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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

the administration of life « Previous | |Next »
December 19, 2005

A quote from a review by Guillermina Seri of Giogio Agamben's The Open. Man and Animal in Politics and Culture:

One of Agamben's most original contributions arises from his extension and radicalization of the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics and its assimilation to sovereign power..... whereas the late Foucault resorted to the Greeks as inspiration for the possibility of freedom, Agamben exposes Aristotle's Politics as the foundation of Western biopolitics. In that text, Aristotle assimilates human life to the life of the citizen in the polis. Outside the polis, life can only be either godly or animal, that is inhuman. What remains implicit in the Aristotelian work and that Agamben infers is that, if life is human only when a political status is attached to it, then the adscription to humanity relies on a political, contingent decision. Starting from this insight, his work uncovers life as the raw matter over which sovereign power reproduces itself by distinguishing between human and inhuman, and makes clear that there is no humanity outside this decision. These main coordinates define what Agamben refers to in The Open as the "anthropological machine," that is the onto-political grammar of production of the human against a background of life defined as worthless and eliminable.

Whereas Foucault understood biopolitics as a modern phenomenon, Agamben argues that the administration of life has accompanied Western politics since its inception in Ancient Greece.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:58 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
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» becoming human from philosophical conversations
As I wind down for Xmas I've started trying to read again. I'm currently reading Giorgio Agamben's The Open. Man and Animal on biopolitics in connection with Maurice Blanchot's The Infinite Conversation. The biopolitics that I find interesting is the p... [Read More]

 
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