Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben (Rome, April 22, 1942) is an internationally renowned Italian philosopher, member of a Venetian family of Armenian origin. In his work, literary, linguistic, aesthetic and political studies converge, under the philosophical determination to investigate the present metaphysical situation in the West and its possible outcome, in the current circumstances of world history and culture.

Trajectory

Agamben graduated from the University of Rome in 1965 with a paper on the political thought of Simone Weil. In the sixties he frequented a lot Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini (he worked for him as an actor in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo) and Ingeborg Bachmann. In 1966 and 1968, he attends Martin Heidegger's seminars on Heraclitus and Hegel. In 1974, he lived in Paris, and taught as a lecturer in Italian at the University of Haute-Bretagne. There he deals, among others, with Pierre Klossowski and Italo Calvino. He is then studying linguistics and medieval culture. ^{[citation needed ]}

In 1974-1975, thanks to Frances Yates, he worked in the library of the Warburg Institute, London. She immediately prepared her book Stanze, La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (1977). She was in charge of editing the Italian version of the complete works of Walter Benjamin for Giulio Einaudi, and found Benjamin's own manuscripts.

Melancholy I, Alberto Durero. Giorgio Agamben dedicates an important text in Estancias to study this engraving.

Between 1986 and 1993, he directed programs at the International College of Philosophy in Paris. Although between 1988 and 1992 he was associate professor of aesthetics at the University of Macerata. Then, from 1993 to 2003, he had the same teaching mission at the University of Verona. ^{[citation needed ]}

From the 1990s, he was already interested in political philosophy and Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics and Carl Schmitt's state of exception. With him and with a rereading of Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt, she developed a theory of the relationship between law and life with a critique of the idea of sovereignty ( Homo sacer , 1995). In 1994, he was a visiting professor at American universities (in 2003, he became a professor at New York University, a post he left in protest of George Bush Jr's policies). Since November 2003, he has been a professor of aesthetics in Venice, where he also taught iconology at the Venice University Institute of Architecture. ^{[citation needed ]}

Work

The Western Tradition

Agamben is accompanied in his texts by Aristotle, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Marx, Pablo de Tarso and Franz Kafka, among others, although also by others less known: cabalists, troubadours, fathers of the Church and medieval poets, and even by influential authors such as the jurist Carl Schmitt. His teachers or mentors are Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, to whose work he always returns. In his investigations into his images he follows in the wake of Aby Warburg. ^{[citation needed ]}

The questions it poses to the Western tradition could be simplified to how did we get to where we are? This question supposes a political judgment and a desolate diagnosis of the situation we are living in, and implies another one whose correct answer depends on survival and for which there is less and less time: What can we do, what direction to take?^{[< i>citation required]}

Tackling such complex and decisive questions involves both an investigation of key concepts in the legal, aesthetic, and cultural fields and the confrontation with the latest philosophical strategies to deal with and understand them. It also involves searching through authors of all eras, in search of those abandoned opportunities or glimpses that show the keys of an era.^{[citation required]}

This study makes Western culture appear from its origins as "astonishingly other". This is what happens in Stays. The word and the ghost in Western culture, an essay that takes a journey from medieval psychology and medicine and troubadour poetry, to Marx's concept of merchandise (Capital) and the psychoanalysis; a whole history of western production, not only the artistic one, centered on the category of "ghost", whose marginalization or oblivion has as a consequence the current inanity of art, its autonomous and spectacular character.^{[ citation required]}

Messianism

The formulation of both questions: What is our time like, how to live it?, that is, how to live up to its demands? It implies an attitude, in which Agamben deepens with his studies on Benjamin, on the Jewish tradition and its interpreters, on the Letter to the Romans of Paul of Tarsus, a messianic attitude. This would be explained as follows: if the metaphysical tradition insists on the foundation, on the origin, the messianic tradition (also Western to the extent that in our history Athens is inseparable from Jerusalem) claims compliance, now, so that this origin must be revoked.^{[citation needed]}

The revocation of the origin and therefore the annulment or transformation of its consequences would be a constant in the work of Giorgo Agamben. The return to the origins does not have the character of the simplifying identification of evil, of the discovery of a guilty deviation. It is about revealing the internal logic of a process whose updating is constant, contemporary, and whose ignorance or oblivion leads to its fatal repetition. This logic cannot be formalized according to the resources that current thinking has established; therefore, they must be questioned and dismantled, as accomplices of the order of things that they cannot explain.^{[citation required]}

