Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher both celebrated and reviled, is among the prominent voices in contemporary Italian thought today. His work, which touches upon fields as diverse as aesthetics and biopolitics, is often understood within a framework of Aristotelian potentiality. With this incisive critique, Doussan identifies a different tendency in the philosopher's work, an engagement with the problem of time that is inextricably bound up with language and visuality. Founded in his early writings on metaphysics and continuing to his present occupation with inoperativity, Time, Language and Visuality in Agamben's Philosophy forges an original path through Agamben's extensive commentary on the linguistic and the visual to illuminate the recurrent temporal theme of capture and evasion the cat-and-mouse game that bears the foundational violence of not just representation but concept-formation itself. In the process, Doussan both reveals its limit and establishes a ground for future engagements.

Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher both celebrated and reviled, is among the prominent voices in contemporary Italian thought today. His work, which touches upon fields as diverse as aesthetics and biopolitics, is often understood within a framework of Aristotelian potentiality. With this incisive critique, Doussan identifies a different tendency in the philosopher's work, an engagement with the problem of time that is inextricably bound up with language and visuality. Founded in his early writings on metaphysics and continuing to his present occupation with inoperativity, Time, Language and Visuality in Agamben's Philosophy forges an original path through Agamben's extensive commentary on the linguistic and the visual to illuminate the recurrent temporal theme of capture and evasion the cat-and-mouse game that bears the foundational violence of not just representation but concept-formation itself. In the process, Doussan both reveals its limit and establishes a ground for future engagements.

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of the world’s most important living philosophers, has been the object of much scrutiny. Yet, there is one dimension of his thought that remains unexamined by scholars: the presence of the ancient science of astrology in his writings. This book, the first of its kind, identifies the astrological elements and explains the implications of their usage by Agamben. In so doing, this study challenges us to imagine Agamben’s thought in a radically new light. A critical account of the presence of astrology and related themes in Agamben’s writings, ranging from the earlier works to the more recent publications, illustrates that the astrological signature constitutes a mode of philosophical archaeology that allows for an enhanced understanding of concepts that are central to his works, such as potentiality, the signature, bare life and biopolitics.

Until recently, "continental" philosophy has been tied either to the German tradition of phenomenology or to French post-structuralist concerns with the conditions of language and textuality. Giorgio Agamben draws upon and departs from both these lines of thought by directing his entire corpus to the problem of life - political life, human life, animal life, and the life of art. Influenced by the work of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and the broader tradition of critical Marxism, Agamben's work poses the profound question for our time - just how exceptional are human beings? This beautifully written book provides a systematic, engaging overview of Agamben's writings on theology, aesthetics, political theory, and sovereignty. Covering the full range of Agamben's work to date, Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell explain Agamben's theology and philosophy by referring the concepts to some of today's most urgent political and ethical problems. They focus on the audacious way in which Agamben reconceptualizes life itself. Assessing the significance of the concepts key to his work, such as biopolitics, sovereignty, the "state of exception," and "bare life," they demonstrate his wide-ranging influence across the humanities.

This book explores the relationship between the works of Agamben and Jacques Derrida. Arthur Willemse explains how Agamben’s thought renders Derridean terminology inoperative—by suspending the suspense of signification. He argues that this is Agamben’s way of undoing a theological structure of thought that philosophy has unknowingly appropriated.

Agamben’s thought has been viewed as descending primarily from the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, and, more recently, Foucault. This book complicates and expands that constellation by showing how throughout his career Agamben has consistently and closely engaged (critically, sympathetically, polemically, and often implicitly) the work of Derrida as his chief contemporary interlocutor. The book begins by examining the development of Agamben’s key concepts—infancy, Voice, potentiality—from the 1960s to approximately 1990 and shows how these concepts consistently draw on and respond to specific texts and concepts of Derrida. The second part examines the political turn in Agamben’s and Derrida’s thinking from about 1990 onward, beginning with their investigations of sovereignty and violence and moving through their parallel treatments of juridical power, the relation between humans and animals, and finally messianism and the politics to come.

Oaths play an essential part in the political and religious history of the West as a 'sacrament of power'. Yet despite numerous studies by linguists, anthropologists and historians of law and of religion, there exists no complete analysis of the oath which seeks to explain the strategic function that this phenomenon has performed at the intersection of law, religion and politics. The oath seems to define man himself as a political animal, but what is an oath and from where does it originate? Taking this question as its point of departure, Giorgio Agamben's book develops a pathbreaking 'archaeology' of the oath. Via a firsthand survey of Greek and Roman sources which shed light on the nexus of the oath with archaic legislation, acts of condemnation and the names of gods and blasphemy, Agamben recasts the birth of the oath as a decisive event of anthropogenesis, the process by which mankind became humanity. If the oath has historically constituted itself as a 'sacrament of power', it has functioned at one and the same time as a 'sacrament of language' - a sacrament in which man, discovering that he can speak, chooses to bind himself to his language and to use it to put life and destiny at stake.