UWS Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy MASTER CLASS September 2011
AGAMBEN: BETWEEN ONTOLOGY AND POLITICS
PEG BIRMINGHAM
In the same way in which the great transformation of the first industrial
revolution destroyed the social and political structures as well as the legal
categories of the ancient regime, terms such as sovereignty, right, nation,
people, democracy, and general will by now refer to a reality that no longer
has anything to do with what these concepts used to designate-and those who
continue to use these concepts uncritically literally do not know what they are
talking about
-Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on
Politics
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar will focus on the thought of Giorgio Agamben,
specifically his well-known claim that Western politics is founded upon the
"state of exception." Our task will be to examine the status of this
"founding" as thought by Agamben. In other words, is Agamben making a
historical claim about the way in which Western politics has to date been
founded on the exception, a founding act made possible by Western metaphysics?
Or, is he claiming something more, namely, that event of being is such that the
state of exception is an ontological condition and as such renders impossible
any avoidance of it at the level of the political? And if it is the case that
the ontological is at work in the political, then what does it mean to
introduce, as Agamben does in the passage above, the historical dimension into
the political? This last question raises a larger theme that guides this
seminar: what is the relation between the ontological (the event of being) and
political events such as totalitarianism or the holocaust? The seminar will
focus on Agamben's Homo Sacer with references to Means without Ends and
Remnants of Auschwitz.
READING LIST:
Giorgio Agamben Homo Sacer
Means without End: Notes on
Politics
Remnants of Auschwitz
CLASS DATES AND TIME: Mondays September 5, 12, 19, 26: 2-5 pm
PLACE: Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy, UWS (Bankstown Campus),
Building 3 (Room 3.G.54)
PEG BIRMINGHAM BIO: Peg Birmingham is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul
University and author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of
Common Responsibility." She is also the co-author of Dissensus Communis:
Between Ethics and Politics. She is currently finishing a manuscript titled,
Hannah Arendt: Immortality, Sacrificial Violence, and the Limits of Political
Action.
Please!! RSVP: Chris Tobin [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
- - - - - - - - -
Dimitris Vardoulakis
University of Western Sydney
School of Humanities and Languages
Bankstown Campus, 7.G.11
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith, NSW 2751
AUSTRALIA
tel: +61 2 9772 6808
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