Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer Series: A Critical Introduction and Guide

248 Pages·2022·1.738 MB·English

by  Colby Dickinson

Giorgio Agamben’s
Homo Sacer Series

Giorgio Agamben’s
Homo Sacer Series
A Critical Introduction
and Guide
Colby Dickinson
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© Colby Dickinson, 2022
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations x
Introduction 1
Overview of the Present Study 5
Charting a Course for Reading 12
A Brief Outline of the Homo Sacer Series 13
Framing the Homo Sacer Series 14
1. Religious and Political Implications of the
Homo Sacer Project 35
The Fiction of Sovereignty 35
Oaths, Language and the Divine Name 42
On God and Gods from the Point of View of a
Modal Ontology 52
An Ontology of Demand 61
2. On Aristotle, Actuality and Potentiality 66
Aristotle and the Problem of ‘Potency’ 66
Potentiality as a Form of Resistance 76
Contemplation of the Inappropriable 85
Demand, Memory and the Place of Thought 90
Contents
3. Glory and the Significance of Political Theology 95
Kingdom, Government and Sovereignty 95
The Desire for Order 101
Sovereign Glory 105
4. Economy and its Inoperativity 114
The Bipolar Sovereignty of Identity 114
Subjects and the Suspension of Identity 117
New Uses of the Body 122
Messianic or Hypernomian 126
5. The Border between the Human and the Animal 132
The Fiction of the Human Being 132
The Problem of Anthropogenesis 140
Anthropogenesis and Metaphysics 145
6. Paul and the Messianic Division of Division 157
A Possible Hermeneutic 157
The Gesture of Pope Benedict XVI 161
Towards a Negative Dialectic 168
Dialectics at a Standstill 173
The Messianic and the Future of Dialectics 176
7. Form-of-Life beyond the Law 180
The Temporality of Fashion and Art 180
What is Form-of-Life? 185
Form-of-Life as End Goal 196
Mystery and Desire 199
Conclusions 206
Notes 212
Bibliography 227
Index 232
vi
Acknowledgements
The following book began as a series of invited lectures that
were delivered on a number of occasions on two continents. The
first among these were two keynote lectures presented at a collo-
quium titled ‘Politics, Economics, Theology: The Contributions
of Giorgio Agamben’s Work’ at Universidade do Vale dos Sinos
(UNISINOS) in São Leopoldo, Brazil in May of 2017. The gra-
cious invitation extended by the Instituto Humanitas Unisinos
(IHU) at UNISINOS was instrumental in making these talks hap-
pen, and their hospitality while I was among them was second to
none. My thanks are extended to everyone there, and especially
to Susana Maria Rocca, Cleusa Maria Andreatta, Marcia Rosane
Junges, Rejane Machado da Silva de Bastos, Rodrigo Karmy and
Alain Gignac, among others, for the wonderful and fruitful con-
versations that took place there.
During this same visit to São Leopoldo, I was fortu-
nate enough to make the acquaintance of another Brazilian
scholar working on Agamben’s thought, Glauco Barsalini,
who invited me to speak at his university the following year.
I gladly accepted and was again privileged to deliver a larger
series of lectures over the course of a week in May of 2018
along with the members of the PPGCR Research Group at
PUC-Campinas in Brazil. My time there was an opportunity
to further develop my intuitions regarding Agamben’s Homo
vii
Acknowledgements
Sacer series, and I am very grateful to many individuals at
PUC for the invitation to speak with them. My thanks are
accordingly, and happily, due to Glauco Barsalini, Douglas
Barros, Renato Kirchner, Ana Rosa Cloclet da Silva, Ricardo
Evandro Martins, Hélerson da Silva, Breno Martins, Cristina
Micaroni Hilkner, Cláudio de Oliveira Ribeiro, Aretha Beatriz
Brito da Rocha, Mariana Pfister, Jefferson Zeferino, Marcelo
Saraiva and the many other professors, students and various
participants of the lecture series. Having since welcomed both
Mariana and Glauco to Chicago for research stays, I am over-
joyed at the wealth of intellectual contact being developed
between our research universities and am hopeful for many
future conversations shared together.
During this last trip to Brazil, I also had the honour of being
accompanied by two doctoral students from Loyola University
Chicago, Marcos Norris and Kim Berkey, both of whom con-
tinue to inspire my work in a number of ways. I was very glad
for their company, conversation and the outstanding research
they presented, not to mention their athletic prowess at various
team sports, during our trip together.
After the bulk of this material had been formulated and
presented, I was subsequently able to expand a couple of these
lectures for another pair of talks given in March of 2019 at
both the Centre of Theology, Philosophy and Media Theory
at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and at the
University of Vienna, Austria. I was immensely grateful for
the opportunity to elaborate on some of these themes and am
very thankful to Martin Kočí, Katerina Kočí, František Štech,
Tim Noble, Virgil Brower, Gábor Ambrus, Adam Kotsko,
Marlene Deibl, Bogdana Koljevic Griffith, Natalie Eder, Jason
Alvis and Kim Berkey for their roles in making these talks
happen and the wonderful dialogues that constituted our time
together.
I owe a great deal of added clarity and insight to the book
to the constructive critiques of Adam Kotsko, who was so gra-
cious as to provide detailed feedback on the manuscript, and
viii
Acknowledgements
Arthur Willemse, who was a most generous reader toward the
end of the publication process.
Lastly, I owe a debt of gratitude to my research assistant,
Evan Marsolek, for all of his work on the text, including the
formatting, editing and referencing of the entire manuscript.
ix
Abbreviations
CC Agamben, Giorgio, The Coming Community, trans.
Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993.
CK Agamben, Giorgio, The Church and the Kingdom, trans.
Leland de la Durantaye, Calcutta, India: Seagull Books,
2012.
FT Agamben, Giorgio, The Fire and the Tale, trans. Lorenzo
Chiesa, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017.
HP Agamben, Giorgio, The Highest Poverty: Monastic
Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2013.
HS Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998.
IP Agamben, Giorgio, The Idea of Prose, trans. Michael
Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt, Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1995.
K Agamben, Giorgio, Karman: A Brief Treatise on Action,
Guilt, and Gesture, trans. Adam Kotsko, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2018.
KG Agamben, Giorgio, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a
Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government
(Homo Sacer II, 2), trans. Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo
Mandarini, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.
x