وسایل بی هدف: یادداشت‌هایی در باب سیاست

by Giorgio Agamben, امید مهرگان (Translator), صالح نجفی (Translator)

Political Science/Critical Theory

An essential reevaluation of the proper role of politics in contemporary life. A critical rethinking of the categories of politics within a new sociopolitical and historical context, this book builds on the previous work of the distinguished political philosopher Giorgio Agamben to address the status and nature of politics itself. Bringing politics face-to-face with its own failures of consciousness and consequence, Agamben frames his analysis in terms of clear contemporary relevance. He proposes, in his characteristically allusive and intriguing way, a politics of gesture-a politics of means without end.

Among the topics Agamben takes up are the "properly" political paradigms of experience, as well as those generally not viewed as political. He begins by elaborating work on biopower begun by Foucault, returning the natural life of humans to the center of the polis and considering it as the very basis for politics. He then considers subjects such as the state of exception (the temporary suspension of the juridical order); the concentration camp (a zone of indifference between public and private and, at the same time, the secret matrix of the political space in which we live); the refugee, who, breaking the bond between the human and the citizen, moves from marginal status to the center of the crisis of the modern nation-state; and the sphere of pure means or gestures (those gestures that, remaining nothing more than means, liberate themselves from any relation to ends) as the proper sphere of politics. Attentive to the urgent demands of the political moment, as well as to the bankruptcy of political discourse, Agamben's work brings politics back to life, and life back to politics.

Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collge International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Language and Death (1991), Stanzas (1992), and The Coming Community (1993), all published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Vincenzo Binetti is assistant professor of Romance languages and literature at the University of Michigan. Cesare Casarino teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.

Theory Out of Bounds Series, volume 20

Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Theory, Nonfiction, History, Italian Literature, Art

143 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.

In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.

He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.

Reviews

[Amirsaman · Rating 4 out of 5]

ریویی فشرده از چند فصل کتاب نوشته بودم، اما بعد از شنیدن درس‌گفتار صالح نجفی درباره‌ی همین کتاب، پاکش کردم. بنظرم یادداشت‌هایی از این کلاس‌ها به مراتب راه‌گشاتر خواهند بود.

یک فرم-حیات داریم و یک حیات برهنه. حیات برهنه یعنی وقتی دو نوع حیات را از هم جدا کنیم؛ بیوس و زویی. [زویی در نظر یونانیان، واقعیت ساده‌ی زیستن بود که مشترک بین همه‌ی موجودات زنده. و بیوس، نحوه‌ی زیستن مختص یک فرد بود.]
اما فرمِ زندگی، در مقابل فرم‌های زندگی است؛ یعنی جدانشدگی فرم از زندگی و بالقوه ماندن آن، در برابر حالت‌ها و ویژگی‌های از قبل معین است. یعنی وقتی کاری را می‌کنیم، مثلا فکر می‌کنیم، نه به خاطر یک هدف، یک به خاطر خود آن کار، فک کردن، آن را انجام دهیم.
خط تیره‌ی بین فرم و زندگی، دقیقا به همین جدایی‌ناپذیری اشاره دارد. در عوض، جدا شدنش و انتخاب یکی از فرم‌ها برای زندگی، زیست‌-سیاست است و اسیرکردن انسان و شکستن زندگی.
برای زندگی شاد هم، به تعبیر آگامبن، باید زندگی را بدون کیفیت از پیش معین داشت، یعنی برای زندگی حرمتی قائل نشد.

بنا به ‌نظر ارسطو، دو نوع فعالیت داریم؛ پراکسیس و پوئسیس. پراکسیس، کنشی است که هدفش در خودش است و وسیله‌ای نمی‌شناسد. پوئسیس (که نزدیک به شعرگفتن است)، وسیله‌ای است که هدفش خودش نیست، و ارزشش در محصولی است که تولید می‌کند.
ژست، نوع سوم فعالیت است. نه هدفی در خود است، نه وسیله‌ای برای رسیدن به هدفی خارج از خود. بلکه وسیله‌ای که بخاطر وسیله‌بودن شناخته می‌شود.
بنظر آگامبن، جایگاه سیاست و اخلاق در ژست است. یعنی سیاست به انسان نشان می‌دهد که ژست مطلق است، وسیله‌ی محض.
ژست‌ها مصادره می‌شوند؛ توسط پزشکی، حقوق، قانون، و صنعت. اما بعد از این فروپاشی، ژست‌ها --با سینما-- دوباره بازمی‌گردند.
از گی‌ دوبور نقل می‌کند که دیگر هرکس زندگی‌اش را تماشا می‌کند، و این است بیگانه‌سازی. به تعبیری ما با ژست‌هایمان ادای نمایش‌هایی که دیده‌ایم را درمی‌آوریم. زندگی به یک نمایش تبدیل شده که ما دم‌به‌دم نگاهش می‌کنیم.
بنابراین ژست‌ها دیگر از تجربه‌ی روزانه‌ی ما جدا شدند و ما به شکل بیگانه از ژست‌ها استفاده می‌کنیم.

