The book shows how Agamben's political concerns emerged and evolved as Agamben responded to contemporary events and new intellectual influences while striving to remain true to his deepest intuitions. Kotsko reveals the trajectory of Agamben's work and shows us what it means to practice philosophy as a living, responsive discipline.

One of the greatest challenges Agamben presents to his readers is the vast and often bewildering range of sources he draws upon in his work. Looking at figures including Michel Foucault, St Paul, Nietzsche, the Marquis de Sade, Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, this one-stop reference to Agamben's influences covers 30 thinkers: his primary interlocutors, his secondary references, and the figures who lurk in the background of his arguments without being directly mentioned.

This book is a continuation of Giorgio Agamben's investigation of political theory, which began with the highly influential volume _Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life_. Having already traced the roots of the idea of sovereignty, sacredness, and economy, he now turns to a perhaps unlikely topic: the concept of the oath. Following the Italian scholar Paolo Prodi, Agamben sees the oath as foundational for Western politics and undertakes an exploration of the roots of the phenomenon of the oath in (...) human experience. He rejects the common idea that the oath finds its origin in religion, arguing instead that the oath points toward a particular response to the experience of language, a response that gave birth to both religion and law as we now know them. This book is important not only for readers of Agamben or of continental philosophy more broadly, but for anyone interested in questions relating to the relationships among religion, law, and language. (shrink)

In this book, Dickson and Kotso examine Agamben’s more recent theologically-focused writing and its implications for philosophical thought.

In this follow-up to _The Kingdom and the Glory_ and _The Highest Poverty_, Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy. Beginning with the New Testament and working through to late scholasticism and modern papal encyclicals, Agamben traces the Church's attempts to repeat Christ's unrepeatable sacrifice. Crucial here is the paradoxical figure of the priest, who becomes more and more a pure instrument of God's power, so that his own motives (...) and character are entirely indifferent as long as he carries out his priestly duties. In modernity, Agamben argues, the Christian priest has become the model ethical subject. We see this above all in Kantian ethics. Contrasting the Christian and modern ontology of duty with the classical ontology of being, Agamben contends that Western philosophy has unfolded in the tension between the two. This latest installment in the study of Western political structures begun in _Homo Sacer_ is a contribution to the study of liturgy, an extension of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, and a reworking of Heidegger's history of Being. (shrink)

In Homo Sacer,1 Giorgio Agamben devotes a crucial “threshold” to an extremely compressed reading of Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,”2 a threshold that provides the transition between his elaboration of the logic of sovereignty and his analysis of the concept of homo sacer or “bare life.” That Benjamin's essay should play such a crucial role in Agamben's text is unsurprising. First, Benjamin is arguably the most important authority for Agamben's intellectual project as a whole, rivaled only by Aristotle and Heidegger. (...) More specifically, Agamben's investigations in the eponymous second part of Homo Sacer are prompted by Benjamin's suggestion that it.. (shrink)

This essay represents an extension and deepening of the author’s book Žižek and Theology. First, it more thoroughly explores the relationship between Žižek’s perspective on theology and his development of the ontology and ethics of “dialectical materialism” in The Parallax View. It contrasts the typical approach to God as a kind of “master signifier” with Žižek’s call for a “non-all” God who names the very contingency and inconsistency of the world as such. The author then reads key texts by Augustine (...) and Pseudo-Dionysius through the lens of Žižek’s theology, showing that these authors provide resources for thinking of God as non-all, particularly in their account of evil as deprivation. It concludes with a call for a materialist theology that would further develop these insights, treating the Christian tradition as material for thought rather than a set of predetermined answers. (shrink)

This paper attempts to read Bonhoeffer’s work as a whole. I maintain that Bonhoeffer’s attempt to develop a distinctly Christian version of the Hegelian concept of objective spirit is the central concern of his Sanctorum Communio. I note the ways he continues to refine and clarify that concept in later works, even as it remainsunnamed. I then argue that by the time of the Letters and Papers from Prison, developing this concept has become Bonhoeffer’s overriding project. I conclude by suggesting (...) ways that the earlier works already provide resources for answering the probing questions of the Letters and Papers. (shrink)

This essay is an investigation of three attempts to think faith. I find my starting place in Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death,1 one of the most important treatments of Christianity in Derrida's later thought, which was increasingly insistent in its engagement with religious questions up until his death in 2004. This reading of The Gift of Death will focus particularly on the question of secrecy and its relationship with faith, leading necessarily to an account of Derrida's reading of two (...) of his primary references in this text: the second essay of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals2 and Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.3 Rather than simply rendering a judgment on Derrida's reading, I will endeavor to read these texts together, extending (or expanding upon) Derrida's reading while questioning some of the positive formulations he makes in his own name – all the while remaining attentive to the gambles involved in thinking faith. (shrink)