Claire Colebrook

Giorgio Agamben emerged in the twenty-first century as one of the most important theorists in the continental tradition. 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. 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 re-conceptualizes life itself. Assessing the significance of the concepts key to his work such as bio-politics, sovereignty, the ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’, they demonstrate his wide-ranging influence across the humanities. They also explore the critical reactions to Agamben's thinking and his reception in philosophical and theoretical circles. This book will be essential reading for students in anthropology, politics, philosophy and related disciplines and anyone interested in finding out more about one of the influential thinkers writing today.

This paper argues that Darwin's theory of evolution offers two modes of understanding the relation between life and human knowledge. On the one hand, Darwin can be included within a general turn to “life,” in which human self-knowledge is part of a general unfolding of increasing awareness and anthropological reflexivity; life creates an organism, man, capable of discerning the logic of organic existence. On the other hand, Darwin offers the possibility of understanding life beyond the self-maintenance of organism and, therefore, beyond the rational of life's putative striving.

Both Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler have sought a renewal of life, perception and philosophy by way of the radical temporality of cinema. In doing so they have, in part, contributed to a long-standing moralism in philosophy that defines itself against the still or photographic image. Rather than see photography as a fragment of a flow of time, and therefore as on its way to becoming cinematic, I argue that the photograph that is cut off from the flow of time provides a more provocative and post-moral way of approaching the relation between philosophy and the arts.

Materialism is at once the most general of concepts, capable of gesturing to anything that seems either foundational or physicalist, and yet is also one of the most rhetorical of gestures: operating as a way of reducing, criticising or ‘‘exorcising’’ forms of idealism and ideology. Derrida's early, supposedly ‘‘textualist’’ works appear to endorse a materiality of the letter (including syntax, grammar, trace and writing) while the later works focus on matter as split between that which is posited and that which will always appear as a receding ground. It is more important than ever that materialism not be accepted too readily as a way of overcoming a supposedly linguistic or textualist Derrida in order that Derrida might be smuggled into the contemporary heaven of naturalism and physicalism. On the contrary, it is the dispersed, inhuman and inorganic materiality beyond bodies, physis and substance that offers itself for genuinely deconstructive thinking.

In On Touching Derrida locates Jean-Luc Nancy (and, briefly, Gilles Deleuze) within a tradition of haptic ethics and aesthetics that runs from Aristotle to the present. In his early work on Husserl, Derrida had already claimed that phenomenology's commitment to the genesis of sense and the sensible is at one and the same time a commitment to pure and rigorous philosophy at the same time as it threatens to over-turn the primacy of conceptuality and cognition.Whereas Nancy (and those other figures whom Derrida cites, such as Merleau-Ponty) express a faith in a return to the sensibility of flesh, Derrida presents his own work as manifestly more cognisant of the necessary distance between flesh and sense. Another ‘approach’ to the haptic is suggested by Gilles Deleuze, whose work Derrida locates within phenomenological presence, despite Deleuze and Guattari's trenchant rejection of ‘the lived’ and the human organism that inevitably subtends any discussion of the relation between sensibility and sense. Rather than decide for or against this border between flesh and cognition, between post-deconstruction and deconstructive rigour, this essay examines this curious border of touch between philosophy and sensibility, and does so by referring to William Blake's problem of returning the signs of sense to the sensibility of the hand.

This article focuses on the concept of the secret in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, with specific attention to the related concepts of becoming-woman and literature. It contrasts Deleuze and Guattari's immanent mode of reading with oedipal theories of the text and hermeneutics. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari argue for the positivity of the secret, where there is content that is not disclosed and that therefore creates lines of perception and interpretation, the oedipal mode of reading regards the secret as a (negative) effect of reading.