آگامبن در خصوص اخلاق می‌گوید باید بپذیریم که هیچ ذات/رسالت تاریخی یا معنوی/تقدیر بیولوژیکی‌ای وجود ندارد که انسان‌ها باید آن را از بالقوه به فعل دربیاورند. یعنی کانت‌وار، می‌گوید انسان باید بتواند امکانِ اخلاقی‌بودن داشته باشد. هر هدفی خارج از کاری که انجام می‌دهیم، اخلاق را از بین می‌برد. برای اخلاقی‌بودن باید هر تقدیر از پیش تعیین‌شده را کنار گذاشت. فقط ژست است که این قلمرو را باز می‌کند، یعنی وسایل محض، یعنی سیاست، یعنی ژست‌بودن مطلق همه‌ی انسان‌ها.
پس مهمْ موفقیت و شکست و شناخته‌شدن نیست، بلکه صرفِ کاتالیزوربودن یک اتفاق است که اهمیت دارد. سوژه با ژست است که می‌تواند کاتالیزور باشد. پس فقط حق تنبل‌بودن (کاری‌نکردن) است که باید ازش دفاع کرد و مهم‌ترین حق است. برای استفاده از چیزی، باید مالکش نبود. پس برای بدست آوردن زندگیِ به یغما رفته‌مان، باید از مالکیت خصوصی حرمت‌زدایی ‌کرد. مثل رابطه‌ی عاشقانه که با صحبت از مالکیت است که پایان می‌یابد.

[Negar · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐

جستارها به قسمی فلسفیدنِ شاعرانه می مانست،گونه ای سوگواری بر سراسر کتاب سایه افکنده بود.
مثل فلسفیدن بر لبه پرتگاه یا حتی فروغلتیده در اعماق مواد مذابی که هرآنچه مایه ی قوام زیست انسانیست را بلعیده است.
جستار هایی در باب زندگی ـصورت ،مردم ، اردوگاه و چهره الهام بخش تر و آموزنده تر بودند (برای من با توانایی فهم امروزم)
به گمانم راجع به هر یک از موضوعات بحث شده در کتاب با دقت و به تفصیل با بررسی جامعه امروزمان میتوان اندیشید.
گونه ی نگاه آگامبن را به طور کلی میپسندم اما نگاه آرنت ( که فلسفی تر است) و یاسپرس(که پخته تر است) را ترجیح می دهم.

[Viktor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nok det mest usammenhængende af Agambens værker, som jeg endnu har læst. Nogen steder virker det også noget redundant, når man har læst Homo Sacer I. Dog er det dele som Noter om gestus og Randnoter til "Kommentarer til skuespilsamfundet" som gør Agamben så skøn at læse. Denne samling af tekster fungerer også godt som konkret eksemplificering af hans filosofi, da han tager udgangspunkt i adskillige historiske og - for datiden (1990erne) - samtidige begivenheder. Dette er nok også det mest direkte normative værk læst af ham, med konkrete opfordringer til, hvad mennesket og samfundet burde stræbe efter (ahem, en fuldstændig lykke; udlevelse af menneskets potentialitet). Jaja...

[Mohammad Mirzaali · Rating 3 out of 5]

خیلی از ایده‌های کانونی کار فکری جورجو آگامبن بزرگ را می‌توان در این مجموعه مقالات پی گرفت؛ حیات برهنه، زیست‌سیاست، هوموساکر، وضعیت استثنایی. ترجمه‌های امید مهرگان به قدری ضعیف‌تر از ترجمه‌های صالح نجفی بودند که با خواندن آغاز یک مقاله می‌شد حدس زد ترجمه‌ی چه کسی ست

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book of essays by Agamben. Not really that necessary in light of his other writings. However, his essay on the refugee is on point, and very important in today's political climate.