This deconstructive activity (Agamben's philosophical work supposes a constant explanation with Derrida's deconstruction) also implies the search for the concept free of such original guilt, the formula destined to cross a door whose biggest obstacle is that it has always been open, to avoid the traps that metaphysics tends in language, in thought, in practice.^{[citation required]}

Biopolitics, Bare Life

In relation to the first question referred to above (How did we get to the situation in which we find ourselves?), it is necessary to describe the precise place in which world civilization finds itself: the era of biopolitics. This concept was introduced into philosophical thought by Michel Foucault. Biopolitics is the political management of life, the intervention of power in human life. This leads to asking what is the character of current thought about life, and its theological, philosophical, political path, that is, metaphysical.^{[citation required]}

This path is the one on which all the achievements of Western culture in relation to the preservation of life travel, and the titles-concepts that are granted as a safeguard in a process that supposedly leads to individual rights, the general health, social progress. This path is also marked by errors and horrors, which leads to the question if these are accidental or inherent to this process. Agamben shows that the metaphysical treatment of the vital and its political drift are inseparable from such events. His key concept in relation to this is that of Nuda vida . ^{[citation needed ]}

Nuda vida can be interpreted as a scientific or medical concept: life devoid of all qualifications, what human life has in common with that of a snail or a plant. It is immediately clear that it is a philosophical-theological idea, which underlies its subsequent medical and political appropriation. Its genealogy goes from Aristotle (nutritive life, the antecedent of the concept of vegetative life) to Gilles Deleuze, with his attempt to elaborate a concept of immanence that fully encompasses that of life.

Agamben points out how philosophy and politics evolve to make life their theme and terrain. Considering man not as a subject but as a living body, and beyond, as life in a body, is proof that the time has come for all the concepts, ideas and arguments that have served as pretexts or concealment maneuvers to show their Indeed, this is the moment of maximum danger, and perhaps of maximum opportunity as well: the time in which biopolitics coincides entirely with politics, and the state of exception with the State. In Homo sacer I. Sovereign power and bare life, Agamben affirms that the entire legal history of the West, from archaic Roman law to the modern Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen with its derivations, is based on the original link between sovereign power and (human) life exposed to death.^{[citation required]}

The question is that any humanist strategy, to reverse this fact, is disabled from the beginning. Humanism is both a detour and a means of concealing or delaying the advent of planetary management of life as naked life. The consequence of considering man as mere life is that life can be removed from any social, political, or cultural context and treated as a project, as a plan, as a historical task, as mere residue, as an object of experimentation; it can be annihilated without this entering the sphere of what is punishable.^{[citation required]}

The privileged moment of the extension of biopolitics to the planetary sphere is the concentration camp. Agamben studies this space in "What remains of Auschwitz", as the realization of what is already implicit in all the political-metaphysical evolution of the West: the place where, within the legal space of a state and at the same time At the same time outside of it, life is treated as matter without human form. This limiting circumstance puts all valid ethical references to a severe test: in the absolute nakedness of the field, the only rudiment of ethics is found in the witness and his testimony, beyond survival itself as an absolute value of the field. ^{[citation required]}

Agamben is not afraid to compare the concentration camp and the Nazi ideology that has made it possible with the current philosophical situation, as if both practices in which metaphysical divisions are annulled, however disparate and incompatible they may be, represented what most extreme in terms of possibilities of the contemporary world.^{[citation required]}

Life as the boundless matter of philosophy and life as the formless matter of criminal field work. In this way, he tries to show that humanist remedies are powerless before the extreme gesture of biopolitics, and that only by facing this as a world reality, as a paradoxical fulfillment of the promise of social and political development of the West, can resistance be considered. ^{[citation required]}

The Anyone

The possibility of a world beyond the concept of sovereignty, that is, of the gloomy abandonment of bare life, is found both in the concept of power designed by Aristotle and later lost in a long tradition of interpretations, which opens to men a margin of realization alien to power over others (potency as "potency of not") as in the Kafkaesque parables which, towards their end, invert a desperate conclusion and absurd, showing an outlet for human ingenuity. Also in the thought of Heidegger's Ereignis, which places being beyond metaphysics, or in the writing of Robert Walser, alien to ontotheological pathos, whose characters inhabit a melancholic transparency, an innocent joviality beyond salvation or death. drop. In "The coming community", Agamben characterizes, through brief texts as erudite as they are enigmatic, the post-metaphysical world.^{[citation required]}

What has changed? Remote discussions of medieval logicians take on a strange relevance, they shine as decisive debates... we are our culture, and all our possibilities, both those of catastrophe and those of salvation, are outlined in the text of the tradition, which must be readable. and interpreted, not as meaningless writing, indistinguishable from life itself (Agamben's reproach to Derrida's deconstruction: he extends the domain of "meaningless validity" to the entire text of Western culture)., but precisely in search of the answers we need.^{[citation needed]}

