Why Agamben?

Jul 5, 2007 by

Via Jodi Dean:

Last weekend, another political theorist asked me why I thought Agamben had become popular. Someone asked Paul a similar question a couple of days ago. It's interesting that people ask this question. I've not heard it asked about, say, Zizek or Badiou. So why do people ask it? And, what's the answer?

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  • Ian M.

    Interesting, though I’ve often asked myself ‘Why Badiou?’ as well. Zizek is worth reading, if not for the sheer fun of doing so, but Badiou (particularly his ‘Ethics’ book) always seemed like part of the last gasp/cry of structuralism. Badiou has some interesting points, but I can’t say he ever really grabbed me as worth anything more than passing fashion.

  • R. Krahn

    The question may not have been asked of, say, Badiou, because — to risk oversimplification — he’s French, and there seems to be an environment naturally inclined to bolster a hard-to-categorize intellectual into popularity. To be sure, it is not be a simple case of geography for Zizek. Instead, in the case of Zizek, he’s his own self-promoter, and, though it may distract from some of his most poignant thoughts, he has risen to popularity due to his willingness to address popular culture/film, his use of humour, and his polarizing personality. The case of Agamben, however, lies outside geography and self-promotion. Thus, the question arises, why Agamben? Or, further, why Agamben moreso than Vattimo?

  • http://www.bookdepository.co.uk Mark Thwaite

    I’m as intrigued as Jodi is by this. Why Agamben? The need always for the Left to have some kind of philosophical superstar? No more Derrida, Foucault, etc.? That seems way, way too crude. I don’t think it hurts that many of the books are small: you can get a handle on Agamben fairly quickly (and Badiou with Ethics, and Zizek with his ubiquity). The situationists become trendy will have helped a wee bit too … Nassim Nicholas Taleb would perhaps say its a Black Swan (but don’t take that as a recommendation for his bonkers book)!

  • http://anotherpanacea.com Joshua A Miller

    If I recall correctly, Agamben became popular after the publication of Remnants of Auschwitz, which was following on the heels of the testimony/witnessing fad, which was itself a mixture of the attempt by academics to think through the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, and the growing fascination with Levinas.

    Now, of course, many are recognizing the Schmittian overtures of the present American administration, and so his thinking on sovereignty and exceptionalism strikes them as important. Add that to the centenary of Arendt’s birth, and the acknowledgment of her early work on biopower stolen without attribution by Foucault, and I think some of the factors that play into Agamben’s popularity start to be clear. Notice, for instance, that his work on community, love, and art is much less popular than the Homo Sacer trilogy.

    For my part, I think that the Badiou excitement is the least justifiable: his work is merely warmed-over Heideggerianism, with just enough unfamiliar jargon to make academics think they’re doing something novel and exciting.

  • http://mikejohnduff.blogspot.com Mike Johnduff

    It’s a great question: why Agamben? I think Joshua Miller’s response is probably right: it took a Guantanamo to see really why concepts like potentiality and exception are important, and at the same time it took those concepts to allow us to understand a Guantanamo–not a Levinas/Derrida ethic of the Other, though this should probably be just as relevant. Outside of this context, then, Agamben’s thought just probably seems less concretely relevant and thus provokes the (appallingly arrogant, considering the tiny intellects that usually utter it) question as to his superfluousness.
    Zizek makes a constant effort to be relevant (and not in a fashionable way)–I think that’s why this question doesn’t come up.
    But I don’t think all this talk about Badiou just being fashionable is right: Badiou is seen as relevant because he most rigorously systematizes the postmodernist subject, and then proceeds to extrapolate from that systematized subject conceptions postmodernists haven’t thought yet or thought only without rigor. Is it entirely obvious that the ontology of a political subject would make the State constantly indifferent to her? I think postmodernists knew this and wrote about this, but they didn’t formalize it or (because they didn’t formalize it) try to go further than it. Badiou does, and he is popular for this reason: he elucidates (in America at least) not just a present situation like Agamben, but a whole history of postmodern thought. I don’t think that’s “warmed over Heideggerrianism” at all.