[Joe Olipo · Rating 2 out of 5]

"[Books] should be used rather as manuals, as instruments of resistance or exodus— much like those improper weapons that the fugitive picks up and inserts hastily under the belt (according to a beautiful image of Deleuze)"

I am coming more and more to appreciate this perspective - though better to extend Agamben's definition also to fiction. Abandoning, unfortunately, the concept of the 'final book' - Rescuing Thomas Bernhard from the compost heap...

The essays of the first and third sections border on plagiarism - frequently composed of direct quotation of earlier sections of the Homo Sacer project (how else would Agamben and Zizek sustain their productivity in the competitive environment of the pop-culture-intellectual) - therefore not much worth reading except as summary/review for one who has progressed this deeply into the oeuvre. Yet, as always, Agamben appears pellucid-correct, at least in the essays of the middle section on Gesture as Gag - though, characteristically, both over-extending himself and not coming far enough: the Word is also a gag - there is more to be said of image/film.

ON GESTURE:

If we understand the "word" as the means of communication, then to show a word does not mean to have at one's disposal a higher level (a metalanguage), starting from which we could make that word an object of communication; it means, rather, to expose the word in its own mediality, in its own being a means, without any transcendence. The gesture is, in this sense, communication of a communicability. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality. However, because being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language; it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term, indicating first of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech, as well as in the sense of the actor's improvisation meant to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak. From this point derives not only the proximity between gesture and philosophy, but also the one between philosophy and cinema. Cinema's essential "silence" (which has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a sound track) is, just like the silence of philosophy, exposure of the being-in-language of human beings: pure gesturality. The Wittgensteinian definition of the mystic as the appearing of what cannot be said is literally a definition of the gag. And every great philosophical text is the gag exhibiting language itself, being-in-language itself as a gigantic loss of memory, as an incurable speech defect.

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The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them.
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if producing is a means in view of an end and praxis is an end without means, the gesture then breaks with the false alternative between ends and means that paralyzes morality.
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Nietzsche represents the specific moment in European culture when this polar tension between the obliteration and loss of gestures and their transfiguration into fate reaches its climax. The thought of the eternal return, in fact, is intelligible only as a gesture in which power and act, naturalness and manner, contingency and necessity become indiscernible (ultimately, in other words, only as theater).
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During the same years, Aby Warburg began those investigations, the main focus [of which] was the gesture intended as a crystal of historical memory, the process by which it stiffened and turned into a destiny, as well as the strenuous attempt of artists and philosophers (an attempt that, according to Warburg, was on the verge of insanity) to redeem the gesture from its destiny through a dynamic polarization.
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The atlas Mnemosyne that he left incomplete and that consists of almost a thousand photographs is not an immovable repertoire of images but rather a representation in virtual movement of Western humanity's gestures from classical Greece to Fascism. The single images should be considered more as film stills than as autonomous realities (at least in the same way in which Benjamin once compared the dialectical image to those little books, forerunners of cinematography, that gave the impression of movement when the pages were turned over rapidly).

THE FACE:

Inasmuch as it is nothing but pure communicability, every human face, even the most noble and beautiful, is always suspended on the edge of an abyss. This is precisely why the most delicate and graceful faces sometimes look as if they might suddenly decompose, thus letting the shapeless and bottomless background that threatens them emerge. But this amorphous background is nothing else than the opening itself and communicability itself inasmuch as they are constituted as their own presuppositions as if they were a thing. The only face to remain uninjured is the one capable of taking the abyss of its own communicability upon itself and of exposing it without fear or complacency.
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"Because human beings neither are nor have to be any essence, any nature, or any specific destiny, [...] what remains hidden from them is not something behind appearance, but rather appearing itself, that is, their being nothing other than a face. The task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear."

