Dimitris Vardoulakis asks how it is possible to think of a politics that is not commensurate with sovereignty. For such a politics, he argues, sovereignty is defined not in terms of the exception but as the different ways in which violence is justified. Vardoulakis shows how it is possible to deconstruct the various justifications of violence. Such dejustifications can take place only by presupposing an other to sovereignty, which Vardoulakis identifies with agonistic democracy. In doing so, Sovereignty and Its Other (...) puts forward both a novel critique of sovereignty and an original philosophical theory of democratic practice. (shrink)

In Remnants of Auschwitz , Giorgio Agamben argues that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame. In shame, I am consigned to something that cannot be assumed, such that the very thing that makes me a subject also forces me to witness my own desubjectification. Agamben’s ontological account of shame is problematic insofar as it forecloses collective responsibility and collapses the distinction between shame and humiliation. By recontextualizing three of Agamben’s sources – Primo Levi, Robert Antelme and (...) Maurice Blanchot – I develop an alternative account of shame as the structure of intersubjectivity , and of a collective responsibility that is more fundamental than the subject itself. On this basis, I sketch the preliminary outline of a biopolitics of resistance rooted in the ethics of alterity. The intuition driving this approach is that life is never bare ; even in situations of extreme affliction there remains a relation to alterity which provides a starting point for resistance. (shrink)

This article gives a critical account of Agamben's contention that the camp is the paradigm of 'bio-politics' in the west. It analyses the deficiencies of this paradigm by means of comparison with other approaches to juridical topics and political theory (e.g., the treatments of the topics of force and state power in liberalism and Foucault). First, I ask about the features Agamben ascribes to the camp space and in what respects they support his contention that the camp has (...) general significance. Second, I question the reasons he gives for his view that the camp situation discloses the general tendencies of legal codes and practices in the West. In particular, I ask whether, as Agamben contends, his approach allows tendencies in the West that would otherwise be obscure to be identifiable, or whether his approach is too speculative to be useful as political theory. (shrink)

A brief account of the work of Giorgio Agamben and its relation to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.

Review of Adam Kotsko (2020), Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 241.

“According to the principle by which it is only in the burning house that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time, art, at the furthest point of its destiny, makes visible its original project.” The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in the final sentence of his book The Man Without Content (L'uomo senza contenuto), just quoted, compares the current state of art to a burning house. At the same time, he points out that precisely at this moment (...) of absolute crisis, we can regain sight of the original stakes of art. Man Without Content, Agamben's most explicit contribution to the philosophy of art, is his debut. The book was first published in 1970 and reissued in 1994. Almost 35 years later, in 2014, he published the collection of essays Il fuoco e il racconto, which was recently translated into English under the title The Fire and the Tale. Although Agamben often focuses on literature in this collection of stand-alone essays, it can be read as a further elaboration of his philosophy of art. This philosophy of art can be summarized as a poetics of inoperativity, which at the same time implies a certain politics. To figure out how to understand Agamen's philosophy of art, this review will place this poetics in the broader framework of The Man Without Content. (shrink)

Placed between constituting and constituted power, homo sacer reveals the state of exception, which through sovereign ban, is kept both inside and outside the law. Agamben’s latest political and legal philosophy is based upon this concept. As the victim of sovereignty, homo sacer unfolds the paradox of sovereign power, criticiz- ing its fundaments and showing the emptiness of law. However, for potentiality which is at the centre of Agamben’s argument, we need to look not only outside sovereignty and (...) sovereign power, but also outside homo sacer. This ar- ticle aims to examine such space, arguing that through absolute potentiality, the fulfilment of law is possible with the content to be focused on reaching conditions of justice and happy life. (shrink)

In his early works, Giorgio Agamben argues that some Auschwitz inmates practised a ‘silent form of resistance’ by shutting themselves off from the world until nothing could harm them. I argue that this conception of ‘bare life’ is both too abstract and too individualistic. Agamben’s idea of bare life’s resistance first neglects the socio-historical context that has produced particular instances of it, effectively barring the investigation into how to avoid future occurrences of sovereign violence. Agamben, second, emphasizes (...) the potential for resistance present in individual bodies shut off from the world without providing guidelines for how these bodies should form a substantive community. I consequently employ Vasily Grossman’s writings on the Shoah to provide an alternative conception of bare life’s resistance in the camps. According to Grossman, resistance lies not in closing oneself off from the world, but in cultivating ineradicable nodes of ‘senseless kindness’ in concrete human interactions. (shrink)