These answers are readable at the moment when the divided world of metaphysics comes to an end, when in the face of what is happening we are "life without form". But this desubjectivation does not erase, for example, the possibility of an ethic, but on the contrary: ethics is only possible in the absence of a historical or biological task, of vocation or essence. What is proper to man is nothing but his impropriety, and this must finally be assumed as a singularity without identity. The being that comes, the Anyone, is not "the being does not matter which, but the being such that, whatever it is, matters...".^{[citation needed]}

Works

Translations in Spain

• Stays. The word and the ghost in Western culturePre-Textos. Valencia 1995. Translation: Tomás Segovia. ISBN 84-8191-053-8.
• Homo priest. The sovereign power and the nude lifePre-Textos. Valencia 1998. Translation: Antonio Gimeno Cuspinera. ISBN 84-8191-206-9.
• What's left of Auschwitz. The file and the witness. Homo Priest III. Pre-Texts. Valencia 2000. Translation: Antonio Gimeno Cuspinera. ISBN 84-8191-288-3.
• Means endless. Policy notesPre-Textos. Valencia 2001. Translation: Antonio Gimeno Cuspinera. ISBN 84-8191-358-8.
• Language and death. A seminar on the place of negativityPre-Textos. Valencia 2002. Translation: Tomás Segovia. ISBN 84-8191-491-6.
• State of emergency. Homo priest II, 1Pre-Textos. Valencia 2003. Translation: Antonio Gimeno Cuspinera. ISBN 84-8191-625-0.
• Man without content. Altera. Barcelona 2005. ISBN 84-89779-62-7.
• Open it. The man and the animal. Pre-Texts. Valencia 2005. Translation: Antonio Gimeno Cuspinera. ISBN 84-8191-673-0.
• Prophecies. Anagram. Barcelona 2005. Translation: Edgardo Dobry. ISBN 84-339-6232-9.
• The community that comes. Pre-Texts. Valencia 2006. Translation: José Luis Villacañas, Claudio La Rocca and Ester Quirós. ISBN 84-8191-771-0.
• The time remaining. Comment to the Letter to the Romans. Trotta. Madrid 2006. Translation: Antonio Piñero Sáenz. ISBN 84-8164-834-5.
• I'd rather not. Bartleby, the writer. With others. Pre-Texts. Valencia...ISBN 84-8191-284-0.
• The Power of Thought. Anagram. Barcelona 2008. Translation: Flavia Costa and Edgardo Castro. ISBN 978-84-339-6271-3.
• Ninfas, Pre-Textos, Valencia 2011.
• The Sacrament of Language. Archaeology of the oath (Homo priest II, 3). Pre-Textos, Valencia 2011. Translation: Antonio Gimeno Cuspiner.
• nakedness. Barcelona, Anagrama, 2012. Translation: Mercedes Ruvituso, María Teresa D'Meza and Cristina Sardoy. ISBN 978-84-339-6332-1.
• The fire and the story. Madrid, Sexto Piso, 2016. Translation: Ernesto Kavi. ISBN 978-84-16358-92-2.

