Tag Archives: Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben: Political power and anarchy

In a series of four short essays – in some sense, a summary of much more extensive earlier work -, Giorgio Agamben unveils the anarchy that lies at the centre of sovereign, political power, split between the constitution/state and the … Continue reading

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Giorgio Agamben: On Anarchy Today

Below, we share Giorgio Agamben’s recent essay On Anarchy Today, whose english language translation by the ill will collective was generously shared with us by the same. Giorgio Agamben conceives the “place” of anarchy as lying and maintaining the distance … Continue reading

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Virginia Woolf: Anarchy against war

The daughters of educated men who were called, to their resentment, ‘feminists’ were in fact the advance guard of your own movement. They were fighting the same enemy that you are fighting and for the same reasons. They were fighting … Continue reading

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Destituent power as living communism

“To destitute is not primarily to attack the institution, but to attack the need we have of it.” This statement, from the Invisible Committee’s text Now (2016), is at the heart of an essay by Spencer Beswick that we share … Continue reading

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Carlo Levi: A witness to freedom

… all history unfolds in every individual life. Of course this only happens when history does unfold, because it can also stop, or turn backward or spin emptily on its own axis like a mechanical top. Carlo Levi, The Watch … Continue reading

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Giorgio Agamben: Our task is to think, together

I believe that it is not certain that we can continue to do as we have done so far, that is, to fight or act in the name of principles and concepts such as democracy, the constitution, law, which perhaps … Continue reading

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Giorgio Agamben: On the government of the faceless and the deathless

The Face and Death [Il volto e la morte – text published in the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung“, April 30th, 2021 and in Quodlibet] It seems that in the new planetary order that is gaining form two things, apparently unrelated to … Continue reading

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Leo Tolstoy remembered against the pandemic

But actually history is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it. […] In world history only those peoples that form states can come to our notice. G.W.F. Hegel, General Introduction to the Philosophy … Continue reading

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Reading the times with Alain Badiou

Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too. Mikhail Bakunin, The Reaction in Germany (1842) … Continue reading

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Refusing to forget a revolution: The Arab Spring

It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why … Continue reading

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