reverberations

[pynchonoid]

[...] .... Agamben must be taken seriously. That at
least is the claim he has successfully defended until
now. He benefits from the perfume of the radical. The
Agambenian critique of democracy could not be more
trenchant: today's constitutional states are in
essence nothing more than huge concentration camps.
This is what he attempts to demonstrate in "Homo
Sacer", originally published in 1995, with an eclectic
overview of the legal history of the West. The modern
state is nothing other than a totalitarian
organisation for the efficient administration of bare
biological life.

Sovereignty today is biopolitics – the control of bare
life. "We live in a concentration camp" is the upshot
of Agamben's diagnostic of contemporary life. For him,
absolute authority over the inmates' bodies and souls
lies in the secret matrix of modern administrative
states. Agamben electrifies his audiences with this
apocalyptic prophesy – you can hear them whispering
and squirming softly in their seats. Along with
para-academic Zeitgeist philosophers, militant
opponents of globalisation have discovered Agamben as
a guiding intellectual force. He is now one of the few
European intellectuals of stature with anarchistic
street credibility. [...] his findings are
categorical: the political dynamic of today is
characterised by a permanent state of emergency.
According to Agamben, democracies are developing as if
under a permanent state of siege. [...]

Preacher of the profane
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is a beacon for an
entire generation of young intellectuals across Europe
- and a flighty eclectic. By Daniel Binswanger

http://www.signandsight.com/features/399.html



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