Search Results (18)

“Inoperative Education as Drift Between Eastern and Western Philosophies” expands upon recent notions of “inoperativity” in educational philosophy in the West through an encounter with the Taoist philosophy of Zhuangzi. Thus far, the concept of inoperativity has largely been inspired by Giorgio Agamben, the contemporary Italian critical theorist. Educational theory has taken up inoperativity in order to rethink the school as a space of free time, the student as a studier, and the gymnastic body, to name only a few. Through a comparative, philosophical analysis, inoperativity is rethought in a decisively Taoist register in order to generate three movements of inoperativity: drift as use, drift as use of uselessness, and drift as deactivation of learning (un-learning). Full article

This article delves into the theme of the death of God in Giorgio Agamben’s work from a political perspective, seeking to interpret the notion of “God” in Agamben through the concepts of “government” and “transcendence”. Although Agamben does not extensively address the theme of the death of God, my hypothesis is that by continually dealing with the ethical and political legacy of Western theology, it is possible to conceive the death of God as an unconsummated political horizon, but that it is yet to come. In this sense, the first two sections of the text provide a review of the theme of governance of men and governance of oneself in Agamben’s work, engaging in dialogue with Schmitt, Peterson, Heidegger, Foucault, and Plato, as well as the concepts of transcendence oikonomia, technology, and care. The last two sections of the text explore Agamben’s response to this diagnosis. Agamben’s philosophical proposal is presented through a dialogue with Spinoza and Stoicism, with the central concept being the idea of use of oneself, which is linked to the notions of immanence, Ungovernable, and anarchy. Full article

Among the contemporary thinkers who try to think of economics not just as having a non-empty intersection with religion but as being intrinsically religious, Giorgio Agamben occupies a singular place. Indeed, one of the main theses of his major work, Homo Sacer, is that the modern rupture between “sovereignty” and “government”—which lies at the heart of his political diagnosis of our contemporary situation—can be traced back to classical Trinitarian theology. Since this rupture is allegedly responsible for today’s Western understanding of economics, this implies that, according to the Italian philosopher, our current crisis has Christian theological roots. In this paper, I first discuss the argument put forward by Agamben to assert that, at least since the Trinitarian controversies of the second century, Christianity has become intrinsically oikonomia, that is, it understands history as the unfolding of a providential dynamic which, he claims, anticipates today’s celebrated “invisible hand” of decentralized markets. Next, I offer critical reflections upon this argument by questioning whether contemporary mainstream economics can be reduced to the “market fundamentalism” with which it is often confused. The article concludes by questioning, in turn, whether all Christian traditions boil down to the historical trend that Agamben characterizes as leading to today’s problematic mainstream economics. Full article

The relationship between minjung theology and the process of social change called secularization or theoretical and practical projects based on such processes of social change is complex. It requires more detailed discussions. Therefore, this paper seeks to reinterpret minjung theology as a theological minjung project using the methodology of new-style phenomenology of religion with a theoretical basis on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s conceptions of secularization and profanation as projects with religious intentions and orientations. Through this reinterpretation, the paper demonstrates that minjung theology in relation to secularization is a unique theological project with very different goals from those of Latin American liberation theology as well as other political and situation theologies. In order to accomplish this purpose, the paper first introduces French sociologist Émile Durkheim who has explained secularization differently from German sociologist Max Weber. It then shows that secularization is not the only way in which the sacred is reappropriated through Agamben’s discussions of secularization and profanation. To identify the passage from secularization to profanation of the concept of minjung, this paper analyzes the minjung-event theory of Byung-Mu Ahn, a representative first-generation minjung theologian. This theory emphasizes the importance of “event” as a way of understanding minjung instead of defining it conceptually. Insofar as it presents the minjung as an intrinsically unnamable, invisible, and unpredictable event, a form of religious phenomenon called “the sacred”, minjung-event theory involves an attempt to secularize Jesus-Messiah as the Minjung-Messiah. In conclusion, this paper argues that beyond the secularization of the Messiah into the Minjung, minjung-event theory moves toward a dialectical project of desacralization and re-sacralization, in which the minjung itself is profaned into an event. Full article

This paper provides an interpretation of the enigmatic concept of ‘happy life’ in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. It departs from a recognition of the ambivalence in Agamben’s use of sacred and profane terminology that informs this concept. In a decidedly Benjaminian frame, and with the help of esoteric religious images, happy life is described by Agamben as a messianic life and a blessed life, while he, at the same time, explicitly defines it as a perfectly profane life. Reading Agamben’s philosophy as aspiring to a radical transformation of our mode of being in the world, I argue that the consistency in his idiosyncratic attitude toward the sacred and profane can be shown, and new light can be shed on the nature of happy life. Beyond prevailing negative characterizations that describe what happy life is not to be, the interpretation developed in this paper argues that it positively entails an ethos of love and a practice of use. As such, the paper aims to contribute to recent attempts at analyzing the curative and promissory aspects of Agamben’s philosophy over and above its critical potential, and provide a basic outline of happy life that allows for comparative analysis with other contemporary authors on the notion of happiness. Full article

