PHILOSOPHY: Giorgio Agamben is over eighty years old, but still very productive. In this newly translated essay, we recognize thoughts from the main work Homo Sacer (1998), but instead of discussing biopower and the naked life, he here deals with the voice. A big plus then is that translator Gisle Selnes has written a complementary foreword that contextualises Agamben's thoughts then and now.
MUSICAL LIFE: With The Use of the Bodies and What is Philosophy?, Giorgio Agamben returns to his early main interest before the first homo sacer book – namely to being, to language, to thought and the blissful life. It is also about where you are – where you simultaneously discover life (ontology) and how life could be (politics, the happy life).
HOLDERLIN: Giorgio Agamben makes a loose juxtaposition between Goethe and Hölderlin, between madness and reason. Did the latter allow himself to be pushed psychologically to the limit?
PHILOSOPHY: Italian Giorgio Agamben describes and envisions different courses for our thinking than today's more technologically nihilistic will-driven production paradigm. Two books delve into other possibilities than the 'fire' he believes we find ourselves in. In this essay, Astrid Nordang tries to bring out some of this complicated material.
PHILOSOPHY: Agamben's sketches for a theory of civil war are thus perhaps also a contribution to a new theory of revolution. Revolution beyond politics. Where the revolution is finally thought beyond any notion of a state and standing upright like a soldier who salutes. MODERN TIMES has chosen to print the afterword to Agamben's book about the civil war.
BIOMAKT: Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has had several controversial statements about the management of the corona crisis. Agamben states that the media handling of the corona crisis in some perverse way has a similarity to the commercial advertising. And warns against a new, despotic security community.
CROWN: Are the European authorities truthful about how long the measures will last? Can you lock up a population for 12-18 months before a vaccine is developed?
Agamben: The archeology of religion, art, politics, and capitalism is not a search for any kind of origin – but a search for a foundation that tears past notions to their roots.
Georgio Agamben brings the reader on track to the essential questions of the transforming power of literature – the relation to the mystery of life itself.
The community that is to come is a learned, rich, complex and sometimes obscure text. Here and there it borders on the mysticism: Agamben empties the ram of a patriarchal God Father with one hand and reintroduces with Spinoza all the divinity of things with the other, before drawing it all back into the profane, and then holding the "solution", a quivering aura, ahead of us.