Agamben

In the introduction to the volume, the editors explain the overarching aim of the volume and contextualize the main themes of its chapters. Even if the notions of biopolitics and biopower have played a crucial role in philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences over the last decades, they have been used in various and at times diverging senses, which has also produced different narratives about the history of biopolitics. The main aim of the volume is to clarify whether and to what extent the concept of biopolitics is applicable to antiquity. To answer such questions, the chapters collected in the volume address three main topics, namely the possible presence of biopolitical discourse in ancient thought, the extent to which the application of a biopolitical approach to ancient thought requires qualifications, and some influential contemporary interpretations of the relation between biopolitics and antiquity.

Walter Benjamin in his 1921 written essay, Capitalism as Religion, tried to express an opinion that Capitalism was a cultic religion without mercy or truce and its immanent principle is to create a “house of despair.”  Benjamin directly asserts the view that capitalism is the most omnipotent religious cult of all time and there is not exist any space beyond it. In other words, the utilitarian practices of capitalism have the meaning of a religious cult. Capitalism does not require the acceptance of a creed, a doctrine or a theology. What counts are the actions, which take the form, in terms of their social dynamics, of cult practices. After several decades influential Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben shared the somewhat same view about Capitalism. Agamben argues that people who belong to the religious cult of capitalism sacrifice every facet of life and end up in a supremely frustrating environment where everything is sacred, hence off-limits to personal use. It must be emphasized that both of these thinkers related capitalism to sacred space in which, in Agamben's opinion, everything is beyond of communal or cooperative use. To put this opinion in other words, sacred space and practice of sacrifice displaces something from the domain of human use to the domain of exclusively divine use, thus making it sacred and thus, in this case, the divine is capital and the sacred is anything required by the apparatus of capitalism. Agamben thinks that against the abovementioned process we should appeal an act of profanation which the opposite of and antidote to sacrifice. After the act of profanation, everything which was sacred now becomes restored to communal use. Agamben differentiates an act of profanation from secularization. He firmly asserts that secularization leaves the status-quo without any revolutionary change while profanation is intended as modes of resisting the universal absorption into capitalist production and consumption. Profaning the unprofanable as an exit strategy, a way to escape a religious cult that offers no hope of redemption. Agamben tells us: "The profanation of the unprofaniable is the political task of the coming generation."

GREGOR SAMSA IN THE SOVEREIGN DOUBLE BIND 
Many analyses of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis proceed by treating key moments in the larger narrative as self-contained and symbolic of the modernist subject's powerlessness, solitude and futility and the apparent meaninglessness that these convey. Abundant evidence exists for such a reading, not least of which the tragic and increasingly isolated inner monologues Kafka composes. While any number of such scenes are in themselves poignant comments on Gregor's isolation and psychological torment, examining Gregor's relationships with the deputy director of the company for which he works, and with his family, will instead reveal a continuous and consistent theme of psychological, economic and physical abuse of Gregor. The scenes that best demonstrate this lend themselves well to a more political reading of the text, rife with meaning for, and resonance with, our present historical moment. Subject to the will of his father and that of the deputy director, Gregor becomes victim to the decisions these characters make regarding his destiny, decisions which take on a sovereign character, in the sense of the term elaborated by Agamben in Homo Sacer. I submit that reading the Metamorphosis as a detailed depiction of the ways in which such power can be exerted in the economic as well as the juridical realms will also reveal the correlations between the treatment of Gregor-as-insect and the treatments of so-called vagabonds and vagrants in early capitalist England. His recollections of life as a worker, his transformation and the violence that this transformation invites upon his body, his subsequent imprisonment in his room and finally his death are all moments that resemble the consequences inflicted upon those who transgress and/or exit the coercive dynamic capital exerts on one's life and labor.

