william watkin's blog (since 2003)

This is a combination of two articles on Agamben in general and then the system. This is because I feel strongly that Agamben's form of metaphysical critique only functions and makes a claim on originality and future significance because of the method. So if you have read the other two articles skip this. Or better re-read with a sense of their articulation.  Part One: Agamben's Philosophy Agamben’s philosophical project is the making apparent and then rendering indifferent all structures of differential opposition that lie at the root, he believes, of every major Western concept-signature or discursive structure. In this manner his philosophy can be termed a form of metaphysical critique that argues all abstract concepts are only quasi-transcendental, in that they are historically contingent not logically necessary. As such Agamben willingly participates in a tradition that includes Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida, thinkers he regularly engages with. Where ...

With a full comprehension of the method firmly in place, (See Agamben's Method Explained here) it is now relatively easy to recast Homo Sacer as exemplary of the indifferential philosophical archaeological method, a method not fully worked through it must be said at the time of the text’s publication. So first of all we can note how the different elements of that text—homo sacer, sovereign, musselman, camps, Karen Quinlan, the führer, maverick doctors and so on—map onto the indifferential method as named paradigms to be found in the text of the wider signatures of Power and Life.  We can also identify the key suspension in the text, named in the subtitle of the work in fact, sovereign power and bare life, and how sovereignty operates as the condition or common, and bare life the conditioned or proper. If we now turn attention to the more obscure issue of the signature, two elements can be noted. First that Life is the primary signatory term in play in the text moving fr...

In 2008 Agamben published probably his most significant work: The Signature of All Things: On Method. Here he corrects his numerous critics the majority of whom mis-construe how he uses historical paradigms within a philosphical system. His remarkable synthesis of philosophy and philology, heavily inspired by Foucault and Benjamin, he calls philosophical archaeology. The system as it is presented in The Signature of All Things is summarised below: Philosophical Archaeology: Agamben's Method This method consists of tracing the origins of large scale concepts back to the moment when they first became operative as modes of organising and legitimising discourse through Foucauldian intelligibility. That said, these moments of arising, as he calls them, are not historical data in the usual sense but, inspired by Benjaminian now-time, they actually say as much about us as contemporaries as they do about historical origins.  Thus every contemporary moment, is founded on an ...

Potentiality Contrary to the assertions of many, Agamben's is not a philosophy of potential or impotential but a critique of the Aristotelian category of potential when applied to the signatures of thought and actions. Summary of Aristotelian Potentiality in The Metaphysics: Potential is the capacity to do something as the basis for the principle of change of state. If A changes to B how can we be sure that B was once A, how can we trace causality? Not just the capacity for child say to grow and learn to speak. You must have acquired a potential through skill. To prove you have this potential you must first actualise it. Megarans argued you can only prove a potential when it is in operation. Thus all potentiality is actuality. Aristotle argues against this sophistry. He accepts that actuality precedes potentiality. One cannot think potentiality without actuality but you can think actuality without potentiality. But if potential only existed when actualised, ...

I have just finished my second major study of the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Agamben and Indifference .  As I think Agamben has been widely mis-read and my work benefits from the most recent books by Agamben which set the record straight, I though it would be worthwhile posting the basic definition of Agamben's work that makes up the first page and a half of that book.  Here it is, in miniature, all you need to know about Agamben.  I swear to it!   Introduction to Agamben's Philosophical Archaelogy I will commence with an unambiguous statement summarising Agamben’s base position as I see it across the totality of all his published works.   Agamben’s philosophical project is the making apparent and then rendering indifferent all structures of differential opposition that lie at the root, he believes, of every major Western concept-signature or discursive structure.   In this manner his philosophy can be termed a form of metaphysical criti...

I recently published an article on the work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben in Jacket Magazine. Take a look at it here: "Though we keep company with Cats and Dogs": Onomatopoeia, Glossolalia and Happiness in the Work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben. It fuses together some central elements of Agamben's work on the poetic word, and Hejinian's provocative theory of happiness. Effectively Agamben's conceptualisation of poetry as a potential modality for an alternate form of life as thinking breaks down into the study of four elements. 1. the poetic word (onomatopoeia, glossolalia, xenoglossia, the semiotic and naming) 2. Enjambement 3. Caesura 4. Structure/Rhythm, what I call projective recursion Placed together these form the basis for what I call logopoiesis in my most recent work, that is what has been called elsewhere by Heidegger and Badiou, poetic thinking. I think now there is material on all four elements posted on the blog in relation to various conte...

A new article commissioned for Jacket Magazine on Ron Silliman is now available here: Projective Recursion: The Structure of Ron Silliman's Tjanting . It is part of an excellent special edition on Silliman's work. The piece is especially important as it is the first time I have tried to formalise my ideas about Agamben's theory of poetic structure in terms of analysis of a specific work of poetry since my work on this area in my recent book The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis .

As ever in Agamben's philosophical archaeology there are, according to him, two contesting theories of poiesis in the period of aesthetic modernity. The first concentrates on the role of the artist as god-like being of creation (the sovereign or common).  The second on the art object itself as thing unto itself (artistic bare life or the proper).  Naturally the two positions are connected in that, as we always see, god needs the world to give his power of making specific instances of operativity, while the world needs god to retroactively found its power of particular making.  In this way then we can 'easily' read Agamben's first book The Man Without Content in light of one of his most recent, The Kingdom and the Glory .  If we were to do this then we can say that the universal power of creation founds of course every specific object created, but that without these objects created pure creation remains merely a potential and thus inoperative....

Ontological Whisperings Only, of the Literature of Exception Now entertain conjecture of a time When creeping murmur and the poring dark Fills the wide vessel of the universe. (Henry V, Act 4 Prologue) Can one found a literary theory based on the topographical specificities of the political that Agamben describes in the Homo Sacer project? Thus far there have been few attempts, aside from Lee Spinks essay ‘Except for Law’ which looks at Crime Fiction in relation to the politics of exception. It is perhaps surprising that this has not yet occurred in any concerted fashion. In the first instance, the narrative of Homo Sacer ought to be provocative of fictive narratives: a despised central character who, although the lowest member of society, contains within him the cipher of absolute power and the very continuation of the state as we know it. It has almost the scent of melodrama about it and certainly echoes numerous famous narratives of doubling such as Frankenstein, Caleb Williams,...