One of the key concepts in Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Paul is temporality. In this article, Delahaye examines this concept. Delahaye shows that Agamben’s understanding of messianic temporality hinges on the opposition between kairos and chronos, which Agamben takes for granted. He consequently traces this opposition back to Heidegger’s influence on Agamben. This leads Delahaye to conclude that messianic temporality can be understood as a variation on Heidegger’s idea of ecstatic temporality.

This essay reconsiders Marx’ prehistory of capital through the lens of the work of Giorgio Agamben, who in the wake of Foucault has proposed a bio-political theory of sovereignty that breaks down the analytical separation between sovereignty and governmentality that Foucault in his work tries to maintain. Although Agamben mentions Marx only once in his study of sovereign power, I argue that his study nevertheless contributes to our understanding of the capitalist relation as not only a governmental but also a (...) sovereign power relation. In the first part of this essay, I show through a philological commentary on Marx’ use of the adjective ‘vogelfrei’—translated as free, rightless, without protection, outlawed—to characterise the proletariat, that the Marxian proletariat is a figure of what Agamben in his study of sovereign power calls bare life. In the second part of the essay, I show that this sovereign dimension of the capitalist relation is also substantiated by Marx’ analysis of the logic of the capitalist relation as that of the exception. After Carl Schmitt, who wrote that ‘sovereign is who decides on the state of exception’, Agamben has argued that the logic of the exception is the logic of sovereign power. Reconsidered through the lens of Agamben’s argument, Marx’ account of the prehistory of capital reveals that there is a sovereign logic of the exception at work in the capitalist relation. In the final part of the essay, I start from Agamben’s single reference to Marx in his study of sovereign power to discuss the importance of my conclusions for Agamben’s political message. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to shed light on the political ambitions of Agamben’s book The Time That Remains. First, the article examines Agamben’s political messianism in The Time That Remains by taking into account the question of political theology. Second, the article elaborates on a number of important concepts and ideas that are at the forefront of Agamben’s political messianism. Third, the author elucidates the general framework within which one has to view Agamben’s political messianism. In the fourth (...) and last part of the article, the author assesses the innovative nature of Agamben’s political messianism by sketching out a comparison between The Time That Remains and Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of Paul the apostle. (shrink)

In this essay I develop a Marxist-informed anticolonialist position, and from this position I assess the role of law in the early Canadian settler-state. I claim that the flexibility of law is a measure of its restitutive and exploitative facets, such facets that operate dialectically as a means of moderating between the settler-state’s liberal democratic ideals and its capitalist imperatives. Law plays an integral role in this context because, by performing this moderating function, it stabilizes the socio-economic order of the (...) emergent settler-state. In the second half of this essay, I enrich my theoretical analysis by examining the variable legal subjectivity of early Ukrainian immigrants to Canada. This historical perspective allows me to illuminate the intricacies of the logic that informs law’s flexibility, and to show how the liberal democratic principle of freedom was—and continues to be—both extolled and compromised by the law’s moderating function. (shrink)

This essay explores the use of the concept of the messianic by Giorgio Agamben and Theodor Adorno. Throughout his work, Agamben consistently presents his reading of the messianic as an alternative to what he considers to be the ‘pessimistic’ negative dialectics of Adorno, which he argues ‘is an absolutely non-messianic form of thought’. For Agamben, the messianic brings dialectics to a ‘standstill’. This essay analyzes this deployment of the ‘messianic’ in his thought, and contrasts it with the perspective of Adorno. (...) Agamben’s interpretation of Walter Benjamin is challenged with reference to a debate between Adorno and Benjamin over theology, dialectics, and politics. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 1, February 2019, Page 54-70.

This article sets out to offer a new reconceptualisation of the common good as the mechanism providing the temporal coordinates for revolutionary politics. The first section investigates the pairing of commonality and goodness, revealing its nature as a synthesis of apparently irreconcilable opposites. The second section examines how this irreconcilability is overcome, advancing the argument that to heal the divide, a double movement of definition and concealment is necessary, whereby the process of definition of what constitutes the common good is (...) accompanied by an expropriation, or hollowing out, of meaning. The third section offers a proposal for overcoming this epistemological impasse about the nature of the common good, by contrasting chronos and kairós, chronological time and what in English can be translated as ‘opportune time’, and offering kairós as the chance to create, within the fissures of the totalitarianism of chronological time, the timescape for revolutionary politics. This proposal is carried on in the second part of this article, starting with ‘Chronos and Kairós’ section, where the concept of kairós is expanded upon and coupled with the Epicurean and Lucretian idea of the clinamen, the swerve of the atoms that introduces the element of chance against Democritean determinism. With the support of Antonio Negri’s reading of kairós and clinamen, the article argues in ‘Alma Venus: Love, Desire and Revolution’ section that these two concepts provide the spatial and temporal coordinates for revolutionary politics, in tension and critical engagement with Ackerman’s idea of constitutional moments, to conclude in ‘Conclusions: Kairós and Revolutionary Politics’ section, that the common good is to be defined as that which takes place and is identified/identifiable within these coordinates. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article pursues the question of the essence of Europe. It does not lie in the religious, cultural and geographical demarcations, but in the openness towards the other. The particular contribution of religion in this could lay in its apocalyptic tradition. This must not be understood as a violent end of history beset by fear. Rather it means the end of all virtual images and identities which serve to mask the fundamental vulnerability of man.