A review of Giorgio Agamben's The Mystery of Evil: Bendict XVI and the End of Days, which attempts to place Agamben's peculiar argument regarding Pope Benedict's abdication in the context of his reading of St. Paul's 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12, and, more generally, in terms of his political-theology in the Homo Sacer series. The questions, 'Who is the Antichrist?' and 'Who (or what) is the katechon?' are also explored, in the attempt to translate Agamben's obscure theology into contemporary (...) political terms. (shrink)

This essay offers an examination of Agamben's statement that there is an important ambiguity in Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta as to whether actuality or potentiality is primary. I argue that this ambiguity is significant because it exposes the ontological dimension of Agamben's paradox of sovereignty.

Agamben is hard to pin down both theologically and philosophically. He attempts to construct miraculous minutiae out of un-miraculous things. Hence this work is the act of profaning the unprofanable. What ontological stature, what imaginative configuration and what spatio-temporal coordinates this move articulates are less than forthcoming. Indeed it is possible that Agamben disavows these entirely in favour of a Benjaminian eternal 'as if' structure, one which sees in the most mundane the traces of an eternal and secular (...) redemption. But this remains problematic; this idiosyncratic moment seems devoid of any real comprehension or description of themes concerning the rest of us mortals, such as temporality, finitude or the spatial and imaginative presentation of that which promises to redeem us. (shrink)

This project retraces activations of Kierkegaard in the development of polit­ical theology. It suggests alternative modes of states of exception than those attributed to him by Schmitt, Taubes and Agamben. Several Kierkegaardian themes open themselves to 'something like pure potential' in Agamben, namely: living death, animality, criminality, auto-constitution, modification, liturgy, love and certain articulations of improbabilities. Attention is drawn to a modal ontology and auto-constitution at work in Kierkegaard's writings, as well as a complicated and indissociable operation between (...) killing and letting-live in legalist exceptionalism, comparable to similar functions found in Foucault regarding the biopowers and necropolitics of territorial and governmental apparatuses. It closes in consideration of Kierkegaard's critique of enumeration, large numbers, and statistical probability alongside contemporary tele-technoscientific social controls via the online datafication of people by surveillance or platform capitalisms. After Kierkegaard, such apparatuses are perhaps suspect as calculated to tranquilize humanity into more docile subhumans as it fools folk into becoming part of its numbers. (*Accompanying file includes only front matter, abstract, and endnotes*). (shrink)

Cultural studies of recent memory tend to cling to love and find a certain answer from its musings. This critical move proceeds from various interrogations of cultural or cross-cultural practices towards adapting a linear progress so that love is tasked to provide an antidote to contemporary social maladies. This critical paper, however, attempts to appraise the idea that love is not a panacea, especially in a setting where theory is fragmented and assumes almost definitively a dead state. Instead, love functions (...) as a specter that haunts a post-theoretical culture. The paper hinges this take from contemporary thinkers whom Nicholas Birns points to as “theorists without ‘theory’.” As such, the spectral concept of love is explored and critiqued in the lens of Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben – both thinkers taken as separate and together – as a subversion to its affirmative theoretical standing and as a proposal on how its spectrality can inform the possibilities of its function. (shrink)

This chapter is an overview of Giorgio Agamben's engagement, in the Homo Sacer series (1995–2014), with Aristotelian philosophy. It specifically studies Agamben's attempt to deconstruct two Aristotelian conceptual oppositions fundamental for the Western tradition of political thought: (1) that between the bare fact of being alive and "qualified" living (associated by Agamben with an alleged distinction between zōē and bios) and (2) that between potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia). Agamben's concept of form-of-life (forma-di-vita), a life that (...) is never "bare" but always in the process of qualifying itself, is designed to deactivate and overcome these distinctions. In the final volume of the series, The Use of Bodies (2014), this is done with the help of the Aristotelian concepts of use (chrēsis) and habit (hexis). (shrink)