During the past few years the border waters between Europe and Africa have become an EU-policy crucible. In the midst of the tightening of EU border controls and refugee protection claims, supranational, national and local actors fi nd themselves in a phase of legal insecurity and negotiation. Th is article is based on ethnographical research carried out in Libya, Italy and Malta. It sheds light on the diff erent actors' practices at sea and in the surrounding border region. It also explores how new parameters for refugee protection are emerging in the border regions of the European Union. Th e article argues that the policy practices of the co-operation between Italy and Libya as well as the informal operational methods carried out in the Mediterranean Sea function as a trailblazer of the overall EU refugee policy. In the long term, some of these practices will aff ect and change the legal basis and the formal regulations of the European refugee regime. Th e principle of non-refoulement could fi rst be undermined and then abolished in this process. Using an approach that combines the empirical study of border regions with a legal anthropological perspective, the article analyses the Union's processes of change and decision-making on local, national and supranational levels and their interconnections.

This article discusses the transformation of the Moroccan state under contemporary neoliberal globalization, and considers what this transition means for the ways in which scholars view state-society interplay in Morocco and the Arab world more generally. Specifically, it examines the protest of unemployed graduates in Morocco, suggesting that public demonstrations are not only a means to communicate and mobilize demands, but also a technology to reclaim and reproduce a particular “truth” in public. This truth does not necessarily equate with the reality of the neoliberal state as a dispersed material force. As such, by looking at the case of Morocco, we hope to instigate further debate on the nature of the state and its specific relation to phenomena as globalization, society and social protest.

This paper first outlines the key traits of some critiques of Agamben’s theory of the subject. What they have in common is an emphasis on the limitations of his conception of political agency, which is based on the one hand on an apathetic and passive figure such as the Muselmann, and on the other, on Bartleby, the Scrivener, who epitomises Agamben’s notion of potentiality. Following this short review I then focus on Agamben’s recent article “K.,” in which he compares and contrasts the two Kafkian figures of K. from The Trial and The Castle in the context of Roman law. Considering Benjamin’s distinction between a virtual and real state of exception, Josef K. and land surveyor K. adopt two different positions with regard to the form of law on which the structure of sovereignty is based. Josef K. represents bare life, which persists along the internal boundary that is constitutive of the form of law, while land surveyor K. is the subject that manages to erase this internal boundary and, thus, represents the only Agambenian figure that can effectively suspend and abolish the form of law.

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

In The Body in Mystery, Jennifer R. Rust takes the political concept of the mystical body of the commonwealth, back to the corpus mysticum of the medieval church. Rust argues that the communitarian ideal of sacramental sociality had a far longer afterlife than has been previously assumed. Reviving a critical discussion of Ernst Kantorowicz’s masterwork, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957), Rust brings to bear the latest scholarship, and expands the representation of the corpus mysticum through a range of literary genres as well as religious polemics and political discourses. She reclaims the concept as an essential category of social value and historical understanding for the imaginative life of the major literature of Reformation England. The Body in Mystery provides new ways of appreciating the always rich and sometimes difficult continuities between the secular and sacred in early modern England.

Nossos tempos são os da desoneração. Menos cargas para todos. É algo que vemos de fato e também o que se coloca no horizonte coletivo e no desejo individual de uma maneira jamais vista. A sociedade da necessidade fica para trás, e a única necessidade que se impõe é a do direito de ter direitos, e estes, por sua vez, sempre no sentido de afastar aquilo que onera. Esse movimento histórico e geográfico é tão forte que já há algum tempo atinge os animais. Somos porta vozes deles na nossa luta de livrá-los de qualquer escravidão, como já fizemos conosco, com as crianças, as mulheres e os pobres.

El paradigma del estado de excepción, que hoy es central en los
estudios sobre la soberanía y la acción política de los Estados
democrático-liberales, ha estado presente en las literaturas
filosófico-políticas desde el siglo XIX. Sin embargo, será el
filósofo y jurista alemán Carl Schmitt quien en las décadas del
1920 al 1950 exponga de forma sistemática una teoría clara
sobre dicho paradigma. Este artículo expone una lectura crítica
de las definiciones e interpretaciones del estado de excepción
propuesta por Schmitt y sus influencias en autores contemporáneos,
tales como Giorgio Agamben. El artículo aclara y
debate con conceptos claves de la filosofía política schmittiana,
como soberanía, decisión y excepcionalidad. Al mismo tiempo
muestra la crítica de Schmitt al liberalismo. Este recorrido nos
permitirá comprender y criticar las posturas schmittianas del
poder, el derecho, la violencia y la política.


