#agamben

[transmutationisms]

are you familiar with agamben / his ideas on bare life/homo sacer? i found it a compelling extension of a biopolitical analysis but he's a weird conspiratorial antivaxx adj guy now and i worry that the roots of this position run deeper in his analysis than i would like to believe

so i think a perennial spectre haunting a lot of academic analysis of biopolitics is a particular form of individualism that tends away from class analysis and toward right-libertarianism. i've said before wrt foucault that i have this problem, particularly where he tries to envision a political alternative or liberatory project (as opposed to just analysing / problematising the existing situation as he saw it). it's not that he's wrong per se when he talks about the 'massifying' effect of modern national politics and sovereign power. but, if the analysis over-privileges this distinction between individual vs [state / professional guild / institution] and doesn't investigate the relationship between the subjection of the individual and the subjection of the labouring class, then we end up with a politics that tends almost populist at points, and certainly tends liberal because it's unable to conceive of liberation as a project requiring class solidarity and action. this sort of writing is often appealing to western universities and academics for what i think are obvious reasons.

agamben is not someone whose career i have closely followed but what i've observed from a distance is a conception of biopolitics marked by the above issues and therefore pretty limited at the outset in its ability to do more than advance a negative (deconstructive) critique (which is not a bad form of critique by any means but is not, on its own, a political platform or call to action). plus i think, for someone who pays lip service to aristotle as much as he does, agamben is not very attentive to the valuation of human 'flourishing' or well-being or whatever you want to call it—instead the emphasis is almost always on (ironically) a pretty bare definition of liberty, a freedom-from forces of the state or institution or even the social body writ large, conceived as a kind of mob. in this framework (again, more than incidentally libertarian), you can see how things like mandatory vaccination or pandemic 'lockdowns' are prima facie bad. they are repressive, in the sense that they constrain individuals. the guiding axioms in the paradigm foreclose questions about what social living should protect or produce, and what an individual owes to their fellows and can expect in return. the position is that maximising individual freedom of choice is always better, and considerations like, yknow, not killing disabled people are simply not weighed the same.

in general this also comes back down to the point that it's not terribly useful to talk about biopolitics outside the context of a critique of capitalism. i think this critique was sometimes implicit in foucault's writing (& much of the biopolitics writing we have is lecture transcripts!) and is sometimes dropped entirely or avoided in certain academic circles. agamben is of course correct that the reason states 'locked down' when covid appeared was because they were trying to protect their biological capital—their workforces, militaries, and so on. he's correct that states do things like mandate vaccination for the same reason. like, we should be clear-eyed about this and not pretend that capitalist states are doing some kind of humanitarianism in any of their public health endeavours. that's not what those departments exist for and never has been. however, it doesn't follow that every action a capitalist state takes in the name of public health is in itself bad or useless, and if we form our politics around a reflexive oppositional impulse and a lack of class analysis then we end up saying shit like that the problem with vaccine mandates is the vaccines and not the character of the power doing the mandating.

i think this is an important distinction in general but especially germane to discussions of things like medicine. your doctor who exists in a system inextricably bound up with capitalist state power and its biopolitical interest in producing a labour force is not your friend and is not, structurally, protecting your interests. that doesn't mean that medical care is intrinsically bad (i hope it's clear that it is emphatically not) or that doctoring is transhistorically doomed to produce and depend on capitalist bio-exploitation.

i guess this is just a long way of saying i think agamben produced a few interesting analyses of existing institutions and structures of power, but relies on operating assumptions that make him really useless for theorising power in a way attentive to its (class) character. i think that whole milieu is more a politics of anti-sociality than anything else and that it has only limited, local points of overlap with communism (and then only when taken pretty far out of its theoretical context).

[figuringoutstill]

"Truth, for Badiou, is never simply a revelation, but has reality only in and through the subject who changes the world in its name. If the subject “answers the call,” then it and the event become part of what Badiou calls “truth procedures,” of which he recognizes four: politics, where a status quo is breached in the name of a new community or society, science, in the name of new possibilities of knowing, art, of a new language of forms and love, a newly shared world of Two instead of One."

Ype de Boer (In 'Badiou and Agamben Beyond the Happiness Industry and its Critics')

[less-ismore]

La torre nella casa del falegname a Tubinga e la cameretta nella clinica di Herisau: ecco due luoghi su cui non ci si dovrebbe stancare di meditare. Quel che si è compiuto fra quelle mura – il rifiuto della ragione da parte di due poeti senza pari – è la piú forte obiezione che sia stata levata contro la nostra civiltà. E ancora una volta, nelle parole di Simone Weil: solo chi ha accettato lo stato piú estremo della degradazione sociale può dire la verità.

Credo anch’io che, nel mondo che mi è toccato in sorte, tutto ciò che a me pare desiderabile e per cui varrebbe la pena di vivere può trovar posto solo in un museo o in una prigione o in un manicomio. Lo so con assoluta certezza, ma non ho avuto, come Walser, il coraggio di trarne tutte le conseguenze. In questo senso, la relazione con i fatti della mia esistenza che non sono potuti accadere è altrettanto, se non piú importante, di quella con i fatti accaduti.

