Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
ThePolisProject, 2020
This essay critically engages with Italian philosopher Agamben's reflections on "naked life" in relation to the state of exception instituted to counter COVID-19. This state of exception is a "new" paradigm of rule where the threat of virus-as-terror trumps mere biological survival over moral, social relations. Future politics is likely to accentuate in the confluence of biopolitics and friend/foe pairing.
Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy, 2024
The Covid-19 pandemic has created a ‘perfect crisis’ that combined health, ecological and economic crises, resulting in the death of millions of people and the unemployment of others. While states took extraordinary measures to manage the crisis, social scientists tried to make sense of this situation. Early in the pandemic, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben controversially claimed that states were instrumentalizing the disease to proclaim, “an authentic state of exception”. This study contributes to the criticisms of Agamben through a critical rereading of German legal theorist, Carl Schmitt. The main argument is that Agamben’s approach to the pandemic is too strongly social constructivist, over-philosophical, over-political and a-historical due to his general philosopho-political project. Agamben’s decisionist and over-political approach is derived from his use of Schmitt’s problematic concept of the “state of exception”. However, Agamben’s use is even more problematic because he uses it to analyze various political developments ahistorically, which obliviates the concept’s analytical consistency.
Law and Critique, 2009
Over the past decade, as human rights discourses have increasingly served to legitimize state militarism, a growing number of thinkers have sought to engage critically with the human rights project and its anthropological foundations. Amongst these thinkers, Giorgio Agamben’s account of rights is possibly the most damning: human rights declarations, he argues, are biopolitical mechanisms that serve to inscribe life within the order of the nation state, and provide an earthly foundation for a sovereign power that is taking on a form redolent of the concentration camp. In this paper, I will examine Agamben’s account of human rights declarations, which he sees as central to the modern collapse of the distinction between life and politics that had typified classical politics. I will then turn to the critique of Agamben offered by Jacques Ranciere, who suggests that Agamben’s rejection of rights discourses is consequent to his adoption of Hannah Arendt’s belief that, in order to establish a realm of freedom, the political realm must be premised on the expulsion of natural life. In contrast to Ranciere, I will argue that far from sharing the position of those thinkers, like Arendt, who seek to respond to the modern erosion of the borders between politics and life by resurrecting earlier forms of separation, Agamben sees the collapse of this border as the condition of possibility of a new, non-juridical politics.
2012
The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.
In the introduction to Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben proposes that the “the protagonist” of his book is “bare life,” particularly “the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed, and whose essential function in modern politics we intend to assert” (12). Agamben’s interpretation of “the life of homo sacer” is derived from Roman law, but it is particularly appropriated with respect to how human life, generally, is included in or excluded from the overarching political structure. For Agamben, “bare life”—a simple form of human existence—becomes zoē constituted by (or separated from) the political order of bios, by sovereignty’s “state of exception.” Essentially, not only does sovereignty exist in a politicalized construct to, chiefly, stabilize it and make determinations about who should be included in (or excluded from) the bios, but the Sovereign has a Heideggerian “ek-sistence,” due to being existentially exceptional.
Psychotherapy and Politics International, 2022
The current ‘pandemic’ is approached through the lens of (mainly) the concept of Homo sacer, elaborated on by Giorgio Agamben (1998). Taking the work of Michel Foucault on the ‘disciplinary society’ and ‘bio-politics’ further, and drawing on the role played by the principle of homo sacerin antiquity, Agamben uncovers the disconcerting extent towhich this principle has become generalised in contemporary societies. In antiquity,the principle of ‘sacred man/human’ was invoked in cases where someone was exempted from ritual sacrifice, but simultaneously seen as ‘bare life’, and therefore as being fit for execution. Agamben argues that the sphere of ‘sacred life’ has grown immensely since ancient times in so far as the modern state arrogates to itself the right to wield biopolitical power over ‘bare life’ in a manner analogous to ancient practices, and finds in the concentration camp the contemporary paradigm of this phenomenon. Arguing that today we witness a further downward step in the treatment of humans as ‘bare life’, these concepts are employed as a heuristic for bringing into focus current practices under the aegis of the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’. In particular, here the spotlight falls on those areas where burgeoning ‘bare life’ practices can be detected, namely ‘origin of the virus’ and ‘lethal vaccines’. In an upcoming second article,other aspects areaddressed, as well as the question of commensurate psychotherapy.
American Sociological Review, 1977
LSE Review of Books, 2024
International Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research, 2023
Marine Geology, 2016
Serbian Journal of Public Health, 2024
Journal of Business Venturing, 2011