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In the face of the growing interest in Agamben's work by planning scholars, this article suggests reframing such an interest by examining the theoretical controversy between Agamben and another Italian philosopher, Roberto Esposito, with special attention to their common roots within the philosophical realm of political ontology. Their different conceptualizations of biopolitics and norms can lead to opposite conceptualizations of the relationship between people and institutions leading to very different planning theoretical possibilities. Like Agamben, Esposito's theory helps recognise the intrinsic violence of planning discourses. However, unlike Agamben, Esposito provides a constructive way out of it through the disentanglement of the exclusionary level of norms from the potentially inclusive affirmative biopolitics (not politics over life but politics of life) of what he calls the instituting thought. Esposito's conceptualization of institutions can further support the ongoing new-institutionalist developments of planning scholarship, showing a way to conceptualize the planning relevance of civic organizing, insurgent practices, and social uprisings without undermining the primacy of institutions in planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'inetto', on which Italo Svevo's entire critical and literary tradition has been based, is mostly absent from Svevo's texts with a few exceptions. Despite this low frequency, 'inetto' has become the adjective most used to define his characters. Surprisingly, Svevo scholarship has not yet focused, intensively and extensively, on those terms that the author did use to describe his protagonists: 'inertia' and 'inert'. The goal of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to reconsider the veil of negativity that still saddles the category of ineptitude. At the same time, in order to achieve this aim, it rethinks this category by means of the neglected concept of inertia. By so doing, it not only rectifies the idea that the term 'inetto' is the primary correlative to describe Svevo's characters, but also allows us to reimagine forms of impotentiality in a positive light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how the concept of 'everyday inhabiting' is problematised in the novel A house full of people (2019) by Mariana Sández. The methodology is based on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, especially on two critical categories: use and care, identified by Camilo Boano as components of the definition of inhabiting. In addition, it incorporates Jolanta Brach-Czaina's theoretical approach to domestic life, highlighting her concept of "everyday hustle and bustle". The article focuses on ontological and existential considerations, exploring the ethics of daily choices in the way of inhabiting as a key element in the organisation of communal life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines three dominant ways in which the concept of potentiality is discussed in art educational literature, and in particular the connections between actualizing potentialities and creation. It then pivots to the works of Giorgio Agamben in order to problematize some of the basic ontological assumptions embedded within the three dominant views of the potentiality–actuality–creativity relationship. Agamben focuses his analysis on the (im)potential remnant of potentiality that remains within any given actualization and highlights the role of such (im)potentiality in creative acts. To illustrate this role, the article offers four ways that (im)potentiality exhibits itself in various art forms before concluding with implications for imagining the artist's studio as a space and time for (im)potential acts of creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"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). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tanulmányomban Giorgio Agamben két szövegének együttolvasására teszek kísérletet amellett érvelve, hogy a L’amicóban adott Arisztotelész-olvasat egy olyan barátságontológiát implikál, mely szinte azonos a korai La comunità che vieneben kidolgozott politikai ontológiával. A két szöveg mögött meghúzódó közös ontológiai koncepció exponálásával és Agamben Arisztotelész-olvasatának ismertetésével és filológiai-filozófiai megalapozásával arra teszek kísérletet, hogy rámutassak az arisztotelészi barátságkoncepció kortárs politikai filozófiai relevanciájára. Ez többek között abban áll, hogy képes fényt deríteni a kortárs közösségfilozófiák azon hiányosságára, mely abban gyökerezik, hogy nem artikulálják kielégítően azt a viszonyt vagy az érintkezés azon formáját, mely az általuk vizionált és elgondolt közösséget összetartja. Ha a két szöveg összeolvashatóságát bizonyítottuk, úgy vélem azt illetően is tisztábban fogunk látni, hogy az Arisztotelész által írtak mentén miként gondolhatóak tovább és egészíthetőek ki ezek a diskurzusok.

Defendendo uma maior aproximação entre a literatura e a filosofia, este artigo apresenta uma análise breve da ideia de contemporâneo apresentada pelo filósofo italiano Giorgio Agamben para, em seguida, considerando o contexto histórico do Liberalismo em Portugal e a partir da leitura dos romances A queda dum anjo, Agulha em Palheiro e Carlota Angela, refletir sobre a contemporaneidade da obra de Camilo Castelo Branco.