This paper addresses the claim that the social orders of Western civilization operate on the basis of the law’s presumed sovereignty over life. I demonstrate how the respective works of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and French phenomenologist Michel Henry are joined in their concern over this issue, and in their shared belief that life can be made sovereign over the law through a communal life based upon habit. At the same time, I argue that their respective conceptions of this communal life are flawed, and that they would benefit from being brought into a productive dialogue with one another. More specifically, I show that Henry’s account of a Christian communal life based upon the habitual practice of love moves at least some way toward addressing Agamben’s account of a coming community that is decidedly abstract and lacking in a substantial ethic. However, I maintain that Henry’s own account of this community is founded upon a problematic conception of potentiality that would benefit from Agamben’s study of the matter. By bringing these two figures together and drawing out the lessons that can be learnt from each of them, this work provides a more concrete and substantial account of how a coming Christian community can play a role in making life sovereign over the force of the law. Full article

How do changes in the perception of the arts stemming from activism, government policies, precarity and the ongoing crises unfolding in the world affect the autonomy of the artist? In this article, I analyse three cases of young and emerging theatre makers in Flanders and Brussels that each deal with the economic, social precarity of the arts, as well as the general precarious state of the world. Camping Sunset, Ne Mosquito Pas, and Anna Franziska Jäger and Nathan Ooms each explore new ways of maintaining autonomy, be it by collective collaboration, creating a network and an aesthetics of failures and cynicism or a performance of overpositivity and a revaluation of the comic. My claim is that these artists find autonomy in the ‘making’ of a work itself, placing poetics back at heart of artistic work instead of performance. I argue that their poetics can be described as a poetics of inoperativity (Agamben), which places resistance and criticality on the level of making theatre and performance itself instead of making large societal claims. Full article

Carl Schmitt’s controversial 1922 Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty initiated a long-standing, lively, and oft misunderstood discourse at the intersections of religious studies, theology, and political theory. Political theology as a discourse has seen something of a revival in recent decades, which has raised genuine problems of interpretation. These include questions of what is at stake in political theology, how political theology can be applied to economic discourses, and how it can be understood in relation to secularity and post-secularity. This study takes Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and Glory as a conceptual bridge that helps to situate contemporary political theologies of neoliberalism historically and theoretically. A survey of four recent political theologies of neoliberalism yields a methodological reflection on the limits and potential of political theology as a discourse. A distinction is made between descriptive-genealogical political theologies and normative-prescriptive political theologies. The former is privileged in its philosophical potential, insofar as it reveals both the contingency and genuine variety of normative-prescriptive political theologies. Full article

“The contemporary” is a phrase in frequent use in artworld discourse as a placeholder term for broader, world-picturing concepts such as “the contemporary condition” or “contemporaneity”. Brief references to key texts by philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, and Peter Osborne often tend to suffice as indicating the outer limits of theoretical discussion. In an attempt to add some depth to the discourse, this paper outlines my approach to these questions, then explores in some detail what these three theorists have had to say in recent years about contemporaneity in general and contemporary art in particular, and about the links between both. It also examines key essays by Jean-Luc Nancy, Néstor García Canclini, as well as the artist-theorist Jean-Phillipe Antoine, each of whom have contributed significantly to these debates. The analysis moves from Agamben’s poetic evocation of “contemporariness” as a Nietzschean experience of “untimeliness” in relation to one’s times, through Nancy’s emphasis on art’s constant recursion to its origins, Rancière’s attribution of dissensus to the current regime of art, Osborne’s insistence on contemporary art’s “post-conceptual” character, to Canclini’s preference for a “post-autonomous” art, which captures the world at the point of its coming into being. I conclude by echoing Antoine’s call for artists and others to think historically, to “knit together a specific variety of times”, a task that is especially pressing when presentist immanence strives to encompasses everything. Full article

This article centers on the relationship of rules (nīti) to the monastic form of life of contemporary Buddhist nuns in Sri Lanka. A genealogy of scholarship focusing on the rules of Buddhist monks and nuns has led scholars to affirm a clear-cut distinction between nuns who have the higher ordination (bhikkhunῑs) and those who do not have it. However, that distinction is not self-evident, because bhikkhunῑs and other nuns lead lives that do not foreground a juridical notion of rules. The lives of nuns focus on disciplinary practices of self-restraint within a tradition of debate about their recent higher ordinations. Whether or not they are bhikkhunῑs, nuns today refer to rules in ways that are different from that which dominant Vinaya scholarship assumes. This article proposes that it is misleading to differentiate Buddhist nuns based on an enumeration of their rules and argues that nuns’ attitudes to rules say more about attempts to authorize claims to power in current debates about their ordination than about their disciplinary practice as a communal form of life. Full article