  • http://drowninginvitriol@gmail.com Maladjusted

    …Because the god of philosophers (let’s call her Sophie) is unbelievably cruel and vindictive and can’t resist punishing anyone who can so much as dialectise their way out of a wet paper bag with the terrible curse of ‘relevance’.

    I mean, let’s imagine you’re Giorgio Agamben. You’re young. You start thinking about…well, crazy, wonderful things. Simone Weil. The human voice. The gap between langue and parole. You read Benveniste. You read Medieval grammarians, Baudelaire, St. Paul, Benjamin, Guy de Bord, et al. You study with Heidegger in his absailing, night-club hopping dotage. No one knows who you are, although a bunch of people translate your works from the Italian for the sheer unadulterated hell of it. You get to play the least visible apostle in Pasolini’s “Gospel according to St. Matthew.” Then you write Homo Sacer.

    A few years later you’re pop-diva of the month: every breathy-voiced, cultural studies, vaguely left-wing platitude-dropper in the Anglophone world suddenly finds themselves with a term to describe Guantanamo Bay that sounds at once more lofty than ‘a really bad thing’ and that has the added benefit of implying that one’s denunciations of such a violation of fundamental liberal or human rights principles is in no way an endorsement of (bourgeois!) liberalism or (bourgeois) human rights. Instead, you get to say that,, on the one hand, the seeming complete disregard for liberal institutions and human rights is BAD, but not in the way that liberasl mean it, because you’re talking about the shadowy underside of the planetary casino: the portrait to late capitalism’s Dorian Grey. I mean, sure, you get a little confused about what exactly you mean (as opposed to what Agamben means) when you start saying that the camp is not an aberration but a ‘paradigm’, but who the hell cares? You get to blame Bush on the separation between bios and zoe, which is better than sex.

    Reiterating: why Giorgio “P. Diddy” Agamben? Basically, because no matter how smart a given philosopher is, people will still find a way to turn them into the poster boy for whatever modish drivel is currently serving as the basis of PhD theses.

    And don’t get me wrong. I’m not giving old George a hard-time. Just saying that his popularity (like the popularity of any philosopher, however great) is mainly due to extra-philosophical factors like the fact that “continental philosopher” means (and we all know it) drooling zombie fashionista in the way that ‘analytic philosopher’ means Aspergic loon.

    Just my take, obviously.

  • PhD

    Maladjusted sounds like a bitter idiot.

    Paint something or drink some orangina or look at a wall.

    You are boring and have you ever done a PhD?

  • http://DrowningInVitriol Maladjsuted

    Wow, PhD. I’m stunned.

    I’ve never seen an ad hominem attack before that was anywhere near that witty.

    I mean, I can definitely see why the editors decided to publish your comment. It’s not just that it’s a worthy contribution to philosophical discussion (there are so many) it’s also genuinely, outrageously funny.

    I mean, “go look at a wall” Gold. You certainly haven’t held back on the A material there. You’re wasted in academe, you know. With talent like that you could get your own YouTube video.

    In fact, your comment was so clever, that I’m beginning to wonder whether you might, in fact, have a PhD in something. Do you? Your alias also seems to point in that direction, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions.

    The only objection that I have to your otherwise hilarious and necessary statements is your suggestion that I should go and drink orangina — now that’s just being mean. I mean, you know that I don’t even like it…

    P.S. I love you because you’re interesting.

    -Mal

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=764465245 Francis Nicholson

    I liked Agamben because he has a solid political engagement combined with a philosophical subtlety, a good command of ancient greek and ancient philosophy, and an engaging writing style. I don’t really know why it comes about that one philosopher becomes a superstar, and another (as Mal puts it) is called an ‘aspergers loon’, other than the common element that all the superstar philosophers can really write. (Or, for a brief period, really couldn’t write, alla Derrida).

    PS: I think the reason why analytic philosophers are traditionally thought of as aspergers loons to those outside the academy (and some inside) is:
    -Analytic philosophers tend to follow the stylistic rule of clarity above all, which at best makes their writing read like toilet maintenance textbooks, and at worst includes long in-jokey analogies.
    -Analytic philosophers tend to lack any engagement with politics, which makes them unable to tap into the ‘theoretical left’, and therefore generally unable to offer anything of interest to the non-philosopher.
    Of course, there are too many exceptions to make this a rule.