Catastrophe and Redemption
eBook - ePub

Catastrophe and Redemption

The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben

  1. 223 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Catastrophe and Redemption

The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben

About this book

Challenging the prevalent account of Agamben as a pessimistic thinker, Catastrophe and Redemption proposes a reading of his political thought in which the redemptive element of his work is not a curious aside but instead is fundamental to his project. Jessica Whyte considers his critical account of contemporary politics—his argument that Western politics has been "biopolitics" since its inception, his critique of human rights, his argument that the state of exception is now the norm, and the paradigmatic significance he attributes to the concentration camp—and shows that it is in the midst of these catastrophes of the present that Agamben sees the possibility of a form of profane redemption. Whyte outlines the importance of potentiality in his attempt to formulate a new politics, examines his relation to Jewish and Christian strands of messianism, and interrogates the new forms of praxis that he situates within contemporary commodity culture, taking Agamben's thought as a call for the creation of new political forms.

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Yes, you can access Catastrophe and Redemption by Jessica Whyte in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Philosophy History & Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Introduction: On Catastrophe and Redemption
  5. 1. The Politics of Life
  6. 2. Politics at the Limits of the Law: On the State of Exception
  7. 3. If This Is a Man: Life after Auschwitz
  8. 4. “I Would Prefer Not To”: Bartleby, Messianism, and the Potentiality of the Law
  9. 5. A New Use: On the Society of the Spectacle and the Coming Politics
  10. Conclusion: Unemployment and the Ungovernable
  11. Notes
  12. Bibliography