Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction

Kevin Attell

Published by Fordham University Press 2014

Giorgio Agamben

Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction

Kevin Attell

In the series Commonalities

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823262076

Overview
Contents

About this book

Traces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work in the 1960s to the present, examining his key concepts – infancy, Voice, potentiality, sovereignty, bare life, messianism – in relation to key texts and concepts in Jacques Derrida’s work.

Author / Editor information

Attell Kevin :

KEVIN ATTELL is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the translator of The Open: Man and Animal and State of Exception and co-translator of The Signature of All Things by Giorgio Agamben.

Reviews

—Joshua Kates:
“Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction is an enormously ambitious book covering the breadth of Giorgio Agamben's writings, from his earliest work on potentiality and discourse up through his later political and theological writings. Attell's interpretations, informed by vast philosophical erudition, presenting independent interpretations of all the texts that he treats, are paradigms for work on theory. This is one of the highest caliber works of theory or continental philosophy to appear in a long time."

—Simon During:
In this impressive book, Kevin Attell changes our understanding of Giorgio Agamben. From now on we will have to see Agamben's work, from the very beginning, as in dialogue with Derrida. As a result an important thinker becomes still more significant to the shape of contemporary European theory.

—Eleanor Kaufman:
This remarkably rigorous, lucid, and open-minded study details the important differences between Agamben and Derrida, something many would regard as minor variants in a similarly deconstructive model, but which Derrida’s late seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign affirm to be profound. Attell meticulously traces the trajectories of Derrida’s and Agamben’s careers, demonstrating in an elegant and textually based fashion the incisive nature of Agamben’s engagement with Derrida, how so many of Agamben’s major themes—potentiality, sovereignty, ban, messianic time, play and profanation, and the animal—could be considered as critical, indeed polemical, responses to Derrida’s philosophical project. The strong distinction between Agamben’s and Derrida’s (and Benjamin’s and Schmitt’s) notions of messianic time is particularly dazzling.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
ABBREVIATIONS Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
INTRODUCTION Agamben and Derrida: An Esoteric Dossier Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART ONE. First Principles
1. AGAMBEN AND DERRIDA READ SAUSSURE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	13
2. “THE HUMAN VOICE” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	40
3. POTENZA AND DIFFÉRANCE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	84
PART TWO. Strategy without Finality or Means without End
4. SOVEREIGNTY, LAW, AND VIOLENCE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
5. TICKS AND CATS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
6. A MATTER OF TIME Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
CODA Play Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	255
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263
WORKS CITED Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	289
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	297

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Pages
- Main content: 328
Keywords: Giorgio Agamben; Jacques Derrida; Deconstruction; Philosophy; Continental Philosophy; contemporary philosophy; Italian philosophy; French Philosophy; Biopolitics; Critical Theory

eBook

Published: October 15, 2014
ISBN: 9780823262076