This paper provides an analysis of the educational use of the Internet and of digital technologies that is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, that is neither critical nor post-critical. Turning to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s comments on studying and its relationship to the technology of the blank writing tablet, the authors argue that digital devises are a radical transformation in our relationship to the technologies of reading and writing. Traditionally, the scholar was able to experience his or her potentiality to communicate (...) through writing via the blankness of the writing tablet. Yet, according to Agamben, such blankness has become inaccessible in the digital age, where the screen is always full of content. Here the authors argue that Agamben is correct in his diagnosis, yet his own theory of communicability offers up a way to redeem the educational use of digital devices. It is precisely the overflowing saturation of communications on the Internet which produces a new kind of blankness. It is this blankness which should thus become the focus of a studious form of media literacy—one that is not critical or post-critical so much as pre-critical. (shrink)

Over the past decade, as human rights discourses have increasingly served to legitimize state militarism, a growing number of thinkers have sought to engage critically with the human rights project and its anthropological foundations. Amongst these thinkers, Giorgio Agamben’s account of rights is possibly the most damning: human rights declarations, he argues, are biopolitical mechanisms that serve to inscribe life within the order of the nation state, and provide an earthly foundation for a sovereign power that is taking on a (...) form redolent of the concentration camp. In this paper, I will examine Agamben’s account of human rights declarations, which he sees as central to the modern collapse of the distinction between life and politics that had typified classical politics. I will then turn to the critique of Agamben offered by Jacques Ranciere, who suggests that Agamben’s rejection of rights discourses is consequent to his adoption of Hannah Arendt’s belief that, in order to establish a realm of freedom, the political realm must be premised on the expulsion of natural life. In contrast to Ranciere, I will argue that far from sharing the position of those thinkers, like Arendt, who seek to respond to the modern erosion of the borders between politics and life by resurrecting earlier forms of separation, Agamben sees the collapse of this border as the condition of possibility of a new, non-juridical politics. (shrink)

Within educational philosophy and theory, there has been an international re-turn to envision study as an alternative formation to disrupt the defining learning logic. As an enrichment, this paper articulates “Daoist onto-un-learning” as an Eastern form of study, drawing upon Roger Ames’s interpretation of the ancient Chinese correlative cosmology and relational personhood thinking. This articulation is to dialogue with the conceptualizations of study shared by Giorgio Agamben, Derek Ford, and Tyson Lewis, and unfolds in three steps. First, I examine how (...) their conceptualizations of study constrain the studier-doing-study logic as a commonsensical expression of “foundational individualism” and anthropocentric disordering. Second, re-invoking the ancient Chinese wisdom, I envision “Daoist onto-un-learning” as a non-individualistic and non-anthropocentric form of study, re-configuring study and learning no longer as two disparate, if not necessarily oppositional, formations but into a Daoist bipolar yin-yang movement. Finally, I story-tell my doctoral research experience as a Daoist onto-un-learning journey, a spiralling learning-study movement, to unpack the ways it suspends and overturns the modern-Western trap/trope of anthropocentric-foundational individualism. In so doing, this paper further internationalizes and supplements the current study scholarship in relation to learning in a way so-far hardly explored yet cross-culturally provocative. (shrink)

This paper returns to the question of how to think of justice through Teubner’s recent definition of what he calls juridical justice. Juridical justice is defined as distinct from political, moral, social and theological conceptions of justice. Teubner attempts to think of an imaginary space for a juridical justice ‘beyond the sites of natural and positive law’ and searches for a conception of justice as the ‘law’s self-subversive principle’. This article reviews Teubner’s conception of juridical justice and further proposes a (...) distinction between juridical and non-juridical understandings of justice. (shrink)

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben suggests that Herman’s Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ offers the ‘strongest objection against the principle of sovereignty’. Bartleby, a legal scribe who does not write, is best known for the formula with which he responds to all his employer’s requests, ‘I would prefer not to.’ This paper examines this formula, asking what it would mean to ‘prefer not to’ when the law is in question. By reading Melville’s story alongside Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and Walter Benjamin’s (...) theses on history, it suggests that Bartleby’s interest, for Agamben, lies in his challenge to dominant conceptions of the relation between potentiality and actuality, which, he believes, are rendered indistinct in sovereignty. By reflecting critically on Agamben’s depiction of Bartleby as a ‘new Messiah’, this paper examines Agamben’s understanding of what it would mean to fulfil the law, and what form of political task this would entail. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe remarkable philosophical present-day turn to Paul pays a lot of attention to the particular role played by the famous distinctions that structure Paul’s rhetoric such as the distinction between faith and law, life and death, and spirit and flesh. These distinctions lead to the question of whether Paul endorses a dualism or not. In this essay, the author investigates Badiou’s and Agamben’s readings of Paul and asks whether one cannot find a form of dialectics rather than dualism in these (...) readings. The concept of the exception seems to corroborate this suggestion. To examine whether this suggestion makes sense, the author first discusses Badiou’s focus on the antidialectics of death and resurrection as well as the dialectical remnants in Badiou’s reading of Paul. Subsequently, the author analyses Agamben’s dialectical account of the Pauline terms katargein, chrēsis and charis. (shrink)