The article analyzes the influence of the kabbalistic doctrine of Sabbatianism on the messianic philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. I argue against Simon Critchley that Agamben’s critique of the sovereign law is not inspired by Marcion’s idea of the total annihilation of law but by Sabbatai Zevi’s project of deactivating its repressive function. I further argue that Agamben also adopts the Sabbatian idea of Marranic messianism, which makes him repeatedly contaminate the Jewish tradition with foreign influences. Although this strategy is potentially fruitful, it eventually leads Agamben to overemphasize antinomianism and problematically associate all Jewish-based messianism with the radical critique of law. In the article, I demonstrate that things are more complex and even in the openly antinomian works of Walter Benjamin—Agamben’s greatest philosophical inspiration—Jewish law is endued with some emancipatory potential. Full article

In this essay, I try to conceptualise meaningful forms of resistance in the present by revisiting Sophocles’ Antigone, one of the most important texts of western literary tradition. I focus on Antigone’s compulsion to act against Creon’s decree, which turns Sophocles’ heroine into a metonymical expression of (civil) disobedience, sacrifice, and mourning—to my mind, the constitutive elements of effective resistant subjectivity. In my analysis, Antigone’s resistance is transformed from a deeply private, filial duty, essentially seen as heroic, into a rich, public expression of collectivity and solidarity. To illustrate this, I capilatise on Judith Butler’s designation of Antigone firmly in the political, and then proceed to make use of Bonnie Honig’s recalibration of her disobedience as one which transcends solitary action to express the collective, democratic feeling of a whole polis. I then mobilise a three-pronged theoretical framework. Firstly, I analyse the clash of Antigone with Creon through the prism of Jacques Derrida’s work on law and violence. Secondly, I explore the possibility of a biopolitical framing as developed by Giorgio Agamben since, at its core, the clash in the play is enacted within the parameters of a vitiated habeas corpus: from the moment Antigone confesses her misdeed she is treated by Creon, the sovereign, as a non-human—as an animal or, indeed, a miasma. In the last section of this essay, I mobilise the work of Howard Caygill with a view to analysing what I perceive as three discernible yet concatenated stages (or aspects) in the formation of Antigone’s resistant subjectivity: her full awareness of what it means to disobey (hence to resist), her acceptance of sacrifice, and, finally, her commitment to the political potentialities of mourning. Full article

The small town of Minamata is infamous for the industrial disease named after the city. This disease resulted from having ingested methyl mercury, a substance released for more than three decades by a factory owned by the Chisso Corporation. Upon entering the human body, mercury affects the nervous system, resulting in paralysis, and often leading to a slow death. Examining how such violence was inflicted on human beings and on the environment involves a complex array of economic, environmental, and sociocultural issues, all revolving around the notions of justice and responsibility. This article analyzes the local residents’ responses to the irreparable damage done to them, focusing in particular on the thoughts and actions put forward by Ogata Masato and a group called Hongan no kai, who chose to carve bodhisattva statues. Investigating the victims’ religiosity, the author argues that the praxis put forward by the Minamata people resonates with the perspective articulated by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. After having witnessed how justice had been exhausted and their case had been lost in the Japanese legal system, the victims showed their resilience in coming up with original responses, which also offer valuable insight into current discussions centered on environmental ethics. Full article

This article brings Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity, or sovereign decisionism, into conversation with the work of contemporary political theorist Giorgio Agamben, who argues that sovereign decisionism is the repressed theological foundation of authoritarian governments. As such, the article seeks to accomplish two goals. The first is to show that Sartre’s depiction of sovereign decisionism directly parallels how modern democratic governments conduct themselves during a state of emergency. The second is to show that Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity models, what Agamben calls, secularized theism. Through an ontotheological critique of Sartre’s professed atheism, the article concludes that an existential belief in sovereign decision represses, rather than profanes, the divine origins of authoritarian law. I frame the argument with a reading of Sartre’s 1943 play The Flies, which models the repressed theological underpinnings of Sartre’s theory. Full article

James Joyce’s depiction of autographic signatures resembles the “doctrine of signatures”—a pre-modern system of correspondence between medicinal plants and parts of the body. Certain aspects of this episteme reappear in the late nineteenth century. This recurrence is due, in large part, to developments in the technology of writing that threaten what Friedrich Kittler calls the “surrogate sensuality of handwriting.” Reading the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses against fin-de-siècle ideas about graphology, I argue that signature offers a unique perspective on Joyce’s taxonomic representation, which questions the boundaries between a body of text and (non)human bodies. Full article