This article explores the relation between biological life and political life, placing it in the context of the ancient Greek distinction between the life of the home and the realm of politics. In contrast with the oikos, the life of the polis was characterized by attempts to exclude from its sphere both the constraints of necessity that oblige human action to conform to the exigencies of survival as well as the violence that accompanies this pursuit. Although this exclusion has never (...) been successful, the question of how to achieve it lies at the heart of the oldest philosophical reflections on politics and, in a more concealed fashion, remains central to our political concerns today. Invoking the work of Giorgio Agamben, this article explores the earliest discussions concerning the question “what is political life?” to show why so much depends upon how we answer this question. (shrink)

This paper revisits Giorgio Agamben’s text The Time That Remains and through a comparative analysis contrasts the author’s reading of St Paul’s Romans to relevant Derridean thematics prevalent in the text. Specific themes include language, the law, and the subject. I illustrate how Agamben attempts to revitalise the idea of philosophical anthropology by breaking away from the deconstructive approach. Agamben argues that language is an experience but is currently in a state of nihilism. Consequently, the subject has (...) become lost; or, more specifically, the subject and its object have not disappeared in language but through language. The resuscitation of experience is thus required to defeat this condition: only in language does the subject have its site and origin. Unlike deconstruction, which highlights an inherent paradox within a situation unearthing a questionable foundation, Agamben argues that, by investigating the “exception,” one finds neither a norm nor an inherent truth of the situation, but the confusion which surrounds them both. (shrink)

A review of Giorgio Agamben's The Use of Bodies that considers Agamben's Homo Sacer series as a contribution to Post-Marxist political theory, and attempts to place Agamben's politial theology in the context of 1970s Italian radical politics. The review also poses the question whether Agamben's anarchist/aestheticist theory is a helpful contribution to political praxis in the contemporary period of the global hegemony of multinational military-industrial technocratic capitalism.

Abstract: Giorgio Agamben's recent works have been preoccupied with a certain obscure passage from St. Paul's 'Second Epistle to the Thessalonians,' which describes the portentous events that must occur before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ can take place---specifically, the appearance of a 'man of lawlessness' (the Antichrist?) and the exposure of who or what is currently restraining the 'man of lawlessness' from being exposed as the Antichrist: a mysterious agency called the 'katechon.' In 'The Mystery of Evil: Benedict (...) XVI and the End of Days,' this obscure passage is connected with the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI through certain equally obscure references to the fourth century theologian, Tyconius, although the precise connection between these apocalyptic events and their mysterious agents remains obscure. This review attempts to shed some critical light upon this cryptic subject, both by considering the world-historical context of St. Paul's epistle, and by asking what role these apocalyptic figures play in Agamben's political theology. But, to begin with, the review also asks: Who, really, is the Antichrist? a scarcely rhetorical question that demands a sardonic answer. Although various candidates from contemporary politics are proposed, the review finally argues that the Antichrist and the katechon are not specific individuals or worldly institutions, but rather refer to world-historical trends within Western European Christian civilization itself that have resulted in what Friedrich Nietzsche called 'the devaluation of all higher values' and 'the desecration of the Christian moral world-view': an apocalyptic turn of events which Nietzsche equally sardonically referred to in 'The Antichrist.'. (shrink)

A concise introduction (in Dutch) to the work of Giorgio Agamben, from the perspective of the central question in his philosophy under what conditions community or society today are possible, not based on in the end always artbitrary principles of exclusion — be they historical, biological, ...

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)

This review shows Agamben as reading Dante and misunderstanding the Jesus event.

