Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism (Nomikoi)
Thanos Zartaloudis
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0415685893
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism is a thorough engagement with the thought of the influential Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. It explores Agamben’s work on language, ontology, power, law and criticism from the 1970s to his most recent publications.
Introducing Agamben's work to a readership in legal theory, as well as in the humanities and social sciences more generally, Thanos Zartaloudis argues that an adequate understanding of Agamben's Homo Sacer project requires an attention to his earlier philosophical writings on language, ontology, power and time. It is through this attentive and creative analysis of Agamben's work that Zartaloudis here presents a rethinking of the ideas of justice and criticism.
Capital Punishment (Historical Guides to Controversial Issues in America)
dictum that, taken on its own, is of a purely constantive nature, without which it would remain empty and inefficient. (“I swear’ and ‘I declare’ only are of value if they are followed or preceded by a dictum that complements them.) It is this constantive quality of the dictum that is suspended and put into question at the very moment that it becomes the object of a performative syntagma.7 Akin to the state of exception that was examined in Chapter 3, linguistic performativity suspends (that
subject‘as’ subject: it is the subject, capable of presenting the concept and the intuition together, that is, the one through the other. It is through and as a subjection (of the subject or agent of this representation) that the will to presentation constantly makes ‘meaning’ return. That is: the meaningful essence of meaning (l’essence sensee du sens), or signification– in knowledge, history, work, the State, the community, law, ethics, and even in art and faith, because this will is the
that it is a reflexive form; in other words, it indicates a movement of re-flextion, a departure from the self and a return to the self, like a ray of light reflected in a mirror. But who is reflected here and how is this reflection achieved?’51 Thus insofar as *se indicates a relation with itself, a reflection, it implies a reference to another pronoun or name and it is never employed by itself; that is, what reflects never has the same form as what is reflected. When Heidegger thinks the Being
governors). This economy entails the originary formal character of democratic government by representation or vicariousness (but as such it reveals also its secret solidarity with the absolutist government’s dependence on such an economic model of power). Excursus: In this regard it is difficult to underestimate the role of conciliarists from the early fifteenth century onwards, like Piere D’Ailly and Jean Gerson in Paris or indeed the later John Major and Jacques Almain, for their writings
2000: 3. Political power as we know it, […] always founds itself – in the last instance– on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context of the forms of life […] Thus, life originally appears in law only as the counterpart of a power that threatens death […] The state of exception, which is what the sovereign each and every time decides, takes place precisely when naked life – which normally appears rejoined to the multifarious forms of social life – is explicitly put into