This article analyses how the concept of ‘everyday inhabiting’ is problematised in the novel A house full of people (2019) by Mariana Sández. The methodology is based on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, especially on two critical categories: use and care, identified by Camilo Boano as components of the definition of inhabiting. In addition, it incorporates Jolanta Brach-Czaina’s theoretical approach to domestic life, highlighting her concept of “everyday hustle and bustle”. The article focuses on ontological and existential considerations, exploring the ethics of daily choices in the way of inhabiting as a key element in the organisation of communal life.

In this paper, I discuss what I call 'the other vow', a vow that undoes all others. Interweaving an aphorism from Kafka, Juliet's speech from Romeo & Juliet, and the Jewish liturgical passage Kol Nidrei, I argue that we might find ways to inhabit language differently in the other vow – not the God of the name, or the God of the father, but rather a relation to the other to be otherwise. Instead, we might practice an affirmative denial and collectively attempt to undo the oaths and names that bind us, legally, socially, economically, in order to live in a different way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Giorgio Agamben claims that the aggressive coronavirus response in Italy turned the nation's entire population into formless bare life, which was cast out from meaningful human existence through a sovereign exception. This widely criticised argument appears to stem from Agamben's radical reinterpretation of biopolitics, a concept popularised by Michel Foucault. Although Agamben is often considered as the second most famous authority on the topic, some have begun to question whether his reinterpretation can operate within the framework set by his predecessor who defines the notion primarily through its life affirming and optimising effects. This has led to an unclear and contested definition of biopolitics, which hinders the notion's usage as an analytical tool. Agamben's statements on the pandemic must face similar scrutiny. According to him, life was not optimised during the pandemic. Therefore, Agamben's critique on the coronavirus response has little to do with the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics, which offers a much sounder way of analysing the Covid crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here I introduce the transsecular concept for the development of a politics of literature in a syncretic, transsecular society. If literature, as per Jacques Rancière (literature as a contradictory discourse in La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature) and Michel Foucault (madness as principle of social partition in Folie, langage, littérature, 2019) is a laboratory of experiences that makes it possible to think outside of binary logic, through non-dialectic contradiction, which does not transform the dual into the univocal. Then, the transsecular approach aims to articulate these identity differences based on a principle of "hospitable" reading, a transsecular hermeneutics, which is in the very origin of the texts that form literary traditions. This hospitable principle of reading proposes a hermeneutics of literary texts as ethics of the care of the self. The transsecular approach is thus based on a synctretic hermeneutics of texts of both secular and religious origin, which live alongside and set different cultural traditions to dialog with each other, following the model of literature that is by nature really transtextual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to extreme conditions, government endowed with extraordinary powers in the form of a state of exception, released from the norms of a rule of law legal order, has been accepted as a modern political institution with an essential role in safeguarding democracy. It is only then, that a democratic government may achieve effective measures necessary to best address the extremities unfolding. The lack of public law theory legitimizing such an institution, alongside the heavy reliance on the medieval principle necessitas legem non habet as the institution's theoretic premise, prompt contemporary theorist Giorgio Agamben to question the role of the state of exception within modern democracy. This paper will first present how Agamben grounds the state of exception to the concept of necessity, tracing the theory of necessity to its apparent European origin, in the writings of Gratian and Thomas Aquinas. Then, this paper will focus on divergent interpretations of necessity drawn from the halls of the Swiss Federal Palace, whilst discussing the fate of recent state of exceptions. These divergent interpretations of necessity, namely by Ernest Paul Graber and Robert Grimm, both historic members of the Swiss Federal Assembly, indicate how necessity may be interpreted in different ways. Finally, this paper will question the extent to which this parallel relationship, between the state of exception and the concept of necessity, may undermine a democratic rule of law legal order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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This essay reconstructs a now