Seguramente lo más interesante de la suspensión de la cuenta de Twitter del ya expresidente Trump después del asalto al Capitolio no sea el debate tan manido sobre los límites de la libertad de expresión, sino el hecho mucho más significativo de que hoy es Twitter quien decide sobre el estado de excepción. Para desentrañar esta particular relación entre técnica y estado de excepción tan característica de nuestro predicamento contemporáneo, hay que leer a Giorgio Agamben. En este sentido, el (...) libro de Juan Evaristo Valls Boix, Política sin obra, ofrece una introducción tan divulgativa como profunda al trabajo del filósofo político italiano. Este ejemplar se enmarca dentro de la colección Pensamiento político posfundacional de la Editorial Gedisa, que lleva desempeñando, en los últimos años, una labor pedagógica admirable a la hora de dar a conocer al público, en lengua castellana y catalana, los principales filósofos y filósofas de lo político que han problematizado cualquier tipo de fundacionalismo –Lyotard, Foucault, Arendt, Derrida, Lefort, Laclau, Mouffe, Badiou, Rancière, Butler, Nancy, Abensour y Anzaldúa, entre otros y otras–. Cuando llega el turno de introducir a Agamben, la directora de la colección, Laura Llevadot, ya avisa que se trata de una auténtica “introducción a la vida no fascista”, haciendo un guiño al prólogo de Foucault sobre el Anti-Edipo de Deleuze y Guattari. (shrink)

Neoliberalism has installed an unending competitive struggle in the economy. Within this context activists have pushed for a reappraisal of laziness and inactivity as forms of resistance. This idea has been picked up by Maurizio Lazzarato and Giorgio Agamben in different ways. I start with explaining the former’s appraisal of laziness as a release of potentialities unrealizable under financial capitalism. Lazzarato’s appraisal of laziness however resembles neoliberal theories of innovation, because both share the conceptual persona of a subject whose (...) potentialities exceed the current status quo. Potentiality is thus not an unambiguous antagonist of capitalism, as Lazzarato suggests. In order to adequately oppose neoliberalism, Lazzarato should question the role of potentiality in capitalism. Agamben has undertaken such a project. In the second part of the essay I consequently argue that Agamben’s philosophy of inactivity as impotentiality is able to circumvent neoliberalism and the society of the spectacle. (shrink)

Agamben is slowly entering the English academy. This review shows how Agamben's understanding of poetry can and should inform the eschatological nature of the lyric. The review does its cultural work by rethinking poetry and the poetic impulse. The book under review by Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell, prepare us for messianic times and shows how Agamben critiques the Spinozist-Marxist project. This book's weaknesses lie in Agamben's hubris in glibly going on to write on Hinduism. & (...) Colebrook and Mason have been excused for not bothering with the religion of a poorer nation than theirs. After all, this reviewer never said that Hinduism is India's state religion. Leave it to others to state that. LOL. Agamben's onto-theology is brought out in this review as has been by Colebrook and Maxwell. (shrink)

El concepto de dispositivo en el pensamiento de Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze y Giorgio Agamben.

Community has been both celebrated and demonized as a fortress that shelters and defends its members from being exposed to difference. Instead of abandoning community as an antiquated model of relationships that is ill suited for our globalized world, this book turns to the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy in search for ways to rethink community in an open and inclusive manner. Greg Bird argues that a central piece of this task is found in how (...) each philosopher rearticulates community not as something that is proper to those who belong and improper to those who are excluded or where inclusion is based on one’s share in common property. We must return to the forgotten dimension of sharing, not as a sharing of things that we can contain and own, but as a process that divides us up and shares us out in community with one another. This book traces this problem through a wide array of fields ranging from biopolitics, communitarianism, existentialism, phenomenology, political economy, radical philosophy, and social theory. (shrink)

This study seeks to critically explore the link between sovereignty, violence and war in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. From a brief rereading of Leviathan’s main arguments that explicitly revolves around the Aristotelian distinction between actuality/ potentiality, it will conclude that Hobbesian pre-contractual violence is primarily based on what Hobbes terms “anticipatory reason” and the problem of future contingency. Relying on Foucauldian insights, it will be emphasized that the assumption of certain potentialities suffices in leading (...) to Hobbes’s well-known conclusion that the state of nature is a “condition of Warre.” In a second step, this study considers some of Agamben’s arguments to account for how pre-contractual violence as envisioned by Hobbes cannot be rendered impotent through the integration of a sovereign. In specific, Agamben’s claims shed light on an irreducible, inextricable entwining between the state of nature and the state of law as “Siamese twins” (Virno). On a meta-level, Agamben thus implicitly shows how the “Hobbesian problem” cannot be merely reduced to a “problem of order” (Parsons). With regard to the current functioning of the stratagems of financial markets and the mechanisms of future-colonization underpinning global politics, this study finally argues that Hobbes ought to be reevaluated in particular regarding the problem of the future in his account. Partly responding to Agamben’s critical investigations, I suggest that a careful exploration of what will be coined “the prospects of an actualization of the potentiality not-to-be” might serve as a first theoretical step towards a productive form of criticism. (shrink)

