El artículo aborda la pregunta por la tarea de la memoria histórica en Colombia desde una perspectiva filosófica, concentrada en los retos epistemológicos y éticos derivados de la elaboración e implementación de iniciativas de memoria en contex- tos de experiencia traumática. Se busca presentar y analizar estos retos desde las consecuencias conceptuales que los contextos traumáticos le plantean a los procesos de elaboración de memoria y a la práctica de escucha de testimonios provenientes de experiencias traumáticas. Se examinan los modos (...) para comprender, desde la filosofía, un aspecto de la tarea de la memoria que puede pasar desapercibido, con el propósito de imaginar e identificar cursos de acción y estrategias de escucha más responsables, inclusivas y plurales. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben presents us with one of the most powerful and controversial criticisms of human rights. He contests conventional understandings of human rights as normative setbacks on sovereign power, and shows instead how these rights reinforce sovereignty by producing bare lives that are irredeemably exposed to violence. This essay aims to understand the distinctive aspects of Agamben's critique and assess his concluding call for a politics beyond human rights. It suggests that this call is necessitated by a counternarrative of Western (...) politics that ties human rights inextricably to the logic Agamben ascribes to biopolitical sovereignty. Within this stringent logic, any politics organized around human rights cannot help but reproduce sovereign violence. The essay questions this counternarrative in two ways: First, it shows how this counternarrative, which aims to unveil all the myths that sustain sovereignty, ends up repeating what it identifies as the distinctive mythologizing gesture: rendering the contingent necessary. Second, it turns to Agamben's notion of ‘potentiality’ to break the binding spell of his narrative of fated necessity and reclaim the contingent, equivocal and unpredictable effects of modern rights declarations and struggles. The essay concludes with a discussion of contemporary rights struggles of sans-papiers to illustrate the strengths and limits of Agamben's critique of human rights. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben presents us with one of the most powerful and controversial criticisms of human rights. He contests conventional understandings of human rights as normative setbacks on sovereign power, and shows instead how these rights reinforce sovereignty by producing bare lives that are irredeemably exposed to violence. This essay aims to understand the distinctive aspects of Agamben's critique and assess his concluding call for a politics beyond human rights. It suggests that this call is necessitated by a counternarrative of Western (...) politics that ties human rights inextricably to the logic Agamben ascribes to biopolitical sovereignty. Within this stringent logic, any politics organized around human rights cannot help but reproduce sovereign violence. The essay questions this counternarrative in two ways: First, it shows how this counternarrative, which aims to unveil all the myths that sustain sovereignty, ends up repeating what it identifies as the distinctive mythologizing gesture: rendering the contingent necessary. Second, it turns to Agamben's notion of ‘potentiality’ to break the binding spell of his narrative of fated necessity and reclaim the contingent, equivocal and unpredictable effects of modern rights declarations and struggles. The essay concludes with a discussion of contemporary rights struggles of sans-papiers to illustrate the strengths and limits of Agamben's critique of human rights. (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)

This paper suggests that a grammar of the secret forms a concept in Agamben’s work, a gap that grounds the enigma of sovereignty. Between the Indo-European *krei, *se, and *per themes, the secret is etymologically linked to the logics of separation and potentiality that together enable the pliant and emergent structure of sovereignty. Sovereignty’s logic of separation meets the logic of relation in the form of abandonment: the point at which division has exhausted itself and reaches an indivisible element, bare (...) life, the exception separated from the form of life and captured in a separate sphere. The arcanum imperii of sovereignty and the cipher of bare life are held together in the relation of the ban as the twin secrets of biopower, maintained by the potentiality of law that works itself as a concealed, inscrutable force. But the ‘real’ secret of sovereignty, I suggest, is its dialectical reversibility, the point at which the concept of the secret is met by its own immanent unworking by the critic and scribe under the *krei theme, and subject to abandonment through the work of profanation; here, different species of the secret are thrown against one another, one order undoing the other. The secret founded upon the sacred is displaced by Agamben’s critical orientation toward the immanent: what is immanent is both potential and hiddenness. (shrink)