In his 2012 work, Faith of the Faithless, the philosopher Simon Critchley presented an ‘atheistic’ formulation of faith as an ‘experiment’ in ‘political theology.’ This work, as part of the so-called ‘turn to religion’ in continental political philosophy, gave an account of what Critchley had formerly articulated as ‘atheistic transcendence.’ Tracing the genesis of the latter and then linking to his notion of the supreme fiction, the paper seeks to account for Critchley’s ‘a/theological’ shift. Through a close reading, the paper (...) argues that Critchley’s ‘faith of the faithless’ depends on the Christian hermeneutic tradition – or radical theology – for its articulation. Finally, using John D. Caputo’s radical theology as the principal proponent in this regard, the paper demonstrates a necessary symmetry with Critchley’s faith of the faithless. Such a claim leads to the conclusion that while symmetrical, Critchley and Caputo are also inversely related. That is: a Critchlean radical politics nourished by radical theology opens up the possibility for a Caputoian radical political theology nourished by Critchlean radical politics. (shrink)

In this paper we claim educational leadership as an autonomous discipline whose goals and strategies should not mirror those typical of business and political leadership. In order to define the aims proper to educational leadership we question three common assumptions of what it is supposed to carry out. First, we turn to Hannah Arendt and her contemporary critics to maintain that education aims at opening up exceptions within the normal course of events rather than simply preserving it. This way, education (...) is not reduced to an instrument at the service of the reinforcement of a given social and economic system. This leads us to ask what should exactly educational leadership oppose by means of these exceptions. According to Tyson E. Lewis’s wise application to education of Giorgio Agamben’s ontology of impotentiality, the apparently reasonable idea that education must help the subject to develop his potentials is precisely an instrumentalization of education which brings about a desubjectification of the learner. Education should actually make the pupil aware of his right not to carry his potentiality to its actualization and dwell instead in a state of impotentiality. Third and last, we complicate this picture by alluding to Zygmunt Bauman’s critique of the rejection of Western individuals to realize certain possibilities, which they deem too costly. By analysing in conjunction Agamben’s encouragement to suspend one’s potential and Bauman’s insistence on the need of not suspending it, we conclude by defining what, in our opinion, defines the raison d’être of educational leadership. (shrink)

In the final volume of his Homo Sacer series, The use of bodies, Agamben claims that for Foucault ethics never escapes the horizon of governmentality and therefore his conception of ethics is ‘strategic.’ In light of this criticism, motivated by Agamben’s Pauline conception of ‘use,’ we reassess the status and function of ethics in Foucault’s late lectures. We investigate how Foucault’s approach to ethics develops from his treatment of liberal governmentality and also how its methodological foundation is developed in an (...) interpretation of truth-telling in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Our interpretation emphasizes the ambiguous status of ethics in Foucault’s late work: on the one hand, Agamben is right that Foucault assigns an irreducible strategic function to ethics thereby connecting it intrinsically to governmentality. On the other hand, Agamben overlooks how Foucault’s interpretation of Sophocles implies a conception of governmentality which emphasizes how ethical practices cannot be captured solely in strategic terms. Foucault’s ‘anarcheological’ approach thus articulates a dimension of ethics that remains, using Agamben’s own terms, ‘ungovernable’ and therefore also genuinely creative. Even so, Foucault’s approach to ethics remains in Agamben’s perspective on the deepest level faced with an antinomy that Agamben seeks to mediate with his Pauline conception of ‘inoperativity.’. (shrink)

Political theorists continue to be provoked by Giorgio Agamben’s disturbing diagnosis that ‘bare life’ – human life that is excluded from politics yet exposed to sovereign violence – is not a sign of the malfunction of modern politics but rather a revelation of how it actually functions. However, despite the enormous amount of attention this diagnosis has received, there has been relatively little discussion of Agamben’s proposed ‘cure’ for the problem that he diagnoses. In this article, I analyze the three (...) main concepts of Agamben’s positive philosophical program – ‘infancy,’ ‘potentiality,’ and ‘form-of-life’ – in order to show how he attempts to subvert the sovereignty of law over life with his idea of a life of habit in which life is sovereign over law. In addition to analyzing these concepts, I engage in an immanent critique of Agamben’s philosophy and contrast his vision of politics with those of other influential contemporary political theorists. I find that while Agamben’s philosophical program is almost undone by internal difficulties, it still radically challenges current theories of subjectivity, humanity, and community. (shrink)