The paradigm of the state of exception, currently central to
studies in sovereignty and political action of liberal-democratic
states, has been present in the philosophical and political
literature since the nineteenth century. However, it is Carl
Schmitt, German philosopher and jurist, who systematically
presented a coherent theory on this paradigm since the 1920s
through the 1950s. This article discloses a critical reading of the
definitions and interpretations of the state of exception proposed
by Schmidt and its influences on other contemporary authors,
such as Giorgio Agamben. It also clarifies and debates the key
concepts of Schmitt's political philosophy, such as sovereignty,
decision, and exceptionality, while showing Schmitt's critique of
liberalism. This overview will allow us to comprehend and
criticize Schmitt's arguments and definitions of power, law,
violence, and politics.

Publié dans l'ouvrage collectif, dirigé par Rémi Astruc,  "La Communauté revisitée (Community Redux)", RKI Press, 2016. Certains aspects ont été développés en anglais: "Whatever Singularity, Negative Community, and Literature (Perhaps)" dans la revue CounterText.

Die aktuelle globale Ausnahmesituation unterscheidet sich vom klassischen Verständnis eines politischen oder juridischen »Ausnahmezustands« und entlarvt nicht nur das Konzept der souveränen Entscheidung über den Ausnahmezustand als Illusion, sondern affiziert auch das Verständnis souveräner Macht als solcher. Die Versuche »souveräner Gesten« wie Sie Donald Trump, Boris Johnson oder Jair Bolsonaro an den Tag gelegt haben, erwiesen sich alsbald als lächerlich. Auch Aussagen des österreichischen Kanzlers Sebastian Kurz lassen sich in diesem Kontext strukturell entlarven. Giorgio Agambens nun abgeschlossenes Homo-Sacer-Projekt macht dagegen Kriterien sichtbar für die »destituierende Potenz« einer »kommenden Politik«, die jedoch nicht auf eine chronologisch künftige Zeit verweist, sonder im »Hier-und-Jetzt« wirksam wird.
(Der Text erscheint als Anhang zu einer Einführung in die Begriffe und die Methodik des Agamben'schen Denkens, sowie ein affirmatives Verständnis seiner Hinweise zu einer "kommenden Politik" im Kontext des Homo-Sacer-Projekts.)

This paper examines the central role of the camp in the early Israeli state period and its spatial and geopolitical evolution. Unlike official Israeli history, which presents the immigrant camps as an inevitable improvised response to the unexpected problem of mass immigration, I examine the camp as a strategic modern biopolitical instrument that allowed for the state's profound geopolitical changes and was itself altered according to them. The paper analyses the ways in which the camp facilitated the creation of Israel as a state formed by two seemingly contradictory, but in fact complementary, conditions: on one hand, a product of a chaotic ‘state of emergency’ and a form of ‘ordered disorder’ created by mass immigration, and on the other hand, a product of a comprehensive, tightly controlled modernist project combining physical planning and social engineering. This duality reveals the role of these immigrant camps, which were created both in Israel and abroad, as spatial ‘black holes’ which swallowed the contradiction between the radical geopolitical transformation and the rational self-image of the Israeli state-building project. The evolving and hybrid typologies of the camp in Israel's pre-state and early-state periods expose it as a versatile instrument, highlighting the need for informed spatial and geographical genealogies of the camp in order to illuminate its various transformations.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629816300877

El conjunto de trabajos contenidos en el presente libro, producidos entre el 2006 y el 2013, constituyen una provocativa propuesta discursiva desde la cual reconstruir críticamente al Derecho actual y repensarlo o, mejor aún, traspasarlo desde ese sentido alternativo de normatividad societal que se va desplegando por doquier más allá de los límites impuestos por la forma-jurídica y el modo estadocéntrico de regulación social.

