Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer Series: A Critical Introduction and Guide

ISBN-13: 9781474486705 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022 / 248 str.

Colby Dickinson

Opis

In this celebrated work, Agamben provides a delicate and complex interweaving of his views on a wide range of themes including sovereignty, and the state of exception, the Aristotelean distinction between potentiality and actuality, through to the impossibility of stating the existence of language in words and the form-of-life lived beyond all forms of law.Requiring no prior knowledge of the text Colby Dickinson provides a guide to understanding why this series is one of the most significant philosophical texts of the past century.

Spis treści

Introduction: A brief outline of the Homo Sacer series; Chapter One: Religious and political implications of the Homo Sacer project; The fiction of sovereignty; Oaths, language and the divine name; On God and gods from the point of view of a modal ontology; An ontology of demand; Chapter Two: On Aristotle, actuality and potentiality; Aristotle and the problem of “potency”; Potentiality as a form of resistance; Contemplation of the inappropriable; Demand, memory and the place of thought; Chapter Three: Glory and the significance of political theology; Kingdom, government and sovereignty; The desire for order; Sovereign glory; Chapter Four: Economy and its inoperativity; The bi-polar sovereignty of identity; Subjects and the suspension of identity; New uses of the body; Messianic or hypernomian; Chapter Five: The border between the human and the animal; The fiction of the human being; The problem of anthropogenesis; Anthropogenesis and metaphysics; Chapter Six: Paul and the messianic division of division; A possible hermeneutic; The gesture of Pope Benedict XVI; Towards a negative dialectic; Dialectics at a standstill; The messianic and the future of dialectics; Chapter Seven: A form-of-life beyond the law; The temporality of fashion and art; What is a form-of-life?; Form-of-life as end goal; Mystery and desire; Conclusions; Bibliography; Index.