Agamben’s potentiality, and Chinese dao, entail experiencing movement on being. This article presents our experiments with these movements in the context of pedagogy, putting at stake our mode of existence in thinking. We examine Agamben’s potentiality as an aporetic experience in pedagogy. We find echoes of dao movement in a controversial pedagogical event in China. Interlacing potentiality and dao with our experience of pedagogical thinking, each makes the other intelligible. We show that reasonings of pedagogy in the USA and China (...) repeat the very paradoxes and exclusions they seek to overcome. We also gesture towards a way that, suspending and holding pedagogical reasoning in being empty, welcomes what cannot be learned or taught. This way also offers an example for comparative education. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThere is an ongoing debate in New Testament scholarship on the correct interpretation of Paul’s pistis Christou formulations: are we justified by our own faith/trust in Christ, or by participating in Christ’s faith and faithfulness towards God? This article contributes to the position of purposeful or sustained ambiguity by reading Paul’s imitation – and faith – language against the background of Hellenistic-Roman thought on and practice of imitation. In particular, the mimetic chain between teachers and students training for a philosophical (...) disposition, and the philosophical topos of ‘becoming like God’ offer material valuable for comparison. Since pistis, fides and cognates are used in these settings as both a quality to imitate and as attitude towards a model, and since, conversely, imitation is very much involved in Paul’s pistis-vocabulary, it makes sense to read pistis Christou as shorthand for a mimetic movement of faith via Christ towards God. (shrink)

This paper wants to draw out a common argument in three great philosophers and littérateurs in modern French thought: Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, and Albert Camus. The argument makes metaphysical and theological scepticism the first premise for a universalistic political ethics, as per Voltaire's: “it is clearer still that we ought to be tolerant of one another, because we are all weak, inconsistent, liable to fickleness and error.” The argument, it seems to me, presents an interestingly overlooked, deeply important and (...) powerful contribution to the philosophical discourse of modernity. On one hand, theological and post-structuralist critics of “humanism” usually take the latter to depend either on an essentialist philosophical anthropology, or a progressive philosophy of history. The former, it is argued, is philosophically contestable and ethically contentious. The latter, for better or worse, is a continuation of theological eschatology by another name. So both, if not “modernity” per se, should somehow be rejected. But an ethical universalism – like that we find in Montaigne, Bayle, Voltaire, or Camus – which does not claim familiarity with metaphysical or eschatological truths, but humbly confesses our epistemic finitude, seeing in this the basis for ethical solidarity, eludes these charges. On the other hand, philosophical scepticism plays a large role in the post-structuralist criticisms of modern institutions and ideas in ways which have been widely taken to license forms of ethics which problematically identify responsibility, with taking a stand unjustifiable by recourse to universalizable reasons. But, in Montaigne, Voltaire and Camus, our ignorance concerning the highest or final truths does not close off, but rather opens up, a new descriptive sensitivity to the foibles and complexities of human experience: a sensitivity reflected amply, and often hilariously, in their literary productions. As such, a critical agnosticism concerning claims about things “in the heavens and beneath the earth” does not, for such a “sceptical humanism,” necessitate decisionism or nihilism. Instead, it demands a redoubled ethical sensitivity to the complexities and plurality of political life which sees the dignity of “really-existing” others, whatever their metaphysical creeds, as an inalienable first datum of ethical conduct and reflection. After tracking these arguments in Montaigne, Voltaire, and Camus, the essay closes by reflecting on, and contesting, one more powerful theological argument against modern agnosticism's allegedly deleterious effects on ethical culture: that acknowledging ignorance concerning the highest things robs us of the basis for awe or wonder, the wellspring of human beings’ highest ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual achievements. (shrink)

The article addresses the critical strategy of profanation in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, focusing on the example of pornography. Agamben’s references to pornography as a site of radical political transformation have recently been criticized as abstruse, vacuous or absurd. Moreover, his own work on the concentration camps in the Homo Sacer series has been disparagingly referred to as ‘pornography of horror’. This article ventures to refute these accusations by interpreting Agamben’s paradigmatic use of pornography in the context of his (...) wider project of profanation, understood as the overcoming of all social separations and the return of objects of social praxis to free use. Read in this context, pornography is grasped as the paradigmatic site of the constitution of the unprofanable, the epitome of the late capitalist ‘society of the spectacle’ and thus the primary target of profanatory criticism. In the remainder of the article we elucidate the logic of Agamben’s profanatory strategy and conclude that, far from being politically irrelevant, profanation constitutes the condition of the actualization of Agamben’s messianic ideal of a generic and non-exclusive community. (shrink)