Phronetic organizational research is an approach to the study of management and organizations focusing on ethics and power. It is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Aristotelian concept phronesis, usually as ‘prudence’. Phronesis is the ability to think and act in relation to values, to deliberate about ‘things that are good or bad for humans’ in the words of Aristotle (1976:1140a24–b12). Phronetic organizational research effectively provides answers to the following four value-rational questions, for specific problematics in management and organization studies: 1. Where are we going with this specific management problematic? 2. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? 3. Is this development desirable? 4. What, if anything, should we do about it?

A tradução das obras de Giorgio Agamben (1942) para o idioma português é significativa para o avanço dos estudos acerca do pensamento desse filósofo contemporâneo que se põe a discutir temas de filosofia, religião, política, direito, economia, cultura. A diversidade temática, característica que perpassa as obras de Agamben, implica possíveis diferentes matizes através das quais se pode aproximar e abordar suas obras: elas não são um domínio exclusivo da filosofia, sendo discutidas também pelas ciências sociais e pelos braços que delas derivam, pela ciência da religião e pela teologia, pela ciência política e pelo direito. Isso é possível porque o conteúdo trazido por Agamben está vinculado à interpretação dos problemas contemporâneos, que, por sua vez, exigem distintas abordagens para que sejam compreendidos em sua integralidade. A aventura (L'avventura), obra originalmente publicada na Itália em 2015, não foge a essa caracterização geral.

The Aalborg Project may be interpreted as a metaphor of modern politics, modern administration and planning, and of modernity itself. The basic idea of the project was comprehensive, coherent, and innovative, and it was based on rational and democratic argument. During implementation, however, when idea met reality, the play of Machiavellian princes, Nietzschean will to power, and Foucauldian rationality-as-rationalization resulted in the fragmentation of the project.

This paper sets out to develop two related ideas. First, it seeks to identify how both violence and neoliberalism can be considered as moments. From this shared conceptualisation of process and fluidity, I argue that it becomes easier to recognise how these two phenomena actually converge. Building upon this conceived coalescence of neoliberalism and violence, the second aim is to recognise how the hegemony of neoliberalism positions it as an abuser, which facilitates the abandonment of those ‘Others’ who fall outside of neoliberal normativity. I argue that the widespread banishment of ‘Others’ under neoliberalism produces a ‘state of exception’, wherein because of its inherently dialectic nature, exceptional violence is transformed into exemplary violence. This metamorphosis occurs as aversion for alterity intensifies under neoliberalism and its associated violence against ‘Others’ comes to form the rule.

At the same time that case studies are widely used and have produced canonical texts, it may be observed that the case study as a methodology is generally held in low regard, or is simply ignored, within the academy. For example, only 2 of the 30 top-ranked U.S. graduate programs in political science require a dedicated graduate course in case study or qualitative methods, and a full third of these programs do not even offer such a course. In contrast, all of the top 30 programs offer courses in quantitative methods and almost all of them require training in such methods, often several courses. In identifying this paradox of the case study’s wide use and low regard, Gerring rightly remarks that the case study survives in a “curious methodological limbo,” and that the reason is that the method is poorly understood. In what follows, we will try to resolve Gerring’s paradox and help case study research gain wider use and acceptance.

The validity of interview data for social science research is under sophisticated critique. In this article, verbal interaction in semi-structured interviews (SSIs) is compared to that in naturalistic conversation in terms of participant use of and response to indirect complaints (ICs). SSIs are analyzed with Boxer's (1993a&c) IC coding scheme and compared to her findings on conversational data. Interviewees are demonstrated to communicate like friends as opposed to strangers, intimates, or other possibly unique pattern. The SSIs are also shown to be asymmetric in that interviewers focus on topic control although, at times, respond to ICs in more normative ways through offering different kinds of commentary. The pattern of interviewer commentary mirrors that of the conversational data except in relation to the dearth of commiseration in the SSIs. In conclusion, the value of this analysis is that it suggests, tentatively, that interviewee contribution within SSIs might, in some situations, be extrapolated to one particular kind of everyday interactional context—communication between friends— although the asymmetry of the interaction demonstrates its institutional nature.