INTERSECTION WITH ART; idea for portraiture (face: eyes and mouth vs nose and ears); cinema (gesture: element of awakening)

Just as the Star mirrors its elements and the combination of the elements into one route in its two superimposed triangles, so too the organs of the countenance divide into two levels. For the life-points of the countenance are, after all, those points where the countenance comes into contact with the world above, be it passive or active contact. The basic level is ordered according to the receptive organs; they are the face, the mask, namely forehead and cheeks, to which belong respectively nose and ears. Nose and ears are the organs of pure receptivity.... This first triangle is thus formed by the midpoint of the forehead, as the dominant point of the entire face, and the midpoint of the cheeks. Over it is now imposed a second triangle, composed of the organs whose activity quickens the rigid mask of the first: eyes and mouth.1
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Even the Mona Lisa could be seen not as immovable and eternal form, but as fragment of a gesture or as still of a lost film wherein it would regain its true meaning. And that is so because a certain kind of litigatio, a paralyzing power whose spell we need to break, is continuously at work in every image; it is as if a silent invocation calling for the liberation of the image into gesture arose from the entire history of art. This is what in ancient Greece was expressed by the legends in which statues break the ties holding them and begin to move.
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Cinema [...] is the dream of a gesture. The duty of the director is to introduce into this dream the element of awakening.

AGAMBEN JOINS THE DESPISERS OF GRIMACE:
Visuddhimagga of the Theravada Canon: "One who has the habit of making grimaces is a grimacer. The grimacer's state is grimacery. - improper mode of bearing
Adorno and Horkheimer: The grimace is a lie because it admits too readily the complaint
Agamben: "it has nothing to express— thus withdrawing silently behind itself — it turns into a grimace, which is what one calls character."- making communicability into a character

QUOTES

"It is well known how peremptorily Spinoza bars repentance from any right of citizenship in his Ethics. The one who repents — he writes — is twice disgraceful: the first time because he committed an act of which he has had to repent, and the second time because he has repented of it."
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"Benjamin once wrote that, at crucial moments of history, the final blow must be struck with the left hand"

[Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Refugee That Therefore I Am

A great primer on the political stakes at play in Agamben’s thought. His attempt to revive the distinction between zoē (naked life, or the basic given of living itself) and bios (political life, or the form-of-life distinct to the a specific individual or group) takes centre stage throughout, always returning to the task of opening up the space for a future politics conscious of this division.

Prescriptions are, whether concrete or more abstract, definitively off the table here (beyond the less-than-revelatory assertion that only thought can rectify our situation); these essays are, to the contrary, simply concerned with demonstrating, sometimes rather obliquely, sometimes more plainly, the ramifications of the sinister merging of zoē with bios in political discourse and praxis.

“human beings… are the only beings for whom happiness is always at stake in their living”

In the world of being-with-others, the gambit of happiness constitutes the irreducible, intrinsically political, form-of-life common to all humans. Management and control of this dimension falls to the consolidation of political power, which is only established upon inaugurating and enforcing the severance between bios and zoē, between form-of-life, or political life, and naked life.

The latter is, for the sovereign, both limit and foundation of its power; legally, it exists beyond the reach of political control, but for this very reason, the decision to demarcate the threshold of the extra-political beyond—or, in other words, the state of exception—is what, following Schmitt, defines the sovereign as such.

When it comes down to it, what separates modern politics from classical politics for Agamben can only be measured quantitatively, not qualitatively. All the forms of political organisation from Athens to today are predicated on this originary split between zoē and bios; what differentiates the political stage of modern capitalism from Athenian democracy is really the degree to which this split is not only obscured but indeed internalised into the constitution of sovereign power, as the state of exception steadily morphs from a hovering possibility into the defining feature of governance.

“… the birth of the camp in our time appears to be an event that marks in a decisive way the political space itself of modernity”

When the ostensibly temporary state of exception acquires a degree of permanence and institutional consolidation, the quotidian political life in a mode of existence ever closer in resemblance to the structural characteristics of the concentration camp. It’s all too easy to dismiss this comparison as another example in a rich heritage of provocative continental philosophers having their way with delicate metaphors, but we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we failed to pay heed to Agamben’s careful and illuminating point here. If we follow him in recognising that the camp “is the space that opens up when the state of exception becomes the rule”, then his sinister conclusion hardy appears all that far fetched.

