Time, language, and visuality in Agamben's philosophy / Jenny Doussan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Doussan, Jenny, 1977-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Agamben, Giorgio, 1942-.

Agamben, Giorgio.

Physical Description:

xiv, 233 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York, New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Summary:

Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher both celebrated and reviled, is among the prominent voices in contemporary Italian thought today. His work, which touches upon fields as diverse as aesthetics and biopolitics, is often understood within a framework of Aristotelian potentiality. This incisive critique identifies a different tendency in the philosopher's work, an engagement with the problem of time that is inextricably bound up with language and visuality. Founded in his early writings on metaphysics and continuing to his present occupation with inoperativity, Time, Language and Visuality in Agamben's Philosophy forges an original path through Agamben's extensive commentary on the linguistic and the visual to illuminate the recurrent temporal theme of capture and evasion-the cat-and-mouse game-that bears the foundational violence of not just representation but concept-formation itself. In the process, Doussan both reveals its limit and establishes a ground for future engagements. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 The Problem with Metaphysics: Taking Place 5

Terminology: the poetic moment of thought 5

The taking place of violence and what remains to be thought 6

The Coming Community: will? whatever 22

Impossible coincidence: the coextensive but not coincident currents of subjectivity 34

2 From Means Without End to the State of Exception 48

The saving grace of bare life 48

Indeterminacy and inversion: pure means and the camp 49

The sovereign ban and exception-as-rule 56

Language: arch-sovereign 61

Time, signification, and deconstruction's open door 66

For and against the eternal return 77

3 From the Meta- to the Para-: On Method 97

Sleight of hand 97

Intention and exception 99

Classification and foundation 107

Para-ontology versus metaphysics 116

Idea of the signature 123

Transcendence, immanence, and the bipolar machine 133

4 Cat-and-Mouse Game 148

Duration and endurance 148

Messianic time: fullness and presence 151

Deactivation: state of exception redux 160

Pure means: to use the word that does not bind 170

Agamben's political theology: cat-and-mouse redux 184

5 Tabula Ocularia 198

Special being 198

Accidental autonomy 199

Battle of wills 203

Time, visibility, use 208

Tabula Ocularia 212.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781137286239

1137286237

OCLC:

825047343