Starve and Immolate tells the story of leftist political prisoners in Turkey who waged a deadly struggle against the introduction of high security prisons by forging their lives into weapons. Weaving together contemporary and critical political theory with political ethnography, Banu Bargu analyzes the death fast struggle as an exemplary though not exceptional instance of self-destructive practices that are a consequence of, retort to, and refusal of the increasingly biopolitical forms of sovereign power deployed around the globe.

Bargu chronicles the experiences, rituals, values, beliefs, ideological self-representations, and contentions of the protestors who fought cellular confinement against the background of the history of Turkish democracy and the treatment of dissent in a country where prisons have become sites of political confrontation. A critical response to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Starve and Immolate centers on new forms of struggle that arise from the asymmetric antagonism between the state and its contestants in the contemporary prison. Bargu ultimately positions the weaponization of life as a bleak, violent, and ambivalent form of insurgent politics that seeks to wrench the power of life and death away from the modern state on corporeal grounds and in increasingly theologized forms. Drawing attention to the existential commitment, sacrificial morality, and militant martyrdom that transforms these struggles into a complex amalgam of resistance, Bargu explores the global ramifications of human weapons' practices of resistance, their possibilities and limitations.

On 29 November 2021, the Indian government repealed three 'Farm Bills' that were passed in Parliament earlier in September 2020. These bills were to have a profound liberalizing impact on Indian farming, ushering in big agrobusiness into an unregulated market. Starting from around November 2020, a protest movement grew from the agriculture-intensive states of Punjab and Haryana in Northern India and rapidly escalated into a nationwide movement, calling in worldwide support. A very striking global optic of the protest was the tens of thousands of protestors gathered at the borders of India's capital city Delhi over the many months of the movement, even when the COVID pandemic raged on. This essay reads this event against Agamben's popular opinion about social distancing as a biopolitical technique that signals the death of the political because it disables the possibility of crowds. Proposing the ascendance of the social in a biopolitical environment, the query that guides this essay is about how social collectivities surpasses the power of physical contagion, leading to another understanding of crowds, politics and governmental technique.

Il lettore che, recandosi presso la Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, voglia consultare l'edizione del Papiro di Torino 55001 a cura di Joseph Omlin 1 , rimarrà sorpreso nel trovare il testo, facilmente consultabile nella Sala Arte e Spettacolo della stessa biblioteca, privo delle belle tavole a colori con le quali lo studioso tedesco tentava di ricostruire il documento originale. Qualcuno, in un gesto che solo con frettolosa approssimazione potremmo ascrivere alla generica categoria del vandalismo, ha privato il libro proprio di quelle tavole che, colmando le numerose lacune dell'originale, ricostruivano i disegni di quello che ancora risulta essere il documento erotico più antico dell'Occidente. Allo stesso tempo, il lettore che voglia consultare Roma Amor di Jean Marcadé 2 , uno dei primi testi dell'antichistica moderna sull'arte erotica antica, una volta trasferitosi nella Sala Manoscritti della medesima biblioteca e qui accolto con estrema gentilezza dal personale di sala, sarà da questi invitato a compilare un modulo di autocertificazione, dove la consultazione del testo dovrà essere motivata e in qualche modo certificata e giustificata nei confronti della Biblioteca stessa.