largely obscure fifty year debate within French philosophy of technology from Alfred Espinas to Alexandre Kojève about slavery in the ancient world. To summarize, I argue that early twentieth century French philosophy of technology's hypothesis that Greek and Roman slavery caused a blocage – a block, delay or stagnation – in the development of technology in antiquity may well seem little more than a historical curiosity today, but that its hypothesis of a constitutive relation between slave labour and technological innovation has recently re-emerged in biopolitical form in such texts as Giorgio Agamben's The Use of Bodies (2015). In the confrontation between what Alexandre Koyré famously calls the 'philosophers' and the 'machine', I argue that we not only enter a largely forgotten conceptual archive for modern French philosophy of technology (Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gouhran, Bernard Stiegler) but for contemporary biopolitical theory (Giorgio Agamben). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Cultural Studies / Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of Journal of Cultural Studies / Kultur Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Beytulhikme: An International Journal of Philosophy is the property of Beytulhikme: An International Journal of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Through the interrogation of recent analyses of the last words of people executed in the USA, this article critiques the popular abolitionist rhetoric that interprets last words in terms of evidence of sin and redemption. In reading the execution event in this way, the article suggests, these texts inadvertently celebrate and affirm the act of execution. Drawing on Gil Anidjar's Blood (2014), the article suggests that this duality is in consonance with the history of modern Christianity as epitomised in the bonding of two events: the Eucharist and the Inquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artigo estuda os mecanismos de dominação revelados nas ações ou estratégias de governos ou regimes de Estados ocidentais contemporâneos, apontados pelo filósofo italiano Giorgio Agamben. A atuação biopolítica dos Estados, aparece como tecnologia utilizada pelo poder para perenizar o estado de exceção, afetando os direitos das pessoas. Analisa-se, também, o efeito causado pela pandemia, à tese de Agamben, o que acabou por fragilizar, indispor e colocar na berlinda, encimadas por críticas, o suporte ético sobre o qual ela foi formulada. Utilizando-se do método de abordagem dedutivo, conclui-se que, embora as teses de biopolítica e estado de exceção de Agamben sejam relevantes à compreensão da realidade atual, suas aplicações no contexto da pandemia revelam-se equivocadas.

Neste trabalho realizamos uma análise teórica das práticas de resistência e organização política do povo curdo, na assim chamada Questão Curda, a partir da obra de Giorgio Agamben. Se a Soberania moderna estabelece as relações do poder político a partir de uma origem romana que define a exceção e exclusão dos povos matáveis como parte de sua natureza, a desativação desses institutos se dá quando outra lógica impera. Assim, trazemos a Questão Curda como exemplo de profanação do sistema moderno de Estado-Nação e Democracia, a partir das próprias propostas teóricas agambenianas, uma vez que uma tradição decolonial dos povos oprimidos toma o lugar da exceção que determina o homo sacer.

This article analyses Achille Mbembe's theorization of necropolitics and surplus life in dialogue with three comparable theorizations: Agamben's 'bare life', Marxist scholarship on 'relative surplus populations', and Afropessimist theorizations of 'social death'. I argue that Mbembe's work allows us to develop a critique of sacrifice that at the same time (contra Agamben) recognizes how it plays a structural role within necropolitics. Examining the influence of Georges Bataille's writings on sacrifice allows me to clarify this argument. The second part of the article examines the 'surplus life' of necropolitics in comparative analysis, tracing some of the limits of Mbembe's reading through a dialogue with Marxist and Afropessimist readings. I characterize Mbembe's work in terms of a poetics and politics of surplus: 'reserves of life' are affirmed against the excess of violence characterizing the present. However, this critique of violence relies upon abrupt leaps from politics to abstract ethical appeals in ways that obscure the implications of Mbembe's own analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literary genre of drama and its performative realisation in the theatre are based on dialogue and interaction. In this, drama and theatre have always had a close affinity to the structures of society in general and community in particular. I shall argue in the following that Inua Ellams's Barber Shop Chronicles (2017), Travis Alabanza's Sound of the Underground (2023), and Martin Crimp's Not One of These People (2022) can be considered as deconstructions of a traditional understanding of community. I shall argue that the designs of community that emanate from these plays conceptually highlight an alternative model of community, which – following the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben – I shall call an "inoperative" (Nancy) or "coming" community (Agamben). The inoperative nature of these communities, which the three plays not only reflect upon but also constitute by themselves, is marked by a shift to singularity, by an openness to the Other, by fluid dramatic/theatrical/linguistic structures that challenge traditional normative and exclusionary practices and borders. The deconstructive aesthetics at work in all three plays reveals an inoperative community which denotes a potentiality that is always on the horizon, but never fully actualised. All three plays become epitomes for defining the ethical as well as the aesthetic programme of much British theatre in the twenty-first century: they question (and reject) traditional concepts of community that are based on unity or identity, while they also criticise overreaching, neoliberal individualism and the decline of communal interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hannah Arendt's seminal yet overlooked essay "We Refugees" was written and published in Menorah Journal in 1943 while she was still a stateless refugee. In this essay, Arendt vividly describes the impossible situation that the stateless Jewish refugees faced before and during Second World War. However, Arendt does not reduce it to a series of individual tragedies, but instead develops a highly original analysis of refugees as a systematic political phenomenon that exposes the limitations of the nation-state system and simultaneously points beyond it. This analysis remains more relevant than ever today, eighty years after its initial publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first pandemic texts, published in the book Where Have We Gone? Epidemic as Politics (“A che punto siamo? L'epidemia come politica”, Quodlibet, 2020), link Agamben's central notion of ”bare life” to fear, placing it at the center of his predictions for the sunset of bourgeois democracies and the rise of despotism based on the notion of ”biosecurity”. The theme culminates in the essay ”What is Fear?” presented here. Unlike the previous ones, it originally appeared on the website of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Research. Being the most philosophically saturated text of the series, it rethinks the key categories of Heideggerian existential analytics, fear and fearing, in the horizon of the pandemic situation, problematizing the ontological priority given by Heidegger to anxiety over fearing, in order to derive fearing as the mood through which power is established and justified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Necessary Exorcisms” reads S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk in the context of Ansky’s travels during World War I as a relief aid worker with the Jewish Committee to Help War Victims. Ansky’s description of the fate of Jews in occupied Galicia—in the fragments of a diary he kept during these years and in a longer memoir published after the war—confronts us with two motifs at the heart of The Dybbuk: a blurring of the threshold between life and death, and the important role that law, litigatory practices, and lawful authorities play as entities to which one could appeal to prevent a wrong from occurring and/ or to adjudicate a wrong after it has occurred. To read The Dybbuk alongside Ansky’s account of what happened to Jews in Galicia during World War I is to see the play as a dramatic exploration of issues at the heart of what Giorgio Agamben has theorized as a state of exception—the geopolitical space in which there is no law or lawful authority to which to appeal when one’s rights as a citizen have been revoked and one has become exposed to arbitrary violence. To read The Dybbuk as a play obliquely linked to the fate of Jews in occupied Galicia is to complicate contemporary readings that see Ansky staging the law’s malign power to punish illicit desires so as to uphold patriarchal and classist norms. Reading The Dybbuk as a postwar play, “Necessary Exorcisms” discerns in it an apology for the law and its intercessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article returns to the work of Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman to theorize the spatial imaginary of fascism, a dimension missing from existing analyses of the social psychology of the authoritarian personality. The fascist spatial imaginary can be defined in terms of a Manichean sense of world space, a dominance of spatial binaries such as inside versus outside, mythic/romantic spatial imagery, a paranoid mood, and finally, spatial projection in which internal contradictions are externalized. As a historical case study, the article charts the rise and fall of the American fascist compound and its replacement by more flexible and mobile terrorist cells, connecting this change in fascist spatial formations to underlying shifts in the composition of capitalism. In conclusion, the article turns to Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben to argue that, in the last instance, the fascist spatial imaginary cannot conceptualize thresholds, states of indistinction where the inside‐outside binary blurs, and that dwelling within the threshold (rather than closing it) might be a tactic to disrupt the power of