In The Open, a series of reflections on the historical endeavours to define the essential features of the human figure in relation to the biological existence it shares with animals, Giorgio Agamben offers a detailed reading of Titian’s painting The Nymph and the Shepherd. He argues that the scene depicted enables the contemporary viewer to visualize the advent of radical freedom, the moment when the historical dialectic of nature and culture comes to a ‘stand-still’. In this article, I offer a (...) different reading of The Nymph and the Shepherd, whereby the advent of radical freedom and death become indistinguishable. This different reading, I argue, calls into question Agamben’s understanding of corporeal being. I conclude by suggesting more speculatively and tentatively that ‘bioart’, the field now emerging at the intersection of the creative arts and the bio-medical sciences, may provide a better site of reflection on the questions Agamben ultimately poses about the future of bio-political governmentality. (shrink)

German early Romanticism was an intellectual movement that originated in the era between the great French Revolution of 1789 and the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars in 1803. Usually, it is defined in contrast to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is presented as the age of reason, criticism and scientific naturalism, while the Romantics are portrayed as its reactionary enemies. According to a still customary prejudice, Romanticism was the age of exaggerated emotions, authoritarian dogmatism and mystical superstition. However, our notion of (...) the Enlightenment has undergone changes in recent decades. Because the traditional antagonism between Aufklärung and Frühromantik has become questionable, the Romantic revival of religion needs reconsideration. In this paper, Nivala proposes an argument why the Romantics did not fall into reactionary irrationalism. His discussion focuses on one person, Friedrich Schlegel. Nivala presents how two vital presuppositions of the Enlightenment, naturalism and criticism, were reinterpreted by Schlegel as pantheism and mysticism. (shrink)

This paper argues for the contemporary significance of the ‘Critique of Violence’ by proposing a Benjaminian reading of two important analyses of the relationship between history, politics and the Rights of Man: Hegel’s account of the French Revolution and the concept of dissensus proposed by Jacques Rancière. For both Hegel and Rancière, the gap between right and reality – between the ideal of equality, for example, and the existence of concrete inequality – does not warrant a rejection of the Rights (...) of Man. Rather, the gap is a constitutive condition of law and political rights. From the perspective of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, however, these analyses serve to perpetuate a bourgeois legality, one that both Hegel and Rancière acknowledge can never be realized due to the constitutive discrepancy between right and reality. In preserving the promise of legal equality, these analyses preclude the possibility of a suspension or ‘absolution’ from law. This suspension of law is a task that Benjamin identified with the proletarian general strike, a strategy whose pure violence is supposed to secure what Benjamin described, enigmatically, as a ‘wholly transformed work’. Remarkably, however, the relationship between the suspension of law in a general strike and a total transformation of labour is never clearly defined in the ‘Critique’. This paper will develop an account of this relationship by pursuing the references to Marx’s critical theory of capitalism in Benjamin’s writings. (shrink)

This paper examines Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Giorgio Agamben's account of the history of bio-politics in the Beast and the Sovereign. In this account, the ‘threshold of bio-political modernity’ is identified with the collapse of an allegedly immemorial distinction between life and the law. According to Derrida, however, this in-distinction between life and the law, which supposedly marks the historical emergence of the bio-political, is in fact an originary event. Agamben, therefore, announces a bio-political modernity that has always already existed. (...) In this essay, I argue that Derrida, in the Beast and the Sovereign, fails to grasp the significance of one of the principal figures employed in Agamben's theory of the bio-political, the ‘threshold’. This figure, which Agamben opposes, elsewhere in his writings, to the Derridean notion of difference/deferral, does not refer to either an historical beginning or something that has always already existed. Rather, the threshold is defined as a particular moment in which an originary phenomenon becomes a decisive historical norm. In his ‘history’ of the bio-political, therefore, Agamben identifies the modernity of the latter in terms of the historical normalization of an in-distinction between law and life that has always already occurred. (shrink)

The article studies the tradicional locus of madhouse present in 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, but taking into consideration also the desert and the church as spaces where the enunciation of madness is expands: the madman’s truth. To this end, three aspects that configure the heuristic notion of lettered madhouse are analyzed: the digressive diagrams, the phobic philology, and enlightened hospice. In short, it shows how Bolaño elaborates in his novel a critical and ironic vision of Latin American literary intelligentsia or (...) the remnants of The lettered City of Angel Rama. (shrink)

The last few years have seen the emergence of a more political, ‘post-Derridean’ generation, critical of the impotent messianism of the politics of deconstruction. As Žižek would have it: ‘Derrida's notion of ‘deconstruction as ethics’ seems to rely on a utopian hope which sustains the spectre of ‘infinite justice’, forever postponed, always to come’ (Žižek 2008: 225). The promise of redemption, it follows, would reside in an insubstantial promissory value, in the writing of irredeemable cheques that, if cashed in, could (...) only ever lead to default. With its ethos of play and over-investment in an empty promise, deconstruction starts to look symptomatic of the now-bankrupt age of excess. Does the current financial crisis not entail a crisis of Derrida? This reading contrives to elide what is genuinely political in Derrida, and thereby fails to recognise the deconstruction of economic theodicy implicit in his work. Jean-Luc Nancy has argued that the concept of sacrifice is irreducibly linked to the short-circuiting of the political. We see in Derrida, however, that sacrifice is at the heart of politics, a response to undecidability that is precisely opposed to the fantasy of economics without sacrifice. Furthermore, sacrificial politics is the condition of possibility of the promise, which is constructed and contingent, rather than a priori. If there is a problem with this, it is that Derrida does not sufficiently entertain the prospect of the promise becoming so distant as to be effectively meaningless. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler, this article argues for an expansion of Derrida's account, to show not only that politics is sacrifice, but moreover that the promise of redemption cannot live on in the absence of sacrifice. (shrink)

