The highest poverty : monastic rules and form-of-life / Giorgio Agamben ; translated by Adam Kotsko.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Agamben, Giorgio, 1942- author.

Contributor:

Kotsko, Adam, translator.

Series:

Meridian (Stanford, Calif.)

Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics

Standardized Title:

Altissima povertà. English

Language:

English

Italian

Subjects (All):

Monasticism and religious orders--Rules.

Monasticism and religious orders.

Monastic and religious life--History--Middle Ages, 600-1500.

Monastic and religious life.

History.

Physical Description:

xiii, 157 pages ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2013.

Summary:

What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule? It is to these questions that Agamben's new book turns through an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book reconstructs in detail the life of the monks with their obsessive attention to temporal articulation and to the Rule, to ascetic techniques and to liturgy. But Agamben's thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which "life" as such, perhaps for the first time, is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the "highest poverty" and "use" challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today. His investigation of the past brings us closer to imagining both a form-of-life, that is, a human life released from the grip of law, and a use of bodies and of the world that never becomes an appropriation. It challenges us to think life as something not subject to ownership but only for common use. Book jacket.

Contents:

I Rule and Life

1 Birth of the Rule 3

2 Rule and Law 28

3 Flight from the World and Constitution 48

Threshold 60

II Liturgy and Rule

1 Regula Vitae 65

2 Orality and Writing 73

3 The Rule as a Liturgical Text 79

Threshold 86

III Form-Of-Life

1 The Discovery of Life 91

2 Renouncing Law 109

3 Highest Poverty and Use 123

Threshold 144.

Notes:

"Originally published in Italian under the title Altissima povertà : Regole monastiche e forma di vita."

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9780804784054

0804784051

9780804784061

080478406X

OCLC:

814301933