O projeto de crítica das categorias éticas e políticas ¿ estéticas e jurídicas ¿ fundamentais do Ocidente tendo em vista a sua operatividade, o modo como estruturam a composição do tempo presente, segundo o tem perseguido Giorgio Agamben, desde antes, porém, de Homo sacer (1995-2015), seu mais vasto projeto filosófico, articula-se a partir do lugar de uma crítica à fundamentação da linguagem (e do ser) na negatividade. Tal é a proposta analítica que conduz as investigações deste trabalho. Se o (...) diagnóstico acerca do destino niilista da cultura ocidental sustém-se, na ótica agambeniana, o vir à luz do vazio e do nada não mais seria do que a exposição do próprio fundamento negativo das experiências de pensamento que se conceberam como metafísica. No tocante à experiência que ela realiza, como filosofia, com a linguagem, evidencia-se, no plano do lugar do seu fundamento, a negatividade do silêncio, o qual seria operacionalizado a partir de um comutador articulatório denominado Voz, comissura da dúplice estrutura da experiência com a palavra entre mostrar e dizer. A partir, portanto, de uma topologia da negatividade, o plano da própria fundamentação metafísica pode ser investigado com relação ao seu indizível fundamento, ao inefável como o seu limite. Nesse sentido, entendemos que uma tentativa de elucidação do pensamento filosófico de Giorgio Agamben passa pelo questionamento da experiência que toma a linguagem a partir de bases negativas, compondo a metafísica como a entende Agamben, e pela compreensão do seu efetivo fundamento ¿ o problema do experimentum linguae como tal, a existência e a maravilha da linguagem, ao qual se confronta o exílio representativo da postulada necessidade humana de falar (o lógos como condição do humano). O que significa, por conseguinte, que o homem, por ser aquele capaz de linguagem, seja também aquele capaz de política, de vida em comum? Se a linguagem aparece como insígnia da nossa antropogênese - portanto, do humano e da ética , qual o fundamento da linguagem, com base no qual se a concebe como lugar dessa operação, bem como da experiência a partir da negatividade - da subtração, da falta, da finitude - que travamos com ela? Essas questões permitem-nos sintetizar o caminho do pensamento agambeniano diante da experiência metafísica com a palavra como aprisionamento à representação e ao lógos, além de vislumbrar possíveis resultados dessa crítica para o seu próprio pensamento sobre a linguagem e a ética, momento fundamental da construção de sua filosofia. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende analizar la particular relación de imbricación que Michel Foucault y Giorgio Agamben han venido a establecer entre la vida humana y el poder. A tal fin, se propone un recorrido por los dos momentos centrales de su producción que permiten dar cuenta de dicha imbricación: en el caso de Agamben, el referido a la investigación “homo sacer” y, en el de Foucault, el de su investigación en torno de la biopolítica como acontecimiento decisivo de la (...) modernidad. Ambas investigaciones han redundado, entre otros aspectos, pero de manera central, en la configuración de la vida humana en su relación con el poder. En cada uno de los momentos elegidos en las producciones de los filósofos, se analizan las nociones centrales que componen cada investigación: nuda vida, “homo sacer”, estado de excepción y “oikonomía”, en el primer caso; y biopolítica y gubernamentalidad, en el segundo. Finalmente, se contrastan ambas formulaciones filosóficas a fin de sopesar los alcances y las potencialidades que implican frente al análisis que proponen. Este breve ejercicio de análisis sobre la relación entre la vida y el poder en los dos filósofos, pretende poner en evidencia los riesgos a los que nos exponen ciertos presupuestos frecuentes que fundamentan y dan sentido a las ideas y a las prácticas políticas contemporáneas. (shrink)

