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Title: The Coming Community (Theory Out of Bounds, Vol 1) by Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt ISBN: 0-8166-2235-3 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: March, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Gateway
Comment: Less an argument and more a constellation or mosaic of insights, formulas, and enigmas, The Coming Community by Giorgio Agamben is both a courageous delineation of political crisis and an intervention in thought that is both beautiful and cheerfully destructive. That is, this mosaic (inspired, I think, more by the early Heidegger of Sein und Zeit and also Walter Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) saves, without naming, the potential for the uprecedented that comes out of the delineation of the astonishing: the 'whatever' which "always matters" but which is in no wise the result of a process of any kind. Composed of twenty-nine brief, dense, suggestive sections, this book opens a gateway out of the space of nihilism that currently enthralls the planet in the form of the Debordian Spectacle. The example of Tianenmen is intended to evoke a scintillating, lawless time--blasted out of history--when everything mattered exactly such as it is. Since Benjamin, no thinker has more clearly entered into the threshold of complicity that thought and politics share.
Rating: 2
Summary: Obscuratist
Comment: Agamben's book Infancy and History was a superb book, and I was looking forward to reading this book. The book should be twice as big, as seemingly every other sentence calls for further elaboration. To be sure, it is esay to undersatnd that Agamben's language is inspired by the later Heidegger's unfolding of language, particularly through etymology. The grounding of the book is an elaboration of the word "whatever" (qualunque), and perhaps this was more understandable in the original Italian, the point being, for Agamben, that 'being' is not a case of "whatever being" such that it does not matter which, but "such that it always matters". This then becomes his base for human ethics. Fair enough. But who needs the exposition of "whatever" in order to argue for an ethics of understanding? His ultimate argument is that the coming community will not be one of control of the State in politrical terms, but rather a struggle between the State and the non-State. He gives the example of the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, whom, Agamben argues, did not demonstate for concrete demands, or rather, that "democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict". This is incredible! Agamben is more familiar with Italian farmers demanding foreign goods be stopped at the borders. My feeling by the end of the book, was that Agamben's Coming Community would be a community of Intellectuals who a few times a year march for people who are no longer a community, the disposessed, (whom, despite their efforts of solidarity with each other's plight, remain ultimately marginal) but after the demonstration the intellectuals return to their comfortable university-paid jobs. This book left me feeling angry.
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Title: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian (Stanford, Calif.).) by Giorgio Agamben, Daniel Heller-Roazen ISBN: 0804732183 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Theory Out of Bounds, V. 20) by Giorgio Agamben, Vincenzo Binetti, Cesare Casarino ISBN: 0816630364 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: 13 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Meridian (Stanford, Calif.).) by Giorgio Agamben, Daniel Heller-Roazen ISBN: 0804732787 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: December, 1999 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Man Without Content (Meridian (Stanford, Calif.).) by Giorgio Agamben, Georgia Albert ISBN: 0804735549 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: July, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Inoperative Community (Theory and History of Literature Series, Vol 76) by Jean-Luc Nancy, Christopher Fynsk ISBN: 0816619247 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: June, 1991 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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