Abstract

The form of life is a secret so secret.What does it mean to initiate life? For the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the question of initiating life concerns how we conceive of and experiment with the how of a form of life. In short, it involves ways of envisaging an absolutely immanent life on the threshold of its political and ethical intensification. Agamben's whole philosophical project can be described as radical mannerism that foregrounds the question of the way of living. To follow Agamben's paradigmatic problematization, an initiated life is thus a life made inextricable from its manner or form—a form-of-life.Initiating life is a complex and multifaceted question. One spontaneous way to approach it is in...