fascist spatial logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where is one's voice to be found? Not all architects search for it in both drawing and writing. Eliyahu Keller, an architectural historian working at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, examines one of Lebbeus Woods's distinct early tropes: an ever‐tense continuum between the image and the text. His ocular reading of Woods's scripts diagnoses their involvement with a darkness of an age, not its light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a companion to "Pride: Alternative Entrepreneurship Enjoyed," a videography about the company Prezi's engagement in the Budapest Pride parade. The aim is to advance video ethnographic methods within Organization and Management Studies (OMS) based on Agamben's profanatory philosophical method, which puts into focus abstract "sacred" concepts and returns them to the sphere of the profane—of the everyday. A profanatory approach of use for OMS accounts for organizations, brands, and management in a way that do not reproduce their "sacredness"—entrepreneurial myths and management clichés. Instead, by opening them up to critical exposure, they can be moved from a "religious canon" of communication strategies, press releases, and policy documents, to everyday profane work. Through a methodological discussion of the videography, we show three ways in which profanation re-positions the myth of alternative entrepreneurship: by engaging in the logic of the sacred, by playing with notions of inside and outside, and by using musical soundtrack as an expressive tool. We suggest that these methodological strategies advance the analytical possibilities within video ethnography, also useful for other organizational phenomena, especially when economic interests are combined with ambitions of social change and ideals of self-realization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Destacamos neste artigo a dificuldade da reflexão crítica sobre o pensamento Agambeniano com referência àquilo que o próprio autor usou como objeto paradigmático de exemplificação, concretização e conclusão de seus conceitos que desde há muito vêm sendo construídos e que não havia sido ainda emoldurado numa expressão prática expressiva e contemporânea em significação. Assim, nosso objetivo aqui consiste em oferecer elemento que integre, sob a ótica dos Direitos Humanos, a discussão acerca da pertinência e principalmente da materialização do pensamento Agabemniano. Desta forma procedemos a uma revisão bibliográfica das obras de Giogio Agamben destacando seus principais conceitos e procuramos estabelecer, diante das argumentações de José Augusto Lindgren Alves, em seu artigo O contrário dos direitos humanos (explicitando Zizek) (2002), a possibilidade de entender a materialização da contradição da engrenagem dos Direitos Humanos. Desta forma, justifica-se na necessidade da desmistificação de que a obra Agambeniana é de difícil interpretação e, principalmente, que não dá margem a significação prática dos seus próprios preceitos e de demonstrar que, se tal cenário ocorre, deve-se às chamadas leituras apressadas que procuram a todo custo essa materialização conceitual naquilo que é incompatível com esses próprios conceitos biopolíticos. O resultado é a correspondência entre as verificações práticas de José Augusto Lindgren Alves e o arcabouço teórico de Giorgio Agamben, na perspectiva do oposto dos preceitos dos Direitos Humanos, justamente em nome – e na sistemática, ou no sistema – destes mesmos direitos, principalmente a nível de Direito Internacional dos Direitos Humanos, bem como nas perspectivas a nível doméstico estatal.

In the article, the author uses a philosophical understanding of an oath to interpret an artwork, and then uses this interpretation to criticize modern polities as cursed empires. The narrative is presented in four steps. It begins with a short presentation of Mark Lilla's and John Gray's diagnosis of the Anglo-American ideological crisis, in which liberalism is modified by cultural politics which to both writers looks like a revivalist religion. Lilla and Gray metaphorically use the word "curse" to explain the new ideological constellation determined by the phenomenon called "woke". The second part presents Agamben's understanding of the relationship between an oath and a curse, which is used to interpret David Lynch's film Inland Empire in the third part. The author tries to show that the film deals with an original idea that a work of art can break a curse. In the fourth part, the author uses the idea of cursing and uncursing to criticize the West for failures in the war in former Yugoslavia, during the migrant crisis, and in the ongoing reappearance of "radical evil" in Gaza. The argument is constructed with a help of Greil Marcus' idea that polities can curse themselves if they fail to live up to their ideological promises. The author concludes that the EU and the USA failed to live up to their alleged founding principles and became cursed empires. The cultural war in which they find themselves seen from the perspective of magico-religious domain in which the oath and the curse originally appeared is not metaphorically a curse but literally the payment for the sin of omission.