Agamben’s notion of the ‘paradigm’ has far-reaching implications for educational thinking, curriculum design and pedagogical conduct. In his approach, examples—or paradigms—deeply engage our powers of analogy, enabling us to discern previously unseen affinities among singular objects by stepping outside established systems of classification. In this way we come to envision novel groupings, new patterns of connection—that nonetheless do not simply reassemble those singular objects into yet another rigidly fixed set or class. Agamben sees this sort of ‘paradigmatic understanding’ as our (...) richest source of intelligibility. For Agamben the paradigm is ultimately about learning to see again, starting not with already perfectly known and categorized objects (or ideas), but rather with a fresh experience of one individual object and the analogical relations it may have to others, and to novel groupings that may arise. The paradigm is a method, a way in which educators might respond to a wide range of educational challenges. For a paradigmatic relation suspends while exposing, deactivates while revealing, complicates while clarifying. But articulating the enigmatic paradigmatic relation between example and class is far more than a method. It is epistemological (a way of knowing and conception of knowledge), ethical (a fostering of freedom from presupposed categories and reified principles) and ontological (a type of being that exposes the potential of knowing and communicating—their intelligibility and communicability). In these qualities, paradigms exhibit to educators a free, a new use of singularities. (shrink)

The term “dystopia of evolution” which the present article proposes qualifies an actual aspect of Latin American dystopic narrative, especially Chilean and Argentinian, in relation with an anti-Darwinist vision of human civilization. This trend is analyzed in two Chilean novels: El asombro by Juan Mihovilovich and Acerca de Suárez by Francisco Ovando, as well as the Argentinian novel: Los restos by Betina Keizman. In these works, the presence of a chronotope of the catastrophe allows to discern the different manifestations that (...) the motive of involution takes. Finally, the article concludes on the meaning and interest of this peculiar form of Latin American dystopia and the problematic developed, in the corpus of analysis, around the environment, which allows to consider these novels under the notion of ecotopia. (shrink)

This article treats post-Holocaust humanitarianism as a secular version of St Paul’s ‘Jewish Question’: why are there still Jews now that the particularities of Jewish history have universal meaning? It considers Paul’s Judaeo-Christianity, a distinctively Christian embrace of Jewish survival, as the prototype of today’s secular project of conversion to human rights, and asks what it means within this project for Jews to regard themselves as the only Jews. The article concludes by defining an Islamic alternative to the imperial reach (...) of today’s human rights discourse, based on the recent publication of 1981 lectures by the late N. O. Brown, who presented Islam as an alternative to the Pauline synthesis of Athens-Jerusalem that would renew, rather than supersede, the prophetic tradition of Jewish monotheism. Following Brown, the article presents Muhammad as the anti-Paul, and considers the key differences between their respective political theologies on issues such as fidelity, cruelty and particularly the urgency of justice. Islam’s insistence that there is no ‘time between’ the end of evil and the beginning of justice shows the limitations of today’s human rights discourse as a religion of permanent transition that denies urgency to justice itself. The ‘Jewish Question’ that Paul formulated for Christians in a Roman world order thus illuminates issues posed by the Holocaust and Israel for professed humanitarians today. (shrink)

The concept of division or caesura is central to the political and legal philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. This paper examines the different ways in which Agamben characterises the law in terms of caesura, and the manner in which this analysis of law is grounded in his analyses of language. I argue that there are two forms of legal division to be found in Agamben’s political analyses. The first is the division that occurs when the legal system produces determinate identities, such (...) as those of nation, and socio-economic status. However, this form of division is itself predicated upon the division that delimits the law as such, the caesura between political and bare life. The way that Agamben sets up both of these political problems is deeply indebted to his analyses of the ‘presuppositional structure’ of metaphysical language—the fracture between signification and its excess. (shrink)

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben makes the claim that Kant’s moral philosophy is prophetic of legal nihilism and modern totalitarianism. In doing so, he draws an implicit parallel between Kantian ethics of respect and autonomy, and the authoritarian constitutional theory of Carl Schmitt. This paper elucidates and evaluates this claim through an analysis of Agamben’s assertion that the legal condition of modernity is a nihilistic law that is ‘in force without significance’. I argue that the theoretical continuity between totalitarianism and (...) the Moral Law is the problem of the undecidable, which arises when the empty ground of normative judgment comes to light. (shrink)

In Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, the narrator finds himself involved in a moral relation with the title character whose sense he finds difficult to articulate. I argue that we can make sense of this relation, up to a certain point, in terms of the influential account of obligation that Stephen Darwall advances in The Second-Person Standpoint. But I also argue that there is a dimension of moral sense in the relation that is not captured by Darwall’s account, or indeed (...) by any of the accounts of obligation that have been most prominent in the history of western philosophy from the early modern period up to the present. More specifically, I argue that what is brought out in the relation between Bartleby and the narrator is the separation of the experience of moral necessitation from the rule that would give its content. I attempt to show that this obligation without rule is a genuine moral phenomenon and that we can begin to understand it in terms of the ideas of love, singularity, and potentiality as these are developed in the work of Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

Hegel is one of the few philosophers to devote systematic attention to phenomena that can be called pathologies of juridicism. Hegel claims that the law fundamentally contaminates the way in which we relate to ourselves, to others and to the world so that our (inter-) subjectivity becomes ethically deformed, distorted, or deficient. I outline this notion and reconstruct its development in the work of the young Hegel. I reconstruct Hegel’s critique of juridical forms of normativity as developed in his Spirit (...) of Christianity with reference to the example of Judaism and sketch his idea of a non-juridical intersubjectivity. I will make apparent the considerable problems lurking in Hegel’s account of love, which turns out to be a form of social integration potentially just as violent as the law. I argue that Hegel himself became aware of this problem and modified his original model by assigning to both love and law a legitimate place within an overarching system of Sittlichkeit, as I demonstrate with reference to Hegel’s Jena article ‘Natural Law ’. In the end I briefly explain why I still find this strategy unsatisfactory. (shrink)

:This article outlines three possible ethical injunctions underlying three different educational projects related to the self: “become what you are”, “be what you are”, and “be what you become”. While differing on many levels, these three injunctions all assume connections between self, education, and some form of determinism and/or developmentalism. Although relatively autonomous, determinism and developmentalism are often linked together in the sense that they both presuppose that function precedes form, determining in advance how something ought to develop, mature, or (...) change. As an alternative, the essay concludes with a parodic fourth injunction which suspends the relationship between self, education, and determinism and/or developmentalism: an injunction to be “less than you are.”. (shrink)

In response to the growing emphasis on learning outcomes, life-long learning, and what could be called the learning society, scholars are turning to alternative educational logics that problematize the reduction of education to learning. In this article, we draw on these critics but also extend their thinking in two ways. First, we use Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze to posit two educational logics—tinkering and hacking, respectively—that suspend and render inoperative learning logics, expectations, and evaluative metrics. Second, we argue that contemporary (...) artists and designers such as Katerina Kamprani and Grupo de Arte Callejero have much to offer educational philosophers and theorists interested in practices of suspension. In conclusion, we suggest ways in which educators can tinker with and hack into the curriculum by playing with the quintessential embodiment of learning: the test. (shrink)

This article argues for acknowledging the existence of an absolute distinction between faith and science. It is often assumed in the science and religion debate that such a distinction would be ahistorical and uncontextual. After discussing this critique, the analogy with love and facts will be used to explain how an absolute distinction between faith and science may exist nonetheless. This contrast, however, does not imply compartmentalization. It is shown that the absolute distinction between faith and science is of crucial (...) importance to understand the historical contexts that so many contributors to the science and religion debate refer to in their argument against the approaches of Independence or Contrast. The article concludes that within our messy and complex practices there is an absolute distinction between faith and science—our historical contexts cannot be understood without it. (shrink)

This article is an argument for furthering the understanding, role and scope of critical theology in reflection on the act, content and implications of theological thought through appropriation of...

How are we to understand Agamben’s philosophical anthropology and his frequent invocations of the relation between bios and zoe? In Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben evokes a quasi-phenomenological account of shame in order to elucidate this question thus implying that the phenomenon of shame carries an ontological significance. That shame has an ontological significance is also a belief held in current debates on moral emotions and the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, but despite this common philosophical intuition phenomenologists have criticized Agamben’s account of (...) shame. In this paper, I will try to show how these criticisms often rely on misreadings of Agamben’s terminology. Once Agamben’s analysis of shame have been properly placed in the broader context if his work, I will outline how Agamben’s analysis of shame and his ontology of life feeds into a rethinking of community and belonging. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that potentialism is uniquely able to articulate the value of educational practices that lack the kind of directionality commonly associated with educational activities. It does so by operating with radically different assumptions about the nature and value of education – assumptions that can be derived from the basic premise of progressive education that education needs to be rooted in experience. I follow here a line of thought that leads from Dewey’s notion of experience aimed at (...) new and better experiences, to Ivan Illich’s emphasis on the experience of the new, to Gert Biesta’s idea that education needs to allow students to bring something new into the world, to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’ emphasis on the experience of the possibility of the new. Finally, drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben and Tyson E. Lewis, I show how a potentialist notion of experience operates with a different temporality, enabling us to think of the experience of the potentiality of the new as such as what accounts for the educational value of non-directional practices – not only in spite of, but because of their lack of directionality. (shrink)