The article analyzes the ethical and political stakes in Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community. The book was irst published in Italian in 1990 and was translated into English in 1993. It was then republished in Italian in 2001, with a short new apostil by the author that reairms its persistent and actual “inactuality.” In this text Agamben establishes the philosophical foundations of the long-lasting project started with the publication of Homo sacer (1995). Its republication in 2001 seems thus to reairm the politics of his analysis of the past ifteen years. The argument revolves around the analysis of the “whatever singularity” (qualunque in Italian, quodlibet in Latin) as the subject of the “coming community,” a singularity that presents an “inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence.” Whatever must not be understood as “indiference” but, rather, as “being such that it always matters.” The ethical and political proposal consists in the call to adhere to this singularity without identity and representation in order to construe a community without postulates and thus also without “subjects.” The paradigm of this politics is identiied in Nancy’s term inoperativeness (inoperosità), a messianic “de-creation.” The inoperative whatever is directed toward apolitics che viene, à-venir as distinct from futura, future: It implies in fact the renunciation of construing images of the future—“utopia is the very topicality of things.”

Taking a cue from a reading of Agamben’s essay “Nudity” (2009), the text analyses the
most famous concept of his vocabulary, “bare” or “naked life,” and attempts to understand
the meaning of life’s “nakedness” within the whole project begun with Homo Sacer. By
attempting to disclose and deactivate the theological signature that determines, in our culture,
the concept of “nudity” in exclusively privative terms, “Nudity” provides both an instrument
for the analysis of life’s nudity in the sovereign ban and the model for a philosophical practice
structured on a “denudation” of the signatures and apparatuses which determine and imprison
our life.

s theories have left an important heritage that clarifies the relation between the dimension of virtuality and the category of commodity as fetish. We can observe how, for example, Slavoj Zizek's words impliedly recall just the French philosopher:

Abstract: In Discipline and Punish the police is a state institution isomorphic with the prison. In his Collège de France lectures, Foucault unearths a ‘secret history of the police’ where greater attention is paid to public health, social welfare and regulating the marketplace than investigating and arresting criminals. This broad overview of Foucault’s writings on the police exhibits a ‘splintering-effect’ in his modalities of power. To resolve this apparent contradiction, a nominalist reading that conflates Foucault’s divergent paradigms of power results in a more multifaceted history and a ubiquitous mode of power with diverse and precise techniques. There are strengths and weaknesses in Foucault’s theory when applied to modern neoliberal police. Foucault should not be employed for one-dimensional criticisms of modern police or as an analytical cure-all.

Keywords: biopower, discipline, Foucault, governmentality, neoliberalism, police

In the past two and a half decades, Walter Benjamin's early essay 'Towards the Critique of Violence' (1921) has taken a central place in politico-philosophic debates. The complexity and perhaps even the occasional obscurity of Benjamin's text have undoubtedly contributed to the diversity, conflict, and richness of contemporary readings. Interest has heightened following the attention that philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben have devoted to it. Agamben's own interest started early in his career with his 1970 essay, 'On the Limits of Violence', and Benjamin's essay continues to be a fundamental reference in Agamben's work.

Written by internationally recognized scholars, Towards the Critique of Violence is the first book to explore politico-philosophic implications of Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' and correlative implications of Benjamin's resonance in Agamben's writings. Topics of this collection include mythic violence, the techniques of non-violent conflict resolution, ambiguity, destiny or fate, decision and nature, and the relation between justice and thinking. The volume explores Agamben's usage of certain Benjaminian themes, such as Judaism and law, bare life, sacrifice, and Kantian experience, culminating with the English translation of Agamben's 'On the Limits of Violence'. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/towards-the-critique-of-violence-9781472533494/#sthash.H7rdHGGK.dpuf

La recente ristampa, in una collezione economica, di un libro che da anni era diventato introvabile, L'érotique des troubadours di René Nelli, si inserisce in un rinnovato interesse per la poesia medioevale e, in particolare, occitanica, che caratterizza già da qualche anno la cultura francese. Il primo risveglio -dopo le ricerche dei critici romantici, da Raynouard a Fauriel 1 -degli studi provenzali in Francia, all'epoca di Anglade e di Jeanroy 2 , era stato caratterizzato da una singolare sordità alla lirica trobadorica; e questa incomprensione fu subito dopo ancora accresciuta dal progressivo sostituirsi dello pseudoproblema dell'amore cortese all'unico problema reale, che era quello dell'intelligenza di ciò che l'esperienza poetica trobadorica aveva di unico e proprio.