RESUMO A obra de Giorgio Agamben é marcada por constantes referências aos trabalhos de Michel Foucault, de modo que esse figura como um importante marco teórico para aquele. Entretanto, um esforço de aproximação dos dois autores se mostra deveras problemático à medida que se percebe que o filósofo italiano opera certas categorias metodológicas e conceituais fundamentais ao pensamento foucaultiano de maneira radicalmente distinta do filósofo francês. Tal incompatibilidade se apresenta com maior clareza quando nos propomos a explorar o tema do ‘destituinte’ na obra agambeniana, a partir do qual ontologia, política e ética se entrecruzam desvelando as diferenças entre os dois filósofos. Assim, para expor os limites dessa aproximação, primeiramente serão exploradas as distinções metodológicas entre os dois autores na abordagem do problema do ‘poder’, bem como a maneira como o conceito se formula na obra de cada um deles. Na sequência, serão apresentadas as linhas gerais da ‘ontologia modal’ e da ‘ética da inoperosidade’ agambenianas com o fim de explicitar ao final, à guisa de conclusão, a divergência entre as saídas éticas propostas por Foucault e Agamben em seus trabalhos tardios.

François Jullien believes that the pillar of Western nude art is the philosophical concepts of essence and ideal, while the benti (the Chinese counterpart of ontology) view of Chinese philosophy emphasizes change and process; therefore, it is impossible for Chinese painting to see the nude as essence. Jullien excludes works such as Chungong paintings (Chinese Spring Palace paintings) from the category of nude art because he holds that they depict nakedness, namely the process from "being dressed" to "being naked," rather than the nude, the natural state of being naked. However, Giorgio Agamben draws on the Christian view of the nude to point out that the nude is always relative to revelation–what exists only is the state of nakedness, while the nude never exists. Nakedness is attached to "undressing," which is endless because desire is endless. Noticeably, Agamben introduces the dimension of desire into the discussion of nude art, which has successfully created a comparative ground for Chinese and Western nude art. The sexual relationships depicted in Chungong paintings embody the Chinese view of the body and the universe, sharing a similar view in the theme of desire as in Western paintings. Thus, with the inclusion of desire, works such as Chungong paintings shall also be considered in transcultural reflections on artistic traditions between East and West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a review of five theoretical proposals (Badiou, Deleuze, Rancière, Foucault and Agamben), the article addresses the possibility of thinking about the link between literature and life with particular emphasis on some figurative concepts (desiring machine, thought from outside, true life, politics of literature, phantasm) emerging from the work of the above-mentioned philosophers, which allow for a reading or re-reading in a post-secular key. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Foucault's and Agamben's readings of Augustine's account of human nature and original sin. Foucault's analysis of Augustine's account of sexual acts in paradise, subordinated to will and devoid of lust, highlights the way it constitutes the model for the married couple, whose sexual acts are only acceptable if diverted by the will away from desire and towards the tasks of procreation. While Agamben rejects Augustine's doctrine of original sin and reclaims paradise as the original homeland of humanity, his reappropriation of paradise remains conditioned by our turn towards our true nature, from which we have been estranged by sin. Agamben's politics of reclaiming paradise necessarily involves the demand for obedience to this originary model of human nature. It therefore follows to the letter Augustine's description of paradisiacal sex, in which the will prevails over desire by applying itself to and curtailing itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Giorgio Agamben's critical stance on biopolitics and sovereignty is primarily concerned with the problem of the "state of exception" as the paradigm of contemporary Western politics. According to Agamben, human life has been reduced to a "bare life" by a state of exception founded on the relation between the law and sovereignty. In response, Agamben's redemptive politics is a counterargument to the contemporary nihilistic-exceptional politics and capitalism of spectacle. This "coming politics" is founded on some basic ideas such as "playing with the law," "profanation," "gesture," "free use" and finally "form-of-life." This essay will first explain the role of these ideas in Agamben's coming politics, then, it will demonstrate that all these ideas (or political strategies) are based on a deep belief in the power of thought. Therefore, it seems fair to assert that Agamben's coming politics is a kind of theoretical or philosophical politics and its hero or subject could be called "philosophers." It will be argued that from a political standpoint, this philosophical politics not only cannot be redemptive but might also result in a form of political passivity and the maintenance of the current political order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annals of the Croatian Political Science Association / Anali Hrvatskog Politoloskog Drustva is the property of Croatian Political Science Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofia is the property of Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)