936 research outputs found
Imperatives without imperator
Schmittâs theologisation of sovereignty has been subjected, 50 years later, to a âquarter turnâ by Foucaultâs move from issues of domination to issues of government. After a further 30 years, radicalising Foucault, Agambenâs archaeology of economy adds another âquarter turnâ: the structure that emerges once the old European conjugality of facticity and validity, of praxis and being, emptied of all bonds, links, and loops, gives way to the bare opposition âbipolarityâ. The new constellation provides the old legal-theoretical (kelsenian) problem of rules unsuspended from a ruler who would authorise them, with a new, unexpected, political content and with a change of epistemic paradigm. Abstract from publisher website at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/r875043667332q76/?p=20359db2f2504c2882f03f03e2c94902&pi=
The Profanation of Revelation: On Language and Immanence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben
This essay seeks to articulate the many implications which Giorgio Agambenâs work holds for theology. It aims therefore to examine his (re)conceptualizations of language, in light of particular historical glosses on the âname of Godâ and the nature of the âmysticalâ, as well as to highlight the political task of profanation, one of his most central concepts, in relation to the logos said to embody humanityâs âreligiousâ quest to find its Voice. As such, we see how he challenges those standard (ontotheological) notions of transcendence which have been consistently aligned with various historical forms of sovereignty. In addition, I intend to present his redefinition of revelation as solely the unveiling of the âname of Godâ as the fact of our linguistic being, a movement from the transcendent divine realm to the merely human world before us. By proceeding in this manner, this essay tries to close in on one of the largest theological implications contained within Agambenâs work: the establishment of an ontology that could only be described as a form of âabsoluteâ immanence, an espousal of some form of pantheism (or perhaps panentheism) yet to be more fully pronounced within his writings
Agambenâs Grammar of the Secret Under the Sign of the Law
This paper suggests that a grammar of the secret forms a concept in Agambenâs 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. Sovereigntyâs 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 ârealâ 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 Agambenâs critical orientation toward the immanent: what is immanent is both potential and hiddenness
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