Book agamben and indifference theory

Since the publication of Homo Sacer Giorgio Agamben has become one of the world s most revered and controversial thinkers His ideas on our current political situation have found many supporters as well as garnering strong criticism from some quarters While his wider thoughts on topics such as language potentiality life law messianism power and aesthetics have had significant impact on such diverse fields as philosophy law theology history sociology politics cultural and literary studies Yet although Agamben is much read his work has often been misunderstood Agamben and Indifference aims to provide clarity around all the vexing issues that have been associated with Agamben s philosophy over the last two decades or The book is the first to fully take into account Agamben s important recent publications which clarify his method complete his ideas on power and finally reveal the role of language in his overall system Commenting in detail on these recent books alongside re readings of the central texts from across Agamben s career William Watkin presents a critical overview of Agamben s work that aims to give a portrait of exactly why this thinker of indifferent and suspensive legal political ontological and living states can rightfully be considered one of the most important philosophers in the world today Agamben and Indifference A Critical OverviewGiorgio Agamben s sprawling body of work now approaching its fifth decade of output has always resisted easy explication Not least for the dizzying array of subjects broached from poetry to animals politics and metaphysics but also for its uniquely baroque approach one incorporating philosophy philology iconology and literary analysis in an intellectual fusion as exhilarating as it is intimidating And while a great deal of ink has been spilt teasing out the nuances and implications of Agamben s work William Watkin s new book stands out among the secondary literature not for being yet another exposition of Agamben s ideas but for cutting to the heart of the very method and approach that underlies his manifold investigations Watkin s Agamben is thus a resolutely systematic Agamben one whom for all the diversity of his texts is nonetheless committed to a unified methodology that finds expression throughout his extensive oeuvre. Agamben and Indifference epublishing Specifically Watkin argues that Agamben s methodological originality consists in the articulation of a method of indifference or indifferential method in which conceptual oppositions between say human and animal fact and law the sacred and the profane are gradually deprived of their power to organise the field of intelligibility upon which so it is consistently claimed the entirety of Western metaphysics rests More precisely Watkin contends that in the period of contemporary crisis in which we live Agamben s work doesn t so much render inoperative the oppositions in question so much as expose the fact that they were never operative or properly functional to begin with The machine as Agamben likes to say was always broken To this end Watkin proposes that ultimately Agamben s philosophical endgame is to accomplish what he terms the indifferentiation of indifference in which the always already indifferent articulation between terms is itself rendered indifferent or inoperative. Book agamben and indifference summary If all of the above sounds like a bit of a mouth full I can only hope to offer consolation in the form of Watkin s book itself which patiently and laboriously fleshes out this method of indifference over the course of a veritable chapter by chapter analysis of Agamben s various books Unsurprisingly for a book so concerned with methodological issues it is Agamben s slim tract on method The Signature of All Things which occupies pride of place among the texts discussed within Indeed one of the signal achievements of Watkin s book is precisely to have recast nearly the entirety of Agamben s corpus in the retrospective light offered by Signatura Rerum parsing Agamben s multifarious inquiries in the terms outlined within Mobilising Agamben s terminology of signatures paradigms and philosophical archeology while reading them as far back into Agamben s earliest works Watkin s study brings into unmissable relief the many ghostly until now threads that run through and across the weave of the Italian philosopher s work. Book Agamben and indifference Beyond what might otherwise be a narrow study of the work of a single philosopher however Watkin s book also attempts to claim for indifference an entirely new manner of practising philosophy altogether Over and against the post structuralist valorisation of difference for Watkin Agamben s indifferential method allows for an advance upon the impasses of deconstruction in Derrida as well as the metaphysics of difference expounded by Deleuze Indeed the organisation of the book is such that of the three divisions that compose the work the first schematically laying bare Agamben s method of indifference the last reading various works of the Homo Sacer series through its lens the entire middle section of the study is given over to a direct confrontation between Agamben and Deleuze and Derrida over their divergent conceptions of in difference While space prohibits a proper discussion of Watkin s mediations here it s these readings that most easily display the wide ambition of the book and the importance to which it assigns to the category of the indifferent. EPub Agamben and indifference Some minor gripes this book was devastatingly let down by whoever edited it It s littered with grammatical errors and even entirely misnamed section headings The most egregious being the one titled Derrida versus Deleuze which headed a discussion on Derrida and Foucault no Deleuze is sight Also Watkin might be a man of ideas but of elegant prose not so much His phrasing can often seem clunky and forced and lines like the following in the context of a discussion on the proximity between Agamben and Badiou At this point it is hard to fit an iPad between Agamben and certain key elements of Badiou are downright cringeworthy Still stay for the ideas not the poetics Editorial and stylistic mishaps notwithstanding Agmaben and Indifference is the sort of book that can t be unread No reading of Agamben from here on out can be indifferent to it William Watkin