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.

Creación y anarquía, el libro que reúne las cinco lecciones dictadas entre 2012 y 2013 por Giorgio Agamben en la Academia de Arquitectura de Mendrisio, es la exploración acerca de  lo  que  sus  propios  conceptos  creados  en Homo  sacer,  su  proyecto filosófico  troncal,  tienen  para  decir  cuando  se  los  hace  hablar  acerca  de  la obra de arte.

“Ana akım medya tarafından bulandırılmış bir zihin, anlam üzerinde verilen mücadeleye kulaklarını tıkamış olsa bile, felsefe bu noktada çatlaklardan sızarak gerçekliğe bir çağrı görevi görebilir. Örneğin, ‘ölü ele geçirildi’ ile ‘öldürüldü’ arasındaki fark üzerine kafa yormak bile önemli bir kapıyı aralayabilir; yerleşik düşünme alışkanlıklarını yerle bir edebilir. İşte bu anlam mücadelesinde yeni cepheler açan biyopolitika, zihnimizin normatif cam tavanını tuzla buz etmek için gereken çekici sunuyor.”

Biyopolitika, yakın dönem sosyal teorinin ve siyaset biliminin anahtar kavramlarından birisi. Hayatla ilgili düzenlemelere analitik ve politik bir bakış için pencere açıyor çünkü. Buradan bakınca görecek çok şey var ve bu sayede birçok “alışıldık” şeyi başka bir gözle görmek mümkün. Öncelikle, iktidarın bedenlerle, genetikle, nüfusla istatistikle, cinsellikle ilişkisini… Özne ve öznelliğin kuruluşunu… Yaşam gibi ölümcül, ölüm gibi yaşamsal bir meseleyi… Utku Özmakas, öncelikle, biyopolitikayı “moda kavram” kisvesinden sıyırmaya önem veriyor. Kavramın gelişme seyrini, farklı nesnelliklere açılan yüzlerini, değişik stratejik kullanımlarını ve bunlar arasındaki bağlantıları, gerilimleri inceliyor. Bunu, kavramın “başlatıcıları” sayılabilecek Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben ve Michael Hardt – Antonio Negri’nin düşünsel serüvenlerinde derinleşerek yapıyor. Kitabın alt başlığı, iktidar ve direniş, biyopolitikayı tek yönlü ve adeta otomatik işleyen bir iktidar tekniği olarak değil, aynı zamanda direniş imkânlarının kaynağı olarak görmenin işaretidir. Konusuna vukufla eğilirken, bir dertle ve merakla düşünmenin zevkini, tutkusunu yansıtan bir kitap.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes—from global tourism to undocumented labor—have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time.

Rather than viewing migration as the exception to the rule of political fixity and citizenship, Thomas Nail reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place. Applying his "kinopolitics" to several major historical conditions (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) and figures of migration (the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat), he provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary migration.

This article interrogates a certain philosophical "scene" – one which constitutes itself through the position of what Jacques Derrida calls “the ethical instance of violence.” This scene supposes a certain “style” of writing or doing philosophy, and perhaps even a certain philosophical “genre” or “subgenre”: the philosophical discourse on violence. In the course of the essay, I analyze this quasi-juridical scene through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Werner Hamacher and Martin Hägglund among others. The scene, built on texts on texts on violence, demands a logic of purity; it is wary of contaminations and equivocations. And yet it thrives on them. In analyzing the implications of text, writing, and trace for the philosophical discourse on violence, I follow Derrida “just to see” what could make the scene tremble.

A slightly different version of this essay was published in the volume 17 of Oxímora: Revista Internacional de Ética y Política, edited by Juan Evaristo Valls Boix, entitled “¿Cómo no temblar? Jacques Derrida y las economías de la violencia en la filosofía política contemporánea.”
Link to the complete issue: https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/oximora/article/view/32030/32094