There is congruence between Nietzsche’s philosophy of life and the biopolitical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. For both philosophers the human animal possesses a divided relationship to its being alive. For both philosophers this division is of a political nature, such that membership in political community as we know it is conditional on the human animal’s alienation from its biological being. Both philosophers are also concerned with the possibility of transformation and, because of the connection they establish between politics and (...) animality, link this possibility to a change in the relationship between humans and their being alive. Yet both philosophers end up with an entirely different understanding of the nature of this change, and of its potential scope. This paper is an attempt at clarifying this disagreement between Nietzsche and Agamben, and with using it to come to a better understanding of the latter’s political ontology. It presents a reading of Kafka’s “The Burrow” in an attempt to show how Agamben’s concept of the anthropological machine challenges the Nietzschean program of the affirmation of life as will to power. (shrink)

During the last two decades, a sharp re-reading of St. Paul’s letters allowed several thinkers to embed a messianic element in their political philosophy. In these readings, the messianic refusal of the world and its laws is understood through the suspensive act of ‘subtraction’ – a movement of withdrawal which nonetheless proved too often ineffective when translated in political practice. -/- After having analysed Agamben’s declension of Subtraction in terms of ‘inoperativity’, this article focuses on the notion of Parousia (...) as a key element to understand his anti-utopian account of messianic time. In contrast with Agamben’s reading, Bloch’s interpretation of the Pauline Parousia envisages the messianic event as infra-historical, but at the same time opened to ultimate (meta-historical) purposes. Bloch’s messianic call – I argue – takes the form of mediation, a correction of subtraction towards the direction of a more committed political engagement. I conclude suggesting that the concrete implementations of this mediation perform their emancipatory function in so far as they assume the character of practical ethics, with the attention directed to the underprivileged and marginalised. (shrink)

Vardoulakis explores the connection between sovereignty and stasis in the work of Agamben. It considers some of Agamben's most famous formulations of sovereignty, such in Homo Sacer. But the focus is on some seemingly obscure references to Spinoza in Agamben's works. Vardoulakis argues that these references reveal the logic of Agamben's political philosophy -- including a politics of reading that influences his account of the philosophical tradition.

Nach Sarasin ist Agambens Analyse im Vergleich zu derjenigen von Foucault ein "todesfixierter Mystizismus der Souveränität"1. Geulen schreibt, Agamben verwandle Foucaults Biopolitik in eine "Thanatopolitik"2, und sogar Agamben selbst unterstellt Foucault, "er habe sich einer einheitlichen Theorie der Macht konsequent verweigert."3. Folglich meint Agamben, er müsse die foucaultsche These berichtigen oder wenigstens ergänzen.4 Ich möchte deshalb im Folgenden in einem ersten, ausführlichen Schritt auf diejenigen Stellen von Agambens "Homo Sacer" eingehen, in denen Agamben aus Foucaults Perspektive (...) argumentiert oder gar Kritik an ihm übt. (shrink)

The idea of the political, reconfiguring sovereignty and exception: Analysing theoretical perspectives of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben -/- Author / Authors : Meenakshi Gogoi Page no. 69-78 Discipline : Political Science/Polity/ Democratic studies Script/language : Roman/English Category : Research paper Keywords: Political, Sovereignty, Exception, Democracy, Rule of Law.

This is the first draft of a paper presented in an international conference in West Bengal.

In this article, we philosophically reflect on the nature of corporate governance. We raise the question whether control is still a feasible ideal of corporate governance and reflect on the implications of the epistemic insufficiency of economic institutions with regard to grand challenges like of global warming for our conceptualization of corporate governance. We first introduce the concept of corporate governance from the perspective of economics and politics. We then trace the genealogy of the concept of governance based on a (...) selective reading of Giorgio Agamben’s work, who has pointed at two interdependent paradigms of governance in the Christian tradition, and apply his categories in the context of corporate governance. We finally engage in a critical reflection on the concept of corporate governance and develop four characteristics of corporate governance that can guide future conceptual as well as empirical research in the field of corporate social responsibility of economic institutions. (shrink)