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Showing posts from February, 2014

Agamben and Indifference Article

If the last century belonged to the philosophers of difference, then this must be handed over to the purveyors of philosophical indifference of whom one name stands out: Giorgio Agamben.  What is philosophical indifference?  The standard dictionary definition of the term meaning not caring either way, finds voice in the first age of philosophical indifference stretching from Stoicism to Kant’s attack on philosophical indifferentism in the opening pages of the first critique.  It is the inability to make a single, true for all time philosophical decision in favour of one position or action over the other.  Indifferentism occurs especially when, as is always the case according to Agamben, the two positions you could care less about either way occupy that of on the one hand a unified, founding, common, one and on the other a multiple, actualising, proper, many.  So, in a sense, since the Greeks, philosophy has been a dispute over the prevalence of indifference: we cannot choose between a