The camp is the absolute, unmediated zone of ambiguity, where the difference between zoē and bios is resolved into a false identity. Within this paradigm, the sovereign is endowed with the capacities, means, and incentives to meddle directly in the biopolitical constitution of the nation. For Agamben, this development reflects the failure of the political system to rely upon the old mechanisms and traditions for regulating the biopolitical life over which they govern, leading them to intervene in such a way which betrays their flailing desperation in the process.

What we have here is essentially a wonderfully idiosyncratic interpretation of the dynamics at play in the implicitly fascist forces rising to the fore through domination and demagogy. In a time of unparalleled insecurity, the bourgeoisie is desperate to grab hold of the security state’s weaponry in all its bloody, suppressive power, cementing its stranglehold over the lives of all those it claims under its sovereignty. If the state of exception cleared the way for Hitler, what could a permanent, universal state of exception mean for us?

Whilst I’m not especially inclined to accompany Agamben all the way towards completely reconstructing our political thought upon the “limit-concept” of the refugee, he is certainly more than correct and somewhat prescient to centre it as that figure which “brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state”.

At least as far back as the flurry of denaturalization and denationalization laws passed in the wake of WWI (France in 1915, Belgium in 1922, Italy in 1926, and of course Germany in 1933), the status of the ‘people’ and the ‘citizen’ has been radically thrown into question. Even if it is only in potentia, we are all refugees to the extent that our governments now almost universally reserve the right to release us from ours.

My favourite essay here sees Agamben teasing out the historico-political contradictions behind the concept of the “people”, dialectically deconstructing the term into capital P People (the all-inclusive body politic, comprising sovereign and citizens) and lower-case people (the hopelessly exclusive subset of those forgotten and downtrodden under the heel of iron necessity).

Even in passing, it’s clear how the former corresponds with bios, and the latter zoē, providing the most salient exposition of precisely how the division in language and act between the two ideas traces out Agamben’s political impasse. From out of this “fundamental biopolitical fracture”, we land upon the realisation that “our time is nothing other than the methodical and implacable attempt to fill the split that divides the people by radically eliminating the people of the excluded”.

A political body or programme can of course tend to this task in any number of ways, but Agamben picks out the “obsession with development”—the insatiable motor of capital—in particular, as the clearest expression of this drive to bridge the gap between the permanent, disenfranchised underclass of capitalism and the body politic. This is, at best, a smokescreen of the status-quo disguised by a Panglossian hope—epitomised in the petit-bourgeoisie, who constitute “the form in which the spectacle has realized parodistically the Marxist project of a classless society”—and, at worst, the violent exportation of the “people” into the Global South.

When the sovereign wishes to be less equivocal with its aims in this department, they are liable to outright attempt, not to integrate the people into the People, but to absolutely annihilate the “people” – a procedure only too executable within the camp paradigm. In this way, the people are those most liable to experience the camp-like conditions of modernity, suspended in “a zone of absolute indeterminacy” between political and naked life, increasingly tending towards the latter as their position becomes not only more socio-economically precarious but also more easily controlled by biopolitical disciplinary and surveillance measures. The imposition of digital ID’s in the UK should illustrate this point well enough.

“The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which politics becomes bio-politics and the homo sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizens”

Far from just a semantic or philological quibble, what Agamben draws our attention to is what this means existentially for the consistency and coherency of human rights as the warrant of state sovereignty in the modern day. If the universalist project of the Enlightenment encompasses only the form-of-life under state protection, then what becomes of bare life stripped of its political garb? In posing this decisive biopolitical question, Means Without End, at the very least, orients us in the direction of Agamben's answer.

[Enzo G · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Chapter 13, "Notes on Politics":

The 'great transformation' constituting the final stage of the state-form is thus taking place before our very eyes: this is a transformation that is driving the kingdoms of the Earth (republics and monarchies, tyrannies and democracies, federations and national states) one after the other toward the state of the integrated spectacle (Guy Debord) and toward 'capitalist parliamentarianism' (Alain Badiou). In the same way in which the great transformation of the first industrial revolution destroyed the social and political structures as well as the legal categories of the ancien régime, terms such as sovereignty, right, nation, people, democracy, and general will by now refer to a reality that no longer has anything to do with what these concepts used to designate — and those who continue to use these concepts uncritically literally do not know what they are talking about.

We probably should've listened to this guy in the 90's. It's not my fault though, I was a child.

