What Is An Apparatus And Other Essays

Author : Giorgio Agamben
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1503600041
Total Pages : 76 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book "What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three essays collected in this book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben's recent work through an investigation of Foucault's notion of the apparatus, a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on contemporariness, or the singular relation one may have to one's own time. "Apparatus" (dispositif in French) is at once a most ubiquitous and nebulous concept in Foucault's later thought. In a text bearing the same name ("What is a dispositif?") Deleuze managed to contribute its mystification, but Agamben's leading essay illuminates the notion: "I will call an apparatus," he writes, "literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings." Seen from this perspective, Agamben's work, like Foucault's, may be described as the identification and investigation of apparatuses, together with incessant attempts to find new ways to dismantle them. Though philosophy contains the notion of philos, or friend, in its very name, philosophers tend to be very skeptical about friendship. In his second essay, Agamben tries to dispel this skepticism by showing that at the heart of friendship and philosophy, but also at the core of politics, lies the same experience: the shared sensation of being. Guided by the question, "What does it mean to be contemporary?" Agamben begins the third essay with a reading of Nietzsche's philosophy and Mandelstam's poetry, proceeding from these to an exploration of such diverse fields as fashion, neurophysiology, messianism and astrophysics.

Author : Giorgio Agamben
Publisher : Stanford Univ Press + ORM
ISBN 13 : 0804764077
Total Pages : 449 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Potentialities written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford Univ Press + ORM. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects fifteen major philosophical essays spanning more than twenty years by acclaimed Italian philosopher and author of State of Exception. Giorgio Agamben is one of contemporary philosophy’s most influential thinkers on the subjects of language, power, society. This collection of essays opens with an enlightening introduction by the translator Daniel Heller-Roazen, who situates Agamben’s work with respect to both the history of philosophy and contemporary European thought. The essays that follow articulate a series of theoretical confrontations with privileged figures in the history of philosophy, politics, and criticism, from Plato to Spinoza, Aristotle to Deleuze, Carl Schmitt to Benjamin, Hegel to Aby Warburg, and Heidegger to Derrida. Three fundamental concepts organize the collection as a whole: the existence of language; the nature of history; and the problem of potentiality in metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of language. All these topics converge in the final part of the book, in which Agamben offers an extensive reading of Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” as a work that puts potentiality and actuality, possibility and reality, in a new light.

Author : Giorgio Agamben
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804730229
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The End of the Poem written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking--nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante. The author presents "literature" as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the Commedia Virgil is Dante's guide. The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise. Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provençal poets, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, among others).

Author : Louis Althusser
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 178873176X
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lenin and Philosophy written by Louis Althusser and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a structuralist Marxist, Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in For Marx (1965), and Reading Capital (1968). These works, along with Lenin and Philosophy (1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship. This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science. Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a humanist and historicist. Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to Andr Daspre, and Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract. The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history.

Author : Giorgio Agamben
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804762309
Total Pages : 76 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book "What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is an apparatus? was originally published in Italian in 2006 under the title: Che cos'è un dispositivo?; The friend was originally published in Italian in 2007 under the title: L'amico; and, What is the contemporary? was originally published in Italian in 2008 under the title: Che cos'è il contemporaneo

Author : Timothy C. Campbell
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452932786
Total Pages : 205 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Improper Life written by Timothy C. Campbell and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2011-10-28 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How biopolitics can get beyond its obsession with death

Author : Giorgio Agamben
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226009262
Total Pages : 108 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book State of Exception written by Giorgio Agamben and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-07-18 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states. The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt. In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.

Author : Giorgio Agamben
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804781664
Total Pages : 476 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Kingdom and the Glory written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned philosopher expounds on the ideas he introduced in Homo Sacer with this analysis of the theological foundations of political power. In the early centuries of the Church, in order to reconcile monotheism with God’s threefold nature, the doctrine of Trinity was introduced in the guise of an economy of divine life. It was as if the Trinity amounted to nothing more than a problem of managing and governing the heavenly house and the world. In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben shows that this theological-economic paradigm unexpectedly lies at the origin of many of the most important categories of modern politics. Its influence ranges from the democratic theory of the division of powers to the strategic doctrine of collateral damage, and from the invisible hand of Smith’s liberalism to ideas of order and security. Agamben also demonstrates that modern power is not only government but also glory, and that the ceremonial, liturgical, and acclamatory aspects that we have regarded as vestiges of the past actually constitute the basis of Western power. Through a fascinating analysis of liturgical acclamations and ceremonial symbols of power—the throne, the crown, purple cloth, the Fasces, and more—Agamben develops an original genealogy that illuminates the startling function of consent and of the media in modern democracies.

Author : Emma Goldman
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Anarchism and Other Essays written by Emma Goldman and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Giorgio Agamben
Publisher : Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics
ISBN 13 : 9780804769501
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nudities written by Giorgio Agamben and published by Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his new collection of essays, Giorgio Agamben addresses the most urgent themes of his recent research.