...Claire Colebrook Throughout his philosophical, political, exegetical, and aesthetic writings, Giorgio Agamben refers ceaselessly to the concept of potentiality. Only if we understand this concept, and the peculiar status it has for the definition of the human, will we be able to forge a new...

... task of witnessing the inhuman. In the first part, Giorgio Agamben's ethics of testimony is situated in his general project of a deconstruction of what he sees as the inherently dangerous metaphysics of Western logos , conducive to the destructive biopolitics that found in Auschwitz its fateful...

...Krzysztof Ziarek Placed side by side, Giorgio Agamben's The Open and Martin Heidegger's “Letter on Humanism” might read like two versions of the critical question about the aftermath of humanism. For Agamben, the answer lies in the rendering inoperative of the anthropological machine of humanism...

...Catherine Mills This essay examines the notion of “playing with law” that Giorgio Agamben proposes in State of Exception and, more broadly, his understanding of “play” as developed in works such as Infancy and History . In this latter text, Agamben provides his most extended discussion of play...

...Eleanor Kaufman This essay examines the way in which Giorgio Agamben's work is marked by a persistent inquiry into that space where what appears as one thing is in fact two. This dynamic characterizes his “state of exception” as well as the notion of “messianic time” central to his book...

...Penelope Deutscher Since it has not to date arisen as a question, is it possible to open a debate with Giorgio Agamben concerning the role of women's bodies in the politicization of life? The woman about whom a ruling is passed forbidding an abortion is sometimes figured as a potentially murderous...

...Idris Robinson This article argues that a theory of destituent power must imply a twofold strategic orientation toward the state, based simultaneously in desertion and destruction. The article opens by first situating Giorgio Agamben's account of destituent power within the broader framework...

...David E. Johnson Duke University Press 2007 David E. Johnson As If the Time Were Now: ​ Deconstructing Agamben This small word, “as,” might well be the name of the true problem, not to say the target, of deconstruction...

...Giorgio Agamben Before we can think what a destituent power might be, we must first dispense with a concept that has surreptitiously dominated Western thought and politics, namely, that of realization. By realization , we understand the idea that political action consists in realizing in practice...

... understandings of thought have dramatic implications for contemporary selfhood, sociality, and political life. This essay situates their understandings of animality, selfhood, and thinking through the work of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben's concept of the “anthropological machine” offers an alternative framing...

...Andrew Benjamin This essay presents a critical engagement with Giorgio Agamben's conception of “bare life.” Central to the argument is that bareness is produced, and therefore, that which is produced as “bare life” is always marked in advance by the process. What this means is that bareness cannot...

...Alison Ross This introduction places the key themes of Giorgio Agamben's suite of works on biopolitics next to some of the concerns and problems that motivate the work of Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy. It considers the interrelation between Agamben's ontological mode of approach to political...

...Katherine Nelson This article offers an account of the anarchy of power in Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer corpus. From this perspective, governmental power is anarchic in the twofold sense of lacking an independent legitimating foundation and being divided between ontology (what...

...Ewa Płonowska Ziarek In this essay, I argue that Giorgio Agamben's revision of biopolitics poses the pressing political question of whether bare life itself can be mobilized by emancipatory movements. Yet, in order to develop the possibilities of resistance, we need to reconsider first of all...

... predisposition, describing himself as “irreligious by heredity,” and the authority of his familial orientations—secular, schoolteacher grandpar- ents who encouraged in him “the desire to crush the clerical infamy” (SP, 1). At the same time, though, he (like Taubes and Agamben) feels compelled to assert...

..., the Inhuman, and the crimes against humanity. The overturn is most clearly illustrated by Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of biopolitics, 5 notably in Homo Sacer. Agamben transforms Arendt’s equation—or para- dox—through a series of substitutions that equate it, first, with Foucault’s...

... modern thought and action, invented in now long gone contexts, are obsolete. Giorgio Agamben's ( 2005 : 23) Pauline dictum that “passing away is the figure of this world” has become the common sense of an entire generation. Still, it is unclear what or who will emerge from the current chaos. While...

... the dwelling of potentiality. The essay begins by examining will, risk, and exhaustion in Foucault’s late works, then turns Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on potentiality and thoughts on will, effort, and mental habit from the American pragmatists William James and Charles Sanders Peirce. © 2012 Duke...

... in Spartakus , bringing this theory more in line with current epochal conditions. In doing so, they presage and lay the groundwork for the theory of destituent power developed in recent decades by Giorgio Agamben. kaarons@govst.edu Copyright 2023 by Duke University Press 2023 Furio Jesi Revolt...

... gift but one capable of destituting the gift‐debt system. Drawing from Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the witness, the final section shows how the subjective structure of martyrdom is that of the witness insofar as a gesturality occurs in it that takes the form of a desubjectification...