[jessi lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

for class.

okay, i went into this book more interested in agamben's ideas about gesture, but i found those to be pretty unsatisfying. he talks about all politics as being gesture, and the kind of vacuousness (vacuity?) of contemporary politics. but then also seeing some kind of potential there. i don't totally get it...

where he's good, it seems to me, is when he's talking about refugees and camps--states of exception to the rule of the nation-state, and kind of deconstructing the term people as always already having kind of foucauldian cracks through it. and he talks about how naked life & political life have been divorced from each other, and how that leaves a space where people can have their political life denied, and just be in this state of naked life. like in camps (think guantanamo, concentration camps, etc).

but definitely don't read this unless someone is making you do it, and going to talk about it with you afterwards.

[Corbin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of essays and thoughts from the early '90s, this book is a nice refresher in Agamben's main concepts and concerns. For those completely unfamiliar with his ideas, he doesn't do a lot to elucidate his jargon or justify his aims. But even for those with a minimal familiarity will gain a lot from the examples, anecdotes, and applied analyses presented here. Some of the pieces are accessible without any background in Agamben's thought, and none of them belabor his conceptual apparatus too much. But some of the moves are more suggestive than argumentative, and as plausible as I find his views, they won't convince the critic or satisfy the curious. Still, I really enjoyed this collection and recommend it heartily to those who want a refresher in his early works or who are only familiar with his later stuff.

[Matthew Balliro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book of essays, but not necessarily essential Agamben. If you've read most of his major book-length studies, there's a lot of repetition here (bare life, bios and zoe, the camps, state of exception, etc.); some passages seem to be torn directly from other books. But there are some good expansions and more detailed explanations of some ideas, like the idea that we're "still in the camps." Also good essays on refugees and languages, states, and people. A must-read only if you're really into Agamben.

[Elsie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It is the first book that I truly loved (and had time to finish) in grad school. People have criticized him to me (I guess he is politically uninvolved), and I hear that his work is way too trendy (an intellectual commodity), but I loved this book. So. (Still the problem of thinking the refugee from the European model.)

[Neal Spadafora · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a solid collection of essays that can introduce you to some core concepts in the Homo Sacer project. Here are some notes I took on a few of the essays.

• The apparatuses and institutions of Western metaphysics and law divide being so as to dominate human existence. Through rendering inoperative the apparatuses and machinery that divide being, the Homo Sacer project is an attempt to elucidate being (as form-of-life) that exists in the void, poverty, suspension, and emptiness outside the law and its machinations.

o As such, form-of-life is the central concept towards which Agamben’s nine-volume Homo Sacer series is aimed. Agamben’s overcoming of the way being has been divided in and through the history of Western thought and practice, starting with Aristotle, culminates in his idea of ‘form-of-life’ as another form of sovereignty that is undivided and anonymous, a form beyond law and doctrine, property and possession, bio and zoē. For Agamben, form-of-life is a life identical with its form, “a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself” (pg. 4, “Form-of-Life”).

• Whereas a form-of-life, much like zoē , exists for itself, “political power… founds itself… on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context of the forms of life” (pg. 4). That is, naked life, which was the prerequisite for the state of exception, now, like the state of exception, is the dominant form of life. Citizen, Man, worker, journalist, and clerk are each forms of life that temporarily represent the bare life sovereign power requires. In other words, individualization is what constitutes sovereign power.

• Agamben’s refusal to practice, study, and construct thought as institutions demand it to be coincides with his notion that the form-of-life resists any identification or classification within a given matrix of knowledge. Agamben classifies such intellectuality as ‘thought.’ He states:

o “Thought is form-of-life, life that cannot be segregated from its form; and anywhere the intimacy of this inseparable life appears, in the materiality of corporeal processes and of habitual ways of life no less than in theory, there and only there is there thought” (pg. 11-12).

o “Intellectuality and thought are not a form of life among others in which life and social production articulate themselves, but they are rather the unitary power that constitutes the multiple forms of life as form-of-life” (pg. 11)

• Form-of-life is thus Agamben’s answer to both Aristotle’s demarcation between bios and zoē. Unlike the past twenty-four centuries of the West, form-of-life is a means without end, a distinctly political life absent any separation or determination towards the good. Form-of-life, then, is a unitary political power that requires no separation of bios from zoē.

-----

“Notes on Gesture” develops the German theater practitioner Bertolt Brecht’s notion of gestus, a term that refers to the movements and postures of the body, both physiological and expressive.

So-called pathological movements of the body, “tics, spasmodic jerks, and mannerisms—a proliferation that cannot be defined in any way other than as a generalized catastrophe of the sphere of gestures” (section 1), formed the basis for new research and classification at the end of the nineteenth century by physicians and neurologists such as Gilles de la Tourette and Jean- Martin Charcot.

In contrast to this, the bourgeoisie, in its anxiety over an assumed anarchy of gestures, sought explanations for them in “psychology”: the belief that there is a causal and symptomatic relationship between gestures and the individual’s psyche, an idea that had already been anticipated in the work of Charcot and, later, Freud (see sections 1 and 2).

Agamben argues that gesture is not a representation, nor a form of production; furthermore, it is not a means to a purposive end; nor is it autonomous (an end in its own right). Gesture cannot be assigned an origin or source in a subject, such as an author, who initiates it (facere). Additionally, gesture is never resolvable into a complete or completed object or performance (agere).

[Rasmus Tillander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Keinot vailla päämäärä on häkellyttävä filosofinen vuoristorata.

Italialainen kirjallisuus -ja oikeustieteilijä-filosofi Giorgio Agamben (s. 1942) on selvästi 1900-luvun lopun relevanteimpia poliittisia ajattelijoita. Erityisen tunnettu hän on lanseeraamastaan homo sacer -käsitteestä, jolla hän viittaa roomalaisen oikeuden tapettavaksi luovutetun henkilön "pyhään" elämään. Tätä hän on soveltanut mm. pakolaisista käytävään keskusteluun.

Tämä kirja on yhdeksästä lyhyestä tekstistä koostuva Agambenin poliittista filosofiaa valoittava teos, joka perustuu vahvasti Michel Foucault'n ja Hannah Arendtin ajattelulle. Ensimmäisten tekstien ytimessä on poikkeustila ja miten oikeuksia voidaan suvereenin toimesta lakkauttaa. Hän nostaa esimerkeiksi muun muassa vankileirit ja poliisitoiminnan, jotka ovat jatkuvaa poikkeustilaa. Nämä hän linkittää suvereenin valtion kehitykseen: Ensin oikeudet liittyivät alamaisuuteen kuninkaalle, sitten syntymisen kautta saavutettuun kansalaisuuteen, jonka kriisiä nyt elämme. Agambenia kiinnostavat erityisesti "puhtaan elämän", eli kansalaisuudesta ja siten poliittisesta elämänmuodosta erotetut, ihmiset.

Keinot vailla päämäärää tuntuukin alkuosionsa ajan ihan ymmärrettävältä poliittiselta filosofialta, mutta sitten, yht'äkkiä luenkin logoksen suhteesta kieleen ontologisessa jumaltodistuksessa ja runon viimeisen säkeen välttämättömästä proosaluonteesta. Lopuksi palataan kuitenkin takaisin politiikkaan ja Agambenin ajatkseen siitä, että politiikassa on kyse keinojen näkyväksi tekemisestä, ei päämääristä; keinoista vailla päämäärää. Tämä on melko haastava kela, jota en voi itse sanoa ymmärtäneeni kovin hyvin. Käytännössä tämä tarkoitti (ehkä) 'pyhän mysteerin' poistamista homo sacerin puhtaasta elämästä ja ymmärrystä siitä miten elämänmuodon irrottaminen tästä bioelämästä voidaan tehdä mahdottomaksi.

Kirja olisi selvästi hyötynyt esipuheesta tai selventävistä nooteista (Markku Koivusalon jälkisanat olivat liian pitkät ja kryptiset). Tuli selväksi, että Agambenia eniten inspiroineiden (ja tunnetusti vaativien) Martin Heideggerin ja Walter Benjaminin ajattelun tunteminen olisi ollut huomattavaksi hyödyksi Agambenin filosofisen systeemin käsittämisessä. Joka tapauksessa tästä jäi kuitenkin hyvä fiilis, paljon sitä kuuluisaa käyttistä ja toisaalta myös nälkä ymmärtää se loppukin.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays. Indeed, it is formed by 'notes' on politics.

