic fallacy, by appealing to the genesis of concepts ("guilt" as originating in Roman jurisprudence is one example) so as to determine their meaning. Surely, even in Derrida's terms, this is problematic, simply replacing one philosophy of presence with another.
This book is difficult, and that gives it an air of profundity. Don't be misled. It is, I submit, not profound.
There is a live debate in analytic philosophy as to whether or not Derrida had anything of genuine originality and importance to say about meaning (see Section Five of Chapter Two of Hutchinson); however, even if one is inclined to argue that he did one would still have something of a task claiming that Agamben has anything of value to contribute to such debates. For, despite claiming to build upon Derrida's insights, Agamben seems to miss the point Derrida is trying to make. So, whether one is a Derridean or not, whether one is sympathetic to the project of Deconstruction or not, I think one will find this book ultimately deeply flawed. If you've read it and you don't find it so, please read Hutchinson's Shame and Philosophy and let us all now your thoughts then.

"Homo Sacer" and the Problem with the Ancient Model
"Homo Sacer" proposes a succinct thesis: contemporary political regimes, including both liberal democracies and totalitarian governments, have increasingly relied on a juridical space that isolates and rules over the "bare life" (zoe) of their subjects. According to the author, the founding gesture of political sovereignty does not simply grant or restrict the rights of citizens, but wields an absolute power over the life and death of men. As the argument goes, today's biopolitical machinery betrays a hidden complicity with the most detestable forms of domination, exemplified by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Whilst many forms of contemporary sovereignty might seem benign compared to this singularly horrible event, these forms share with Nazism a tendency to expunge mediating political categories such as rights and contracts, and subject biological bodies to the immediate control of a sovereign.

Reviving a forgotten subject of ancient Roman law, Agamben defines the homo sacer (sacred man) as a political unit that can be killed but not sacrificed. Anybody can terminate the life of the sacred man with impunity, and no worth can be conferred upon his being through a ritualistic sacrifice. Although the sacred man is not actually deceased, he inhabits an indeterminate ground between life and death because homicide laws do not apply to him. He lives a virtual death. His "being-toward-death" is not only ontologically implicit but juridically authorized.

The figure that completes this grim picture is the sovereign, who may at any time call for a "state of exception." That is, he may suspend the laws of the land and thus produce a collective of sacred men who occupy a threshold between nature and civilization. Paradoxically, the sacred men are included in a new juridical sphere to the very degree that they are abandoned by the law. With this insight, Agamben subverts the conventional understanding of Hobbes' state of nature. The state of nature does not designate the status of men prior to the advent of political rule. Politics, rather, incorporates the state of nature into its very essence; the setting of Hobbes' "war of all against all" becomes the very terrain on which biopolitical authority is exercised. In Agamben's scheme, there is no chaotic life outside the scope of political sovereignty. On the contrary, sovereignty is sustained by this "zone of indistinction" between law and order on the one hand, and violence and chaos on the other.

Like his intellectual precursors Benjamin, Heidegger and Arendt, Agamben seeks to demonstrate the relevance of seemingly outmoded texts to contemporary political and cultural phenomena. Agamben persuasively illustrates the contemporary manifestation of one attribute of the sovereign/sacred man pair: the sovereign's capacity to kill without being punished and, correlatively, the sacred man's potential exposure to this injustice. I believe Agamben fails, however, to unfold the implications of the other aspect of homo sacer's being, that is, his inability to be sacrificed.

From a contemporary vantage, homo sacer's "unsacrificeable" character seems not simply irrelevant, but downright erroneous. The stringency of Agamben's ancient paradigm precludes an analysis of the insidious logic of sacrifice operative today. Because Agamben detects sacrifice exclusively within the boundaries of religious ceremony, he is unable to discern the manner in which secular political ideology both reinforces the sacrificeablity of the subject and renders him utterly disposable. Agamben tells us "that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, `as lice,' which is to say, as bare life. The dimension in which the extermination took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics." But this dichotomy--between the event of the collective sacrifice on the one hand and the banalized process of extermination on the other--is less stable than Agamben implies. "Sacrifice" functions as a convenient catchword by which the sovereign may, paradoxically, reduce the subject to bare life while recuperating a sense of purpose and meaning in the midst of mass slaughter. (Thus, Truman was able to write, "I think the sacrifice of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was urgent and necessary for the prospective welfare of both Japan and the Allies.") Within the scope of a dubious utilitarian calculus, sacrifice is deemed an investment for a"better future." In this sense, sacrificeability does not mitigate or contradict the sacred man's "capacity to be killed," but makes this capacity seem both palatable and redemptive. While we are beyond an epoch in which religious sacrifice is pervasively practiced, sacrifice is nonetheless transposed into a secular key and thereby used to justify a wide range of biopolitical crimes.

