'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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two Agambens?
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February 9, 2006
A quote from Aviva Shemesh's insightful post about Giorgio Agamben over at Forms of Life:
The ambivalence of Agamben's philosophy, which can be read as both a curse and a cure, may be attributed to the double strategy behind his publications in recent years. On the one hand, we have the celebrated Homo Sacer series, which, up to now, is comprised of three books: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception, and Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive. These books analyze the darkness of our time, which Agamben calls "biopolitics", the political power over our naked life. However, in each of these three critiques, the attentive reader can also discern a certain light that shines in the darkness, which flashes up at the closing sections of each one of those "pessimistic" books. Because of the difficulty to recognize this light, Agamben offers a second set of investigations, those other books, which elaborate on his glad tidings: The Coming Community, The Open: Man and Animal, and the book that concerns us here, The Time That Remains.
My own relationship to Agamben's philosophy is to the political texts Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception, and Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive. I've explored these over at philosophy.com because they make sense of the new political realities of sovereignty, the law and biopolitics in liberal democracies. I find the thesis that the subject of sovereign power in modernity is not territory, but the mere fact of life, (a naked or bare life) to be a compelling one, as well as the centrality of the camp.
I do not know the other texts mentioned above. I only have The Open, which explores the way western philosophy has privileged the human through creating the great divide between human and animal based on language. From memory the classical understanding of human is animal rationale, the living being that has language or reason
I've only dipped into this text. I do not recall what I have read or what I have written So I do not know how Darwinism fits into Agamben's thesis about the ancient and modern anthropological machine. On my understanding the opposition between animal/human and human/inhuman evaporates with the abandonment of the old anthropolological perspective by the life sciences. I do recall thinking that Heideigger's Being and Time represents a backward step, as it dismisses the life sciences (ie., biology or ecology) in only a few lines in interpreting being-in-the-world. Are not animals, as distinct from stones, being-in-the-world? Should we not think beyond the human?
I'll pick The Open up again as I'm interested in biophilosophy.
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Gary, for what it's worth, I have a post on Shemesh's post and the relation between the "two Agambens" here.