Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer

Durham: Duke University Press (2005)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is having an increasingly significant impact on Anglo-American political theory. His most prominent intervention to date is the powerful reassessment of sovereignty and the politics of life and death laid out in his multivolume _Homo Sacer_ project. Agamben argues that in both the modern world and the ancient, politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camps—in which some inmates are reduced to a form of living death—are not a political aberration but instead the place where this essential political decision about life most clearly reveals itself. Engaging specifically with _Homo Sacer_, the essays in this collection draw out and contend with the wide-ranging implications of Agamben’s radical and controversial interpretation of modern political life. The contributors analyze Agamben’s thought from the perspectives of political theory, philosophy, jurisprudence, and the history of law. They consider his work not only in relation to that of his major interlocutors—Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger—but also in relation to the thought of Plato, Pindar, Heraclitus, Descartes, Kafka, Bataille, and Derrida. The essayists’ approaches are varied, as are their ultimate evaluations of the cogency and accuracy of Agamben’s arguments. This volume also includes an original essay by Agamben in which he considers the relation of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to Schmitt’s _Political Theology_. _Politics, Metaphysics, and Death_ is a necessary, multifaceted exposition and evaluation of the thought of one of today’s most important political theorists. _Contributors:_ Giorgio Agamben, Andrew Benjamin, Peter Fitzpatrick, Anselm Haverkamp, Paul Hegarty, Andreas Kalyvas, Rainer Maria Kiesow, Catherine Mills, Andrew Norris, Adam Thurschwell, Erik Vogt, Thomas Carl Wall

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

    This entry is not archived by us. If you are the author and have permission from the publisher, we recommend that you archive it. Many publishers automatically grant permission to authors to archive pre-prints. By uploading a copy of your work, you will enable us to better index it, making it easier to find.

    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 102,323

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Chapters

Similar books and articles

Law and Life.Rainer Maria Kiesow - 2005 - In Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Durham: Duke University Press. pp. 248-261.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
120 (#182,815)

6 months
15 (#207,306)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

Cosmopolitan Exception.Susan McManus - 2013 - Journal of International Political Theory 9 (2):101-135.
The exception and the paradigm: Giorgio Agamben on law and life.William Stahl - 2020 - Contemporary Political Theory 19 (2):233-250.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references