Giorgio Agamben (Routledge Critical Thinkers)

Giorgio Agamben (Routledge Critical Thinkers)

Alex Murray

Language: English

Pages: 164

ISBN: 0415451698

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet the exclusion of both bare life and of the voice is illusory. They are always reincorporated in being the negative foundation of politics and language that plague both. So the political task of developing politics beyond bare life is intrinsically linked to developing a language that isn’t trapped by a negative relation to the voice. Both of these tasks are intrinsically tied for Agamben, and the most valuable political action is one based in an undoing of the dominant languages of power. In.

Explore the potential for uncovering an iconographic history of Western art that didn’t pay attention to the auratic and isolated space of the aesthetic object, but instead saw these images as part of a much larger constellation. Instead of examining the psychology of the painter, or the fixity of the image, he attempted to account for the movement between images. He called his science of art history Mnemosyne, the Greek word for memory, with its guiding principle an attempt to ‘map’ European.

Utilitarian philosophy, there was always a question over whether the ends justified the means. Could one justify violence as a means if the ends were noble enough? Politics is often seen as the sphere in which the means/ends relation is played out. This can be mapped onto Aristotle’s distinction in the Nichomachean Ethics between production (poeises) and action (praxis). Agamben turns to the Roman scholar Varro (116–27 BC) who introduces a third concept – gesture. As Agamben states, ‘if producing.

Moment in Bergman’s film Monika when the movie star suddenly stares directly into the camera, that is, directly at us. Agamben points out that this technique is now perfectly banal as we have become so used to it from pornography and advertising. What pornography and the fashion model in advertising show us is that there are always more images behind each image, hence their emptiness, and Agamben returns to the image of the pornstar staring into the camera on a number of occasions as.

Or obscure the question of Auschwitz: ‘Some want to understand too much and too quickly; they have explanations for everything. Others refuse to understand; they offer only cheap mystifications. The only way forward lies in investigating the space between these two options.’ While one could speculate as to those Agamben has in mind here, his goal is clear – to understand a small aspect of the Holocaust – the testimonials written by those who survived. Agamben describes this aim in a modest.

Download sample

Download