Giorgio Agamben, Autoritratto nello studio, 2017.

[crazy-so-na-sega]

Lo spettacolo non coincide semplicemente con la sfera delle immagini o con ciò che chiamiamo oggi media: esso è "un rapporto sociale fra persone, mediato attraverso le immagini" (cit.Guy Debord), l'espropriazione e l'alienazione della stessa socialità umana. Ovvero, con una formula lapidaria: "lo spettacolo è il capitale a un tale grado di accumulazione che diventa immagine". Ma, per ciò stesso, lo spettacolo non è che la pura forma della separazione: dove il mondo reale si è trasformato in un'immagine e le immagini diventano reali, la potenza pratica dell'uomo si distacca da se stessa e si presenta come un mondo a sé. E' nella figura di questo mondo separato e organizzato attraverso i media, in cui le forme dello stato e dell'economia si compenetrano che l'economia mercantile accede a uno statuto di sovranità assoluta e irresponsabile sull'intera vita sociale. Dopo aver falsificato l'insieme della produzione, essa può ora manipolare la percezione collettiva e impadronirsi della memoria e della comunicazione sociale, per trasformarle in un'unica merce spettacolare, in cui tutto può essere messo in discussione, tranne lo spettacolo stesso, che, in sé, non dice altro che: "ciò che appare è buono, e ciò che è buono appare".

-Giorgio Agamben -La comunità che viene

[thefragileabsolute]

Correspondence between Agamben and Arendt.

[belacqui-pro-quo]

The Faubourg Saint-Germain, however, as Proust depicts it, was in the early stages of this development. It admitted inverts because it felt attracted by what it judged to be a vice. Proust describes how Monsieur de Charlus, who had formerly been tolerated, "notwithstanding his vice," for his personal charm and old name, now rose to social heights. He no longer needed to lead a double life and hide his dubious acquaintances, but was encouraged to bring them into the fashionable houses. Topics of conversation which he formerly would have avoided — love, beauty, jealousy — lest somebody suspect his anomaly, were now welcomed avidly "in view of the experience, strange, secret, refined and monstrous upon which he founded" his views.

Something very similar happened to the Jews. Individual exceptions, ennobled Jews, had been tolerated and even welcomed in the society of the Second Empire, but now Jews as such were becoming increasingly popular. In both cases, society was far from being prompted by a revision of prejudices. They did not doubt that homosexuals were "criminals" or that Jews were "traitors"; they only revised their attitude toward crime and treason. The trouble with their new broadmindedness, of course, was not that they were no longer horrified by inverts but that they were no longer horrified by crime. They did not in the least doubt the conventional judgment. The best-hidden disease of the nineteenth century, its terrible boredom and general weariness, had burst like an abscess. The outcasts and the pariahs upon whom society called in its predicament were, whatever else they might have been, at least not plagued by ennui and, if we are to trust Proust's judgment, were the only ones in fin-de-siècle society who were still capable of passion. Proust leads us through the labyrinth of social connections and ambitions only by the thread of man's capacity for love, which is presented in the perverted passion of Monsieur de Charlus for Morel, in the devastating loyalty of the Jew Swann to his courtesan and in the author's own desperate jealousy of Albertine, herself the personification of vice in the novel. Proust made it very clear that he regarded the outsiders and newcomers, the inhabitants of "Sodome et Ghomorre," not only as more human but as more normal.

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

[bocadosdefilosofia]

«Contra esta sabiduría pueril, que afirma que la felicidad no es algo que pueda merecerse, la moral ha alzado desde siempre su objeción. Y lo ha hecho con las palabras del filósofo que menos ha comprendido la diferencia entre vivir dignamente y vivir feliz. "Aquello que en ti tiende con ardor a la felicidad es la inclinación; aquello que luego somete esta inclinación a la condición de que debes ser primero digno de la felicidad es tu razón", escribe Kant. Pero con una felicidad de la cual podemos ser dignos, nosotros (o el niño que hay en nosotros) no sabemos bien qué hacer. ¡Qué desastre si una mujer nos ama porque nos lo merecemos! ¡Y qué aburrida la felicidad como premio o recompensa por un trabajo bien hecho!»

Giorgio Agamben: Profanaciones. Adriana Hidalgo editora, pág. 22.  Buenos Aires, 2005

TGO

@bocadosdefilosofia

@dies-irae-1

[quotesoutofseason]

Santi Romano (Italian jurist)

right ≠ law

1909

(there is a true and proper source of law beyond legislation)

medieval theory: law does not need its own independent ground, it is a pragmatic instrument, values are religious.

modern theory: law is an ungrounded procedure (proceduralism, closed system) OR it has its own inherent ground (be it decision, necessity, sovereignty, force) so it is independent from spiritual values. (system of the threshold)

[ilsimplicissimusblog]

Agamben: teatro, menzogna e politica

Visto che sarà difficile che questo articolo di Agamben  in un Paese dove vige la censura e l’autocensura, dove non si è ancora spenta l’eco delle baggianate di Sanremo e nel quale l’argomento di maggior interesse sono le confricazioni della premier single col macellaio argentino, mi piace riproporlo su questo blog dove da sempre si denuncia la politica spettacolo. Dopo il caso Zelensky Giorgio…

