"Zones of Exception: Biopolitical Territories of the Neoliberal Era" explores the biopolitical in Roberto Esposito together with the notion of exception in Giorgio Agamben to think diverse scenarios of social, economic, and cultural conflict of the neoliberal era. Focusing on the Argentine piqueteros and the clandestini at the Centers of Temporary Permanence in Italy, we discuss how the economic rationality of neoliberal rule both produces "bare life" and is haunted by its disruption, in ways that neoliberalism can't fully contain. This (...) dislocation, its paradoxical and unstable nature between bodies and territories, may become the instance of an actual or potential resistance. (shrink)

In this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur,” the words ambiguity, ambivalence, and ambience are shown to share the common prefix, from Latin, ambi-, defined in most modern dictionaries as “around, on both sides.” Ambi captures some, but not all, so Leo Spitzer has argued, of the multiple senses (physical surrounding, spiritual embrace, air) that Greeks infused into the prefix peri. Ambiguity and ambience (“going around,” “that which surrounds”), as well as the more (...) modern ambivalence (coined in the context of psychonanalysis), suggest different angles of perception, but all represent fuzzy modes, modes that would seem to have no place in science, especially in climate science, which is pressed to be ever more precise. Yet an analysis of the genealogy of these terms and, in particular, of the differential relation between “around” and “on both sides” may reveal that the very fuzziness of ambi is precisely what is required to grasp the chaotic complexity of the environment. (shrink)

A formidable and influential work, Language and Death sheds a highly original light on issues central to Continental philosophy, literary theory, deconstruction, hermeneutics, and speech-act theory. Focusing especially on the incompatible philosophical systems of Hegel and Heidegger within the space of negativity, Giorgio Agamben offers a rigorous reading of numerous philosophical and poetic works to examine how these issues have been traditionally explored. Agamben argues that the human being is not just “speaking” and “mortal” but irreducibly “social” and “ethical.” Giorgio (...) Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Means without End, Stanzas, and The Coming Community, all published by the University of Minnesota Press. Karen E. Pinkus is professor of French and Italian at the University of Southern California. Michael Hardt is professor of literature and romance studies at Duke University. (shrink)