Translations in Argentina

• State of emergency. Homo priest II, 1, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2004. Translation: Flavia Costa and Ivana Costa. ISBN 978-987-1156-15-4.
• Prophecies, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2005. Translation: Flavia Costa and Edgardo Castro. ISBN 987-1156-34-0.
• Open it. The man and the animal, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2006. Translation: Flavia Costa and Edgardo Castro. ISBN 987-1156-50-2.
• The Power of Thought, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2007. Translation: Flavia Costa and Edgardo Castro. ISBN 978-987-1156-69-9.
• The Kingdom and the Glory. Homo priest II, 4, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2008. Translation: Flavia Costa and Edgardo Castro. ISBN 978-987-1156-97-9.
• Symbol rerum: about method, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2009. Translation: Flavia Costa and Mercedes Ruvituso. ISBN 978-987-1556-17-5.
• The Sacrament of Language. Archaeology of the oath. Homo priest, II, 3, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2010. Translation: Mercedes Ruvituso. ISBN 978-987-1556-30-4.
• Children and history, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2011. Translation: Silvio Mattoni. ISBN 978-987-9396-53-7.
• nakedness. Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2011. Translation: Mercedes Ruvituso, María Teresa D'Meza and Cristina Sardoy. ISBN 978-987-1556-55-7.
• Opus Dei. Homo priest, II, 5, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2012. Translation: Mercedes Ruvituso. ISBN 978-987-1923-00-7
• Pilate and Jesus, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2013. Translation: Maria Teresa D’Meza. ISBN 978-987-1923-74-8.
• High poverty. Monastic rules and life forms. Homo priest IV, 1, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2013. Translation: Flavia Costa and María Teresa D’Meza. ISBN 978-987-1923-16-8.
• The mystery of evil. Benedict XVI and the End of Times, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2013. Translation: Maria Teresa D’Meza. ISBN 978-987-1923-28-1.
• What is a device?, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2014. Translation: Mercedes Ruvituso. ISBN 978-987-1923-88-5.
• The idea of prose, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2015. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía. ISBN 978-987-3793-54-7.
• The end of the poem, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2016. Translation: Edgardo Dobry. ISBN 978-987-3793-62-2.
• Gusto, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2016. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía. ISBN 978-987-3793-86-8
• Stasis. Civil war as a political paradigm. Homo priest II, 2, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2017. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía. ISBN 978-987-3793-99-8
• Use of the bodies. Homo priest IV, 2, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2017. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía. ISBN 978-987-4159-03-8
• What is philosophy?, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2017.Translation: Mercedes Ruvituso. ISBN 978-987-4159-19-9
• Means endless. Policy notes, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2017. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía. ISBN 978-987-4159-15-1
• Karman. Short treatise on action, guilt and gesture, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2018. Translation: Mercedes Ruvituso. ISBN 978-987-4159-33-5
• Homo Priest. Sovereign power and naked life, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2018. Translation: Mercedes Ruvituso. ISBN 978-987-4159-02-1
• What remains of Auschwitz, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2018. Translation: Edgardo Castro. ISBN 978-987-4159-10-6
• Self-portrait in the study, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2018. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía and María Teresa D'Meza. ISBN 978-987-4159-36-6
• The adventure, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2018. Translation: Mercedes Ruvituso. ISBN 978-987-4159-32-8
• What's real?, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2019. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía. ISBN 978-987-4159-61-8
• Creation and anarchy, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2019. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía and María Teresa D'Meza. ISBN 978-987-4159-64-9
• Polychinela or divertimento for boys, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2019. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía. ISBN 978-987-4159-71-7
• Where are we at? The epidemic as a policy, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2020. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía and María Teresa D'Meza. ISBN 978-987-8388-05-02
• Studiolo, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2021. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía and María Teresa D'Meza. ISBN 978-987-8388-57-1
• When the house burns, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2022. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía and María Teresa D'Meza.
• Hölderlin's madness, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2022. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía and María Teresa D'Meza.
• Pinocchio. The adventures of a puppet twice commented and three times illustrated, Buenos Aires, Editorial Adriana Hidalgo, 2022. Translation: Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía.

Translations in Mexico

• The mystery of evil. Benedict XVI and the End of Times, Fractal Number 68, Mexico 2013. Translation and notes: Ilya Semo Bechet and Armando Cintra Benítez. http://www.mxfractal.org/RevistaFractal68GiorgioAgamben.htm
• The indecent girl. Myth and Mystery of Kore (with Monica Ferrando), Mexico, Sixth Floor, 2014. Translation: Ernesto Kavi. ISBN 978-84-1560-147-0.

Agamben Bibliography

• Alfonso Galindo Hervás, Politics and messianism. Giorgio Agamben, New Library, Madrid, 2005
• Edgardo Castro, Giorgio Agamben. An archeology of power, UNSAM edita, Buenos Aires, 2010
• Flavia Costa, “The politics that comes. A reading by Giorgio Agamben”, journal Redes n° 7, Faculty of Education of the Department of Humanities of the University of Santiago de Cali, Colombia, March 2009, pp. 185-206. ISSN 1692-6803
• Flavia Costa, Breaking Policy. Escaparate, Santiago de Chile, 2010. pp. 21-36. ISBN 956-7827-89-3.
• Flavia Costa, “The government machine. Sovereignty, government, secularization” in Ma. Elena Sierra Castillo (comp). Biopolitics.Reflections on the governance of the individual. S fakeS Editores, Madrid, 2010.
• Jacopo D'Alonzo, "The Origin of Life: Politics and Language in the Thought of Giorgio Agamben", in Revista Pléyade (12), 2013, pp. 93-112.
• C. Crosato, Critica della sovranità. Foucault and Agamben. Tra il superamento della theoria moderna della sovranità e il suo ripensamento in chiave ontologica, Orthotes, 2019

Filmography

His only film role was in the film The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which he played the apostle Philip.^{[citation required]}