Although this may seem like a minor flaw in this text, it gestures toward Agamben's larger shortcoming, that is, his inability to buttress his most provocative claim: that we, today, collectively embody the ancient figure of homo sacer. His enumeration of contemporary states of exception toward the end of the book does little to remedy this problem. For instance, he squeezes "military interventions on humanitarian grounds" into his conceptual model of the state of exception not by demonstrating a structural coincidence between homo sacer and the subjects involved in contemporary warfare, but by making an unconvincing appeal to "an undecidability between politics and biology." Agamben is at his weakest when adducing such platitudes of deconstruction and passing them off as argument. While the reader cheers for his attempts to graft the structure of ancient Roman law onto the contemporary political landscape, these lines of thought run up against the same impasse, at which Agamben invariably resorts to specious analogical thinking.

Since I haven't read Agamben's entire oeuvre, I'm in no position to comment on the extent to which he has corrected this defect in subsequent publications. But in this book, at least, it is conspicuous. So, while "Homo Sacer" advances a strikingly original thesis, it leaves the reader wishing this critical point had been proven and not merely proclaimed.
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This book consists of prose pieces that find a new form of expression for philosophy, an expression showing the inseparability of idea and prose--the very form of truth.

In this book, thought seeks a new form, a new "prose." To this end, it brings into play the strategies of the apology, the aphorism, the short story, the fable, the riddle, and all those "simple forms" that are today no longer used, but whose task it has always been to bring about in the reader an experience, an awakening--rather than attempting to put forth a theory. It is only in this sense--insofar as thought contends with the exposition of an Idea--that the problem of "thought" becomes, in these "treatises," a poetic problem. These are little ideas or forms that, in their brevity, compress that which cannot in any way be forgotten, since according to the platonic admonition, it would be put in "the shortest possible measure." ... Read more

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An idiosyncratic, ifnot pretentious, collection. Far from being a succinct analysis of his topics, he muses over and wanders about the theme he chooses. But he is high quality, a high-brow Eco, so on occasion his writing opens up new fascinations. I must say that if much has gone over my head this is because he's a professional philosopher and I'm a retail assistant.
I came to this as Agamben is admired by Baudrillard, someone I do understand and admire. But don't expect the same fireworks. ... Read more

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"One cannot overstate the importance of Agamben's work or the wide respect it enjoys among scholars in a variety of disciplines in the United States and elsewhere. This volume contains valuable essays from a variety of prominent scholars, and is the only such collection available in any language."
--Michael Hardt, Duke University

Giorgio Agamben has come to be recognized in recent years as one of the most provocative and imaginative thinkers in contemporary philosophy and political theory. The essays gathered together in this volume shed light on his extensive body of writings and assess the significance of his work fordebates across a wide range of fields, including philosophy, political theory, Jewish studies, and animal studies.The authors discuss material extending across the entire range of Agamben's writings, including such early work as Language and Death and more recent and widely acknowledged works such as Homo Sacer. Readers will find useful discussions of key concepts and theories in Agamben's work, such as sovereignty and bare life, along with more critical analyses of the political stakes and consequences of his theoretical and political interventions. ... Read more

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Radical Passivity examines the notion of passivity in the work of Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben, three thinkers of exceptional intellectual privacy whose writings have decidedly altered the literary and philosophical cultures of our era. Placing their use of passivity in the context of Heidegger and Kant, Wall argues that any philosophical understanding of Levinas's ethics, Blanchot's aesthetics, or Agamben's community must begin with an understanding of a "logic" of passivity that in fact originates (in the modern era at least) in Kant's analysis of the transcendental schema. ... Read more