The diversity of these notes is profound. We see clear explorations of the state of exception. Strong analytical work was conducted on the ambiguity in how 'the people' are constituted in Western politics.

But there is also a fascinating essay on 'the face' as "the passion of revelation."

This is a book that probes what is true. What is meaningful. What is important.

[Bahman Bahman · Rating 2 out of 5]

آگامبن، درآغاز کتاب می‌کوشد تا با بررسی دو شکل حیات، یعنی حیات برهنه و حیات سیاسی بپردازد و در تعریف شکل حیات می‌گوید: منظور من از اصطلاح شکل‌ ـ‌ حیات، در مقابل حیاتی است که هرگز نمی‌تواند از شکلش جدا شود، حیاتی که در آن مجزا ساختن چیزی نظیر حیات برهنه به هیچ‌ رو ممکن نیست

[Nicholas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mostly decent. The last essay though ('In this Exile...') is spectacular.

[Joel Call · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of those books where i stop and ask myself "what in the actual fuck did i just read" in a good way

[Nate Bohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concise and small but nonetheless overflowing with valuable insights and ideas.

[Vassiliki A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read "Homo Sacer" I found a lot of common themes and repeated ideas in this. Nevertheless, it's a nice short read.

[Yokusun Basi]

Mezzi senza fine. Note sulla politica by Giorgio Agamben (1996)

[Severin M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible series of short essays. Easily the best introduction to Agamben's work and the stakes contained within

[Nessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why is this book in my favorites? I cannot watch a film without thinking of this theory. Amazing.

[August Denys · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his book, The Courage To Be, Paul Tillich writes on Nietzsche's concept in a way that has stuck with me; he states "It is wrong to speak of will to existence or even of will to life; one must speak of will to power, i.e. to more life." (pg. 29) That we do no simply will ourselves simply to exist or continue to existence, but our will, our capacity to act should be a life that surpasses life; that the will to power is the will to life to more life. Why, when this book is by Giorgio Agamben, do I bring this up? For the simple reason that Agamben's political philosophy, or biopolitical philosophy, expressed in this book, this collection of his essays, is perhaps the most faithful politics on the will to power. Even though he never mentions the Will to Power by name, the spirit is present throughout the book. "Is today something like a form-of-life, a life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living, possible? Is today a life of power available?" (pg. 9) That, this idea of life is central to the entire book. "We can no longer distinguish between zoē and bios, between our biological life as living beings and our political existence, between what is incommunicable and speechless and what is speakable and communicable. As Foucault once wrote, we are animals in whose politics our very life as living beings is at stake." (pg. 138)

It is brilliant. There is no other way to state it. It is a philosophy that analyzes the limits of our past and challenges us to face the outside. "Be only your face. Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subjects of your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them: rather, go with them, in them, beyond them."(pg. 100)

[Alfonso de Castro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Giorgio Agamben es probable el filósofo más interesante que he leído desde hace mucho. Lector y traductor de Benjamin, su erudición es tremenda. Medios sin fin es un conjunto de textos, notas sobre la política, "verdaderas iluminaciones en las que se encuentran quizá algunos de los más felices y penetrantes enunciados de la vasta investigación del autor en este territorio". Una lectura a veces difícil pero al final muy gratificante.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mainly read this volume for the essay on Guy Debord - the great under-appreciated theorist of late 20th century Europe. It seems that Agamben is one of the few philosophers who has seriously engaged Debord's corpus. The other essays are excellent as well - Agamben, or at least his English translators, are masters of a crystalline prose.

[Parker Piccolo Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

SOOOO hard to read… Agamben seems almost paranoid at points, and writes in a Messianic voice that comes across as very aggrandizing. There were very interesting points, and I think if it were more straightforward I would have liked it more. It is definitely a must in Biopolitics, though, and I have noticed myself thinking about dynamics explained in it differently now.

[Olesya Vartanyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A combination of early works by Agamben. Should not be his first book to read. Better to start with sth more well-established by him. But still an interesting read for those, who are trying to understand our modern statehood and why it produces so many disappointments and protests.

[Alfonso de Castro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Qué es un pueblo? y Qué es un campo? son dos escritos sensacionales. Y no son los únicos de este volumen.