While some argue that the only way to make a place for Philosophy for Children in today's strict, standardised classroom is to measure its efficacy in promoting reasoning, we believe that this must be avoided in order to safeguard what is truly unique in P4C dialogue. When P4C acquiesces to the very same quantitative measures that define the rest of learning, then the philosophical dimension drops out and P4C becomes yet another progressive curriculum and pedagogy for enhancing argumentation skills that (...) can easily be appropriated by any content area. What we want to offer in this article is a reevaluation of P4C that remains faithful to a radical kernel that we find when we do philosophy with children and young adults. To theorise the potential for P4C, we draw heavily on Agamben's work, and in particular his reflections on speech and infancy. We propose that the redemption of P4C necessitates a shift from a community of inquiry to a community of infancy. Such a community is not a community that operates according to predefined rules or standardised assessment protocols but rather is an inoperative community that is defined by letting ends idle. On our account, a community of infancy is an example of dialogic studious play that is neither ritual nor just play, thus avoiding the extreme polarities of the ritualised classrooms of high-stakes testing and the ‘ludic’ postmodern classroom of free play. What is at stake here is to preserve the last vestige of freedom within the school. (shrink)

How can the use of testimonies, as representations of suffering, be understood in education? What kind of potential can the use of testimonies have for pedagogical transformation? In this article, drawing on Mollenhauer and Sontag, I discuss the problem of representation as selection in education as it is easier to opt out of that which is difficult to face, to describe and to understand. As an alternative, I see what happens if representations of suffering are related to voices and remnants (...) from the past, drawing on Agamben, and as something that stands between what is possible to say and what is impossible to say, in any language. The article also draws on Spivak's theory of a representational idea based on literary reading, hacking and suturing, which urges ‘us’ to regard testimonies as relational and to listen to different voices from the past and to make room for them within our own language. (shrink)

Traditionally, transitional justice has referred to that field of theoretical scholarship that proffers recuperative strategies for political societies divided by a history of violence. Through the establishment of truth commissions, public confessionals and reparative measures, transitional justice regimes have sought to establish restorative conditions that might help reconcile historical antagonists both to each other and to the trauma of their shared past. Because of some of the theoretical lapses in this scholarship some have turned recently to the field of radical (...) democratic and ‘new pluralist’ thought – and especially to agonistic literature – to foreground a theory of post-conflict reconciliation based not on the principles of the sublimation of difference, but rather the perpetual deferral of accord. This essay works both to underscore that effort, as well as to problematize it. Through unorthodox readings of Giorgio Agamben, Jean Améry and Sheldon Wolin, the essay argues that an emphasis on messianicity as the temporal mode of political repair is ultimately less productive for what I call an agonistics of reconciliation than a more nuanced approach to what Wolin calls ‘fugitive democracy’. Where the former is allied with a problematic politics of mutual respect, the latter affirms a more germane politics of abiding resentment. In the end, a startling conclusion is drawn from reading agonistic reconciliation through Wolin: democracy may be a political experience reserved for scenes of transitional justice alone. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article begins with a detailed analysis of Althusser's criticism of Feuerbach as an “ideologue” of the body. Althusser concentrates on the mirror structure of the subject and the object and on empiricism, which represents the ideological discourse. I argue that Althusser overlooked Feuerbach's decisive revelations: a bodily materiality which corresponds to Adorno's non-identical inner nature, and the ontological condensation of the human being; a process which generates the “living reality” of the body. I show Feuerbach's breakthrough reinterpretation of the (...) Ground in Schelling's concept of the object that was identified with nature and represents the non-identical limitation of the subject. This limitation, which is connected to death, creates the difference between the “living reality” of the body and bodily materiality as subjected by ideological discourses. I conclude that Feuerbach revealed a non-identical materiality of the body that evades both Althusserian interpellations and Foucauldian regulative practices. (shrink)

Sixty years before Carl Schmitt wrote his Political Theology, and more than a 100 years before President Bush announced a ‘war on terrorism’ the American Supreme Court grappled with the difficult issue of emergency powers in connection with issues arising out of the American Civil War. The question confronting the Court in a set of cases named the Prize Cases was whether President Lincoln’s decision to respond to acts of aggression by the secessionist Southern states with measures of war was (...) lawful. The legal problem was that Lincoln had made this decision unilaterally although the American Constitution specifically allocates the power to declare war to Congress. The Court solved the dilemma by arguing that in cases where no war has been declared, the decision whether the country is in a state of war is ultimately ‘a question to be decided by him [the President], and [the Supreme] Court must be governed by the decisions and acts of the political department of the Government to which this power was entrusted’. The precedent, which the Court thereby laid down, has since played out as an important leverage for the Bush government’s legal arguments in connection with the war on terrorism. This article engages the theoretical framework of Locke, Schmitt and Agamben in order to come to a better understanding of this important set of cases. (shrink)