This article develops the affirmative biopolitics that Roberto Esposito intimates in his trilogy – Communitas, Immunitas and Bı´os. The key to this affirmative biopolitics lies in the relationship between the munus, a form of gift that is the root of communitas and immunitas, and the gift discourse that developed throughout the 20th century. The article expands upon Esposito’s interpretation of four theoretical sources that are crucial to his biopolitical perspective: Mauss and the gift-exchange tradition; Hobbes’s social contract theory, which Esposito (...) presents as the anti-gift that founded modernity’s thanatopolitical ‘immunization paradigm’; Bataille’s dangerous concept of sacrifice, which gestures toward an affirmative biopolitical community; and, finally, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, L’Intrus, which reflects on the near-decade Nancy lived as the recipient of the gift of a transplanted heart. This discussion of Mauss, Hobbes and Bataille is used to further develop Esposito’s interpretation of L’Intrus in a manner that supports his conception of an affirmative biopolitics ‘of, not over, life’. (shrink)

Those commentators who accept that Agamben offers an affirmative political project tend to hold that its realization depends upon pre-personal messianic or ontological alterations. I argue that there is another option based around the notion of individual agency that has received relatively little attention, but which clarifies whether or not Agamben holds that the transition is one that agents can participate in. By engaging with the texts “On Potentiality,” “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” and Opus Dei, I first show that he (...) develops a notion of potentiality that he claims not only underpins willing, but is also defined by an indeterminate contingency between action and non-action that undermines the binary opposition between willed action and non-action that sustains biopolitics. I then turn to the discussions of praxis, work, and poiesis in The Man without Content to determine whether Agamben thinks that other non-will-based forms of activity can contribute to the deactivation of biopolitics and, indeed,... (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 204-214, February 2021.

Beginning in earnest in the late 1990s, educational researchers devoted increasing attention to the study of “active learning,” leading to a robust literature on the topic in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Meanwhile, during largely the same period, political theorists discovered the radical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, which soon after began to ripple through more radical forms of philosophy of education. While both the SoTL works on active learning and writings of “Agambenian” philosophers of education have offered new insights (...) into their respective fields, active learning has not yet received a systematic philosophical reflection and the community of Agambenian philosophy of education has not yet been systematized. This article addresses both gaps, first through an outline of existing Agambenian approaches to the philosophy of education and second by theorizing active learning as a form of “destituent potential.” The systematic reflection on the three threads of Agambenian philosophy of education—whatever, potentiality, and study—offers an introduction to less familiar readers, and the second section offers a model for how philosophical concepts can become theoretical tools for SoTL analysis. (shrink)

This article argues that Agamben’s conception of fiction is crucial for understanding his recent works. I suggest that the key to understanding Agamben conception of fiction is to be found in a few curious remarks at the end of Language and Death. These remarks explain why the distinctions between life and death, animal life and human life, bare life and political forms of life, the outlaw and the sovereign, and the norm and the exception that continue to preoccupy Agamben are (...) all fictions. After considering Agamben’s account of these fictions and their relation to the relevant passage in Language and Death, the article explores the ways Agamben thinks the fictions that govern human action and social life might be unworked. (shrink)

This article argues that Agamben’s conception of fiction is crucial for understanding his recent works. I suggest that the key to understanding Agamben conception of fiction is to be found in a few curious remarks at the end of Language and Death. These remarks explain why the distinctions between life and death, animal life and human life, bare life and political forms of life, the outlaw and the sovereign, and the norm and the exception that continue to preoccupy Agamben are (...) all fictions. After considering Agamben’s account of these fictions and their relation to the relevant passage in Language and Death, the article explores the ways Agamben thinks the fictions that govern human action and social life might be unworked. (shrink)

This article takes a close look at the discussion of singularity in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community and Being Singular Plural with the aim to comment on subject-object dichotomy and create a new context for its relationship with resistance. The philosophy of singularity is critical of humanism and the individualist model of subjectivity it advocates. By placing a challenging scenario of antihumanism against the humanist sense of responsibility, the philosophy of singularity questions whether it is possible to do philosophy without saying (...) ‘I’. This antihumanist stance, which replaces the ‘I’/‘other’ differentiation with Nancy’s ‘the other of another,’ chooses to strengthen the link between ontology and resistance in the notion of coexistence; beyond traditional hypotheses on immanence and transcendence. To discuss the merits and limits of this coexistence, the article digs under the notion of individualistic subjectivity and proceeds to ground Nancy’s ‘ekstasis’ on the Freudian theory of drives. Against this theoretical background, the values of modesty and responsibility come to formulate an alternative moral consciousness, which no longer relies on the humanist jargon to work toward the common ground between 'I' and 'we'. (shrink)