•  117
    The Hyper-Hermeneutic Gesture of a Subtle Revolution
    Critical Horizons 14 (1): 70-92. 2013.
    Drawing upon the thought of Giorgio Agamben, this essay focuses upon the potential of a single act to change a political order. Agamben’s writings retain the possibility for a paradigmatic gesture that opens a space for a politics not founded on a form of belonging grounded in a particular property, such as national identity. To illustrate this event this essay turns to Agamben’s construction of whatever-being, which is constructed hyper-hermeneutically. This term is chosen deliberately. Whateve…Read more
  •  109
    This article interrogates the specter of resistance in the writings of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, arguing they open up divergent ways of theorizing resistance to power. This article’s focus is on both philosophers’ use and interpretation of the dispositif, or apparatus, which controls and orders subjects, and which is the target for forms of resistance. Whereas for Foucault resistance is a practice existing as a transcendent possibility for any individual, Agamben reads such transcende…Read more
  •  65
    In thinking about Rancière and Law, as this collection exhorts us to do, I have turned my attention to one of the most well-known areas of Rancière’s writings, the Rights of Man. In “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, Rancière aimed a broadside at the rights-scepticism which can be traced in much of critical theory to the writings of Hannah Arendt, and an older tradition on the right exemplified by Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham. Rancière’s writings and thought cover a wide range of are…Read more
  •  47
    Giorgio Agamben’s development of a messianic politics-to-come seeks to counter the law which is in force without significance, a law which creates bare life. Embodying this messianic politics, and a call for the law’s fulfilment, is the figure of whatever-being, a form-of-life. This article contends that there is an important conceptual problem in respect of Agamben’s construction of such a form-of-life, namely the issue of relationality. The problem of relationality in Agamben is explored here …Read more
  •  31
    Agamben's Sovereign Legalization of Foucault
    Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 30 (3): 545-577. 2010.
    This article compares Michel Foucault’s way of thinking about sovereignty and law within biopower to the reading given to Foucault’s work and its development by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. It is argued that Agamben supports the expulsion thesis in order to generate critical distance for his own re-imagining of biopower. The expulsion thesis is a controversial account of the position of law in Foucault’s work that does not reflect Foucault’s own nuanced views. A post-structuralist ac…Read more
  •  5
    Michel Foucault articulated the hypothesis of biopower and biopolitics in the 1970s, and Giorgio Agamben developed this hypothesis in his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, published in English in 1998. Since these interventions, biopower and biopolitics have become indispensable as a theoretical point of reference in the humanities and social sciences. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that in the last thirty years the process of biopower and biopolitical regulation has increased, s…Read more
  •  5
    This first book-length study into the influence of Emmanuel Levinas on the thought and philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life demonstrates how Agamben's immanent thought can be read as presenting a compelling, albeit flawed, alternative to Levinas's ethics of the Other. The publication of the English translation of The Use of Bodies in 2016 ended Giorgio Agamben's 20-year multi-volume Homo Sacer study. Over this time, Agamben's thought has greatly influenced schol…Read more
  •  2
    4. Kierkegaard and the Figure of Form-of-Life
    In Marcos Norris & Colby Dickinson (eds.), Agamben and the Existentialists, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 65-80. 2021.
  •  1
    Giorgio Agamben: Legal, Political and Philosophical Perspectives brings together contributions from scholars in a number of fields including many who have worked closely with Agamben in order to argue that Agambens thought is vital to the future directions of research in the humanities and social sciences. The book is divided into three sections, each coalescing around a different perspective. Contributions in the first section examine the potential for Agambens thought to impact upon future leg…Read more
  • . 2017.
  • The figure of form-of-life is a life lived as a ‘how’ or a mode of living, beyond every relation. Form-of-life is a form of impotent, destituent power that seeks to deactivate the biopolitics that continuously divides and separates life itself. Agamben’s work is remarkably silent on the question of reproductive rights. The pregnant woman’s life is regulated continuously by biopolitics, yet Agamben does not discuss this regulation. The woman’s relationship with her foetus is difficult to reconcil…Read more