We shall attempt to elucidate the concept of ‘civil person’, as developed by Hobbes in both On the Citizen and Leviathan. This is where the idea of political subjectification takes its first steps in modern political theory. Such a process of political subjectification is meant by Hobbes as a process of construction of the ‘artificial person’ of the State. The fact that Hobbes defines the persona ficta of the State as ‘artificial’ sometimes leads scholars to forget that he sees the (...) State as a ‘person’ and that the novelty of his theory is as much to be found in the formula auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem as in his investigation into the type of personality or subjectivity that the modern State embodies. Hobbes’s essays are worth revisiting today, when the question of political subjectification seems to have become challenging again. In the final section of this paper we shall consider a recent reading of Hobbes’s theory proposed by Giorgio Agamben. With the aim of calling into question the very idea and possibility of political subjectification, Agamben critically addresses Hobbes’s notion of ‘civil person’. We will argue that, instead of promoting a rejection of modern political theory in the name of messianic politics, as Agamben does, it is more advisable to look into the differences between monarchy and aristocracy, on the one side, and democracy, on the other, as Hobbes did. (shrink)

ExcerptThis essay analyzes the following constellation of concepts from a theologico-philosophical perspective: “state of exception,” “bare life,” and “the remnant.” Recently employed in the work of Giorgio Agamben, none of these concepts is his own coinage. Agamben borrowed “state of exception” from Carl Schmitt's Political Theology, “bare life” from Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,” and “the remnant” from biblical sources, which include Isaiah and the letters of Saint Paul. Nevertheless, the reappearance of these concepts within Agamben's constellation provides each with (...) an altered meaning, which emerges only through interplay with the others. In the prologue to his work on German…. (shrink)

Even if political theorists rarely read him, Italian political thinker, Marsilius of Padua, presents one of the most radical theories of the multitude prior to Machiavelli and Spinoza. This article reconstructs Marsilius of Padua's political theory of the multitude in his Defender of Peace and pays special attention to two main sources from which Marsilius frames his theory: Aristotle and Ibn Rushd. Compared to Aristotle, Marsilius advances a more epistemic view of the multitude as a lawmaker. Marsilius’ ideas on the (...) multitude also depend on Ibn Rushd's theory of collective knowledge and, to a certain extent, on his position on natural law. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben is accused of political passivity, but this article argues that he sees the potential for resistance in modes of being inactive and unproductive, in study, play and profanity, which alone can escape the binary oppositions through which modern power operates, most notably the attempt to separate useful from useless life. He finds the resources for this model in very diverse locations, including the poetry of the troubadours, medieval thought about angels and medieval monastic movements. Agamben argues that such (...) texts retain philosophical potential which is revealed precisely by modern crises of subjectivity, economy and community. Agamben’s The End of the Poem is read here as containing early elements of a mode of resistance that informs the new paradigms for human life and practice developed in his The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, where the revolutionary potential of past cultures emerges fully. (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)

Puts leading Italian thinkers into conversation with established Continental philosophers concerning the future of the nature of the human, technology, metaphysical foundations, globalization, and social and political oppression.

In contrast to functionalist explanations of themes of purity and impurity as an expression and affirmation of the social order (e.g. Emile Durkheim, Mary Douglas), Giorgio Agamben considers purity and impurity as comparisons of phenomena with their imputed essence. From the perspective offered by Agamben, judgements regarding purity and impurity can be seen as in part constructing the essence against which they supposedly simply measure phenomena. Agamben’s investigations suggest that on occasions when themes of purity or impurity are invoked within (...) Western discourses on subjectivity, the full human subject tends to be placed as relatively pure: neither too close nor too distant from human essence. FollowingWalter Benjamin, he suggests that such a classification gives the full human subject a certain social protection and inviolability, separating relatively pure and protected human life from impure subjectivities unprotected by social or legal conventions. (shrink)

It could be said that architecture encounters its end through its self-extraction from its original existential potential –its power of creativity– when at some point it replaces this experience of loss by procuring a self-validation for itself as a techne, an art and end in itself; and, perhaps, even more depressingly today when thought as near-exclusively along the axis of production and commodity circulation. How are we to think of this power, this potentia, other than by appreciating its key formulation, (...) in the western tradition, as dynamis in Aristotle (Metaphysics 1069b19-20)? A paradoxical definition of potentiality (dynamis), perhaps, given that a potentiality, by definition, is, to put it in a modern sense, a possibility that exists. Such a definition posits a line of what could be called an existent (and not merely possible or probable) potentialization in the creative act. By definition, historically, existence has been subject to an understandable logical scission (a dividing line) between ‘what is actual’ and ‘what is potential’, which however as an ontological motor of truth production, including political truth production, leads to a misunderstanding of potentiality as something that once actualized belongs to the past and which crucially thus remains exhausted. Yet in the original formulation in Aristotle, potentiality as a philosophical problem is precisely that of a potentiality which is not reducible to actuality –and this becomes the kernel of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. From this point a remarkable and complex series of consequent medieval formulations came to define potentiality as the problem of sovereign power (whether earthly or divine) and all the way to our time. Giorgio Agamben is of course the thinker who has shed more recent light to Aristotle’s link between power (potere) and potentiality (potenza) throughout his work; and who has centered his critique of the forgetting of its most crucial element (impotentiality); a forgetting that intentionally aimed at capturing the birth of the subject in the form of an alleged sovereignty of a self-grounding being. A self-grounding, an autonomy, justified historically through the political theology of a self-grounding power (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press [1995]1998: 47). Thus, as Agamben shows, we have mostly thought of impotentiality as an incapacity, an absence or a negation. Instead, for Agamben, potentiality indicates in a particular way “the existence of non-Being” (Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Ed. and Trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1999: 178). But how are we to think of such a paradoxical existence of non-Being or of the unthought, that seemingly has, through a politically conscious misunderstanding, crippled our politics of creativity, including, one may venture to suggest as a hypothesis, that of the existential creativity of architecture? How are we to avoid being impoverished by our “estrangement from impotentiality”? (Agamben, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Trans. D. Kishik, S. Pedatella. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009: 45). I would like to propose that we can first attempt to do that, as a preliminary theoretical step, by exploring further what Aristotle thought. (shrink)