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 -c.to...@uws.edu.au<mailto:-c.to...@uws.edu.au> - - - - - - - - - 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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