[dsirmtcom]

NC - Giorgio Agamben, Pinocchio

Notes Contemplatives - Giorgio Agamben, Pinocchio #Philosophie #MardiCestPhilosophie #Contemplation #Agamben #Pinocchio #Vie #Mort

Notes contemplatives de lecture – Note contemplative n° 62 Aucune explication verbale ne remplace jamais la contemplation. Saint-Exupéry, Pilote de guerre. Notes de lecture Prologue céleste (ou infernal ?) Le nom même de Pinocchio, de même que toute l’onomastique du livre, a une signification ésotérique : “En Latin, pinoculus signifie éclat de pin. Pour un païen, il s’agit de l’arbre…

[figuringoutstill]

"Those who realize that the house is burning can be led to look with disdain and contempt upon their peers who seem not to realize it. And yet won't these people who do not see and do not think be precisely the lemurs to whom you will have to answer on the last day? Realizing that the house is burning does not raise you above the others: on the contrary, they are the ones with whom you will have to exchange a last glance when the flames draw nearer. What will you be able to say to justify your supposed conscience to these people who are so unknowing that they almost seem innocent?"

Giorgio Agamben in 'When the House Burns Down'

[katebvsh]

St Francis would love you even if you were a worm!

- taken from Giorgio Agamben’s “The Highest Poverty”

[loneberry]

—Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas

Can’t get enough of this Agamben book, which offers a theory of the phantasm grounded in an analysis of eros, melancholia, humoral theory, psychoanalysis, medieval medical texts, theological debates about acedia, Aristotelian theories of the imagination, the love poetry of the stilnovisti, etc etc

The phantasm exists, in its most distilled form, inside the dream… That we dream is one of the great mysteries of existence.

[simonm223]

Truth and the Cultic: Let's get properly postmodern

As part of the promotional tour for their new book, Neon Yang recently wrote an editorial at Tor.com about truth and the nature of cults. It isn’t very good, as editorials go, but the mistakes it makes are informative with regard to a failure of contemporary science fiction as a discursive space and I think this makes it, while not a good argument regarding truth, one that is interesting enough…

[danielarrebola]

Asimismo, las notas sobre el gesto de Agamben nos pueden servir como un marco perimetral general para hallar más claves en el estudio de la lágrima masculina aplicada a las stars de cada generación.

"El gesto es, en este sentido, comunicación de una comunicabilidad. No tiene propiamente nada que decir, porque lo que muestra es el ser-en-el-lenguaje del hombre como pura medialidad":

También dialoga con las tesis de Gilles Deleuze sobre la falaz distinción psicológica que el cine suprime entre imagen y gesto. Agamben alude a que el gesto es capaz de liberar toda una imagen en movimiento (por ejemplo Las Meninas o La Gioconda, siendo imágenes que podemos construir en gesto previo/posterior), y esto es interesante tenerlo en cuenta en tanto a la imagen de la lágrima masculina.

[belacqui-pro-quo]

It was Disraeli who had discovered that vice is but the corresponding reflection of crime in society. Human wickedness, if accepted by society, is changed from an act of will into an inherent, psychological quality which man cannot choose or reject but which is imposed upon him from without, and which rules him as compulsively as the drug rules the addict. In assimilating crime and transforming it into vice, society denies all responsibility and establishes a world of fatalities in which men find themselves entangled. The moralistic judgment as a crime of every departure from the norm, which fashionable circles used to consider narrow and philistine, if demonstrative of inferior psychological understanding, at least showed greater respect for human dignity. If crime is understood to be a kind of fatality, natural or economic, everybody will finally be suspected of some special predestination to it. "Punishment is the right of the criminal," of which he is deprived if (in the words of Proust) "judges assume and are more inclined to pardon murder in inverts and treason in Jews for reasons derived from ... racial predestination." It is an attraction to murder and treason which hides behind such perverted tolerance, for in a moment it can switch to a decision to liquidate not only all actual criminals but all who are "racially" predestined to commit certain crimes. Such changes take place whenever the legal and political machine is not separated from society so that social standards can penetrate into it and become political and legal rules. The seeming broadmindedness that equates crime and vice, if allowed to establish its own code of law, will invariably prove more cruel and inhuman than laws, no matter how severe, which respect and recognize man's independent responsibility for his behavior.

[...]

As far as the Jews were concerned, the transformation of the "crime" of Judaism into the fashionable "vice" of Jewishness was dangerous in the extreme. Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from Jewishness there was no escape. A crime, moreover, is met with punishment; a vice can only be exterminated. The interpretation given by society to the fact of Jewish birth and the role played by Jews in the framework of social life are intimately connected with the catastrophic thoroughness with which antisemitic devices could be put to work. The Nazi brand of antisemitism had its roots in these social conditions as well as in political circumstances. And though the concept of race had other and more immediately political purposes and functions, its application to the Jewish question in its most sinister aspect owed much of its success to social phenomena and convictions which virtually constituted a consent by public opinion.

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism