German E Primera

Reviews
“German Primera's engaging work uses the recent completion of the Homo Sacer project as an occasion to assess Agamben's work in its entirety. Demonstrating how the early writings on metaphysics and signification inform later discussions of sovereignty, theology, governmentality, power and life, it shows how the ontology of signatures and paradigms underpinning Agamben's philosophical archaeology form the threads that cross the whole arc of his thinking, cashing themselves out in a politics of inoperability and destituent potency. Combining close engagements with contemporaries such as Foucault, Derrida and Negri, and answering a multitude of critics, Primera establishes Agamben's distinctive place in post-Heideggerian political philosophy.” –  Nathan Widder, Professor of Political Theory, University of London, UK

“One of the very few genuine attempts to understand Agamben's work philosophically: by means of a careful, precise, and absolutely lucid reconstruction of his thought, which only an exceptional familiarity with the whole corpus would allow, Primera throws new light on the very deepest of its structures. These structures are rendered visible by a return to one of the earliest moments of Agamben's mature work: the critique of signification and the sign. This return is made in such a way as to allow Primera to carry out a deeper excavation of the foundations of Agamben's conceptual architecture than we have ever seen before.” –  Michael Lewis, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

“A clear, inspiring, and beautifully written investigation into Giorgio Agamben's philosophy understood as a critique of Western metaphysics aimed at rendering inoperative the signatures that control the intelligibility of Western politics and culture. In dialogue with Derrida, Foucault, Negri, Schmitt, and Benjamin, the book underscores the significance of Agamben's work for both a critique of and a contribution to current debates on neoliberalism, biopolitics, governmentality, and sovereignty.” –  Silvia Benso, Professor of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

The aim of this article is to follow Honig's intention of thinking inoperativity as a form of refusal. It demonstrates that Agamben's inoperativity entails an intensification of use that can circumvent the pitfalls associated with the language of 'demands,' or the need to rescue the city as the space of the political par excellence, all while preserving its potential for instituting change. I claim that all destitution entails instituting practices and forms of experimentation that modify the subject, and that, with the help of Agamben, subjects are nothing other than these modifications. The wager of this short intervention, therefore, is that a form of refusal that pays critical attention not only to the act of suspension or negation, but also to the generative force that this suspension inherently entails is attainable, all while circumventing the city as a political space shaped by anti-blackness.

The concept of inoperativity, making its first appearance in the work of Alexandre Kojève, gets fully thematised across the writings of Maurice Blanchot and Jan-Luc Nancy before being taken up and further developed by Giorgio Agamben. Although already present in the very first volume of his Homo Sacer series, Agamben's formulation of inoperosità has gained increasing centrality within the rich and intricate theoretical universe constructed by the Italian philosopher over the years. However, this concept has frequently been misinterpreted or dismissed as indicating mere inactivity: a passive and complete absence of all work. This simplistic interpretation falls short of grasping what truly is at stake in the complex notion of inoperativity: namely, a much more radical and sophisticated suspension of potentiality, which Agamben seeks to rescue from the mechanisms of actualisation that have plagued much of Western thought. With this edited volume, to our knowledge the first entirely dedicated to the study of inoperativity, our primary concern is not so much that of correcting superficial appreciations of this concept for the sake of accuracy. Rather, we are here introducing a number of perspectives on, and putting forth a set of deliberately unresolved propositions for, inoperativity that may open this notion to new uses.

This paper both rejects the reading of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as a secularized katechon and rethinks anew the questions of sovereignty and politics in his thought. It does so by examining the eschatological charac- ter of his politico-theological understanding of the relation between the kingdom of the Leviathan and the kingdom of God. Indeed, through dif- ferent contemporary readings of Hobbes’s theory of the state,1 this paper offers an insight into the concrete eschatology at operation in Hobbes’s thought and underscores its relevance for the understanding of govern- ment, biopolitics, and sovereignty. This is achieved through two different albeit interconnected undertakings, which in turn allow us to agree with but also to go beyond Giorgio Agamben’s claim that the state in Hobbes does not have a katechontic function. The first is an exposition of the a-teleological character of Hobbes’s eschatology and his metaphysics of motion. The second involves a consideration of the temporality and the nature of the relation between the ahistorical world of reason and the historical world of faith that underpins Hobbes’s theory of the state.
By bringing this eschatological perspective to the fore, we will not only problematize the reading of Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty that aligns him with liberalism, but we will also develop an analysis of the re- sources that Hobbes offers to imagine a different form of politics. Indeed, contrary to the contemporary interpretations in which Hobbes’s eschatol- ogy is presented as future regarding, we will highlight the chronological coincidence between the historical time of faith and the ahistorical time of the Leviathan, placing Hobbes within the political coordinates of Walter Benjamin’s messianism. Before developing this interpretation of Hobbes’s theory of the state, a brief account of the katechontic reading of his the- ory of sovereignty will be presented in the opening section, followed by a critique of this reading and an examination of both the particularity of Hobbes’s eschatology and the understanding of motion that grounds his theory of the state.

The aim of this paper is to examine Agamben's engagement with economic theology in order to underscore its relevance for the critique of contemporary neoliberal politics. In the first part, I offer a summary of the central arguments of The Kingdom and the Glory. In particular, I focus on both the treatment of the notion of oikonomia in the early Christian discussions on the divine trinity and its relation to the providential paradigm of government. I then show how this genealogy of oikonomia is useful for a political analysis of the present. In doing so, I respond to some of the criticisms leveled against Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory by Alberto Toscano. Finally, I will conclude by showing how Agamben's work is of particular importance for the study of neoliberal political rationality.

This article presents a critical account of Agamben’s understanding of the logic of sovereignty and of the notion bare life, particularly Agamben’s approach to the paradox of sovereignty and its relation to Aristotle’s metaphysical category of po- tentiality. With regards to bare life, it brings together an analysis of the figure of the homo sacer with an account of Agamben’s use of paradigms as methodological tools. The first part of the paper argues that Agamben ontologises sovereignty by dramatising the paradox of its structure as im-potentiality. The second part claims that even though an account of Agamben’s methodology serves to respond to the different critiques that his notion of bare life has raised, Agamben’s notions of sov- ereignty and of bare life ultimately rely on Schmitt’s decisionism.

This paper attempts to think anew the shift from ancient to modern slavery by both examining the character of the relation between the status of the slave and the notion of work and by questioning the role of the modern politico-economical category of labor in this shift itself. In doind so, I attempt to start a conversation on the notion of resistance that emerges out of the problematization of these two temporalities (ancient and modern).

This, I hope, will be  achieved through two different, albeit interconnected undertakings, which in turn allow me to agree but also to go beyond Hannah Arendt’s claim that for the modern, the slave is a means of producing labor-power at a good price with the goal of profits while for the ancient it was a means of eliminating labor from the properly human life. The first is an exposition of the peculiar nature of the use of the slave’s body in the ancient paradigm and of its transformation in modernity through the category labor. The second involves a consideration of the notion of the workless slave as it relates to fugitivity in order to think about resistance.

Agamben, contra Schmitt, claims that secularization is not a concept through which a ‘structural identity’ or an essential continuity between theology and politics can be determined. Neither does he thinks, with Hans Blumenberg, that a radical discontinuity between Christian theology and modernity is at stake in the notion of secularization (Agamben, 2009:76). Rather, as I will argue in this paper, for Agamben secularization functions as a signature, that is as a ‘strategic operator that marked political concepts in order to make them refer to their theological origins’ (Ibid). This paper will demonstrate that Agamben is certainly not making an argument for the theological foundation of all politics, nor is he claiming, in the case of economic theology, that Christian theology is the foundational ground of managerial administration and economics. Indeed, as William Watkin argues, ‘the displacement of oikonomia from home economics, for the Greeks, into theological economy and then political economy describes merely how certain things could be said in terms of theology and politics, rather than how one proceeds from the other’ (2014:22). Therefore, the signature of Secularisation does not indicate a structural identity between theology and politics nor does it refer to an epistemological break between the sacred and the secular, but rather it distributes and controls the political and the theological through a relation of mutual referentiality. This paper aims at examining the general coordinates of Agamben’s philosophical archaeology and his account of the signature in particular, to underscore its relevance for the understanding of secularization.

In this paper, it will be claimed that Agamben’s critique of the western tradition of the sign - the separation between the signifier and the signified, the proper and the improper - that could be traced back to his Stanzas (1977) provides the methodological structure that underpins his philosophical system.
Indeed, it will be argued that the dialectic proper/improper deciphered by Agamben in his critique of the western tradition of signifying allows him to develop what will be presented, through a critical reading of William Watkin’s Agamben and the indifference (2014), as the underlying structure of Agamben’s thought: The scheme common-proper-indifference. The common is an unconditioned element, a founding ground (e.g sovereignty) that founds the proper, that is, the conditioned fact, the founded element (e.g bare life). Paradoxically, what Agamben shows repeatedly in his works, is that it is the proper what founds the common, that is to say, it is the founded element what founds its own founding ground. Ultimately, both the common and the proper collapsed into a zone of indistinction in which it is no longer possible to distinguish them.
This structure is always at operation in Agamben’s archeological investigations to the extent that, for him, it constitutes the core of the entire metaphysical tradition of the West. The aim of this presentation, therefore, is to make this structure intelligible as a precondition of a comprehensive understanding of the inclusion-exclusion paradigm. In order to do so, I will take Agamben’s reading of the isolation of the improper within the tradition of signification, as an incipient but nonetheless crucial development of the dialectic of the common and the proper.

As a whole, the Homo Sacer project could be described as an attempt to decipher the political meaning of pure Being as a precondition to ‘master the bare life that expresses our subjection to political power’ but inversely, it aims at 'understanding the theoretical implications of the isolation of bare life in order to solve the enigma of ontology’ (Agamben, 1998:182). Neither of these tasks will be effectively accomplished if the constitutive processes of metaphysics and politics are not located within the oikonomia of the common and the proper, that is to say, within the linguistic-metaphysical machine that lies at the core of Agamben’s philosophy.