Agamben and Radical Politics

Daniel McLoughlin is Senior Lecturer in the Law School at the University of New South Wales. He has published extensively on Agamben in journals including Angelaki, Theory & Event, Law and Critique and Law, Culture and the Humanities.

Agamben has undoubtedly been one of the most influential thinkers of the last decade or so. What I find particularly important in this book is the fact that it clearly delivers the sense that the Agambenian project is not over but, on the contrary, that the Italian philosopher, albeit in continuity with his past work, has opened new lines of thought that may help us ‘thinking the present’. When reading the essays composing this volume, one is left with a clear feeling that the ‘Agamben effect’ and its related debates have moved on, well beyond the initial stages of the homo sacer project.

• Introduction: Agamben and Radical Politics, Daniel Mcloughlin; 1. Capitalism as Religion, Giorgio Agamben; 2. Glory, Spectacle, and Inoperativity: Agamben’s Praxis of Theoria, Mathew Abbott; 3. On Property and the Philosophy of Poverty, Simone Bignall; 4. ‘Man Produces Universally’: Praxis and Production in Agamben and Marx, Jessica Whyte; 5. Liturgical Labor: Agamben and the Post-Fordist Spectacle, Daniel McLoughlin; 6. An alogical space of genetic reintrication: Notes on an Element of Giorgio Agamben’s Method, Justin Clemens; 7. Zoē aiōniōs: Giorgio Agamben and the Critique of Katechontic Time, Nicholas Heron; 8. Agamben, Badiou, and Affirmative Biopolitics, Sergei Prozorov; 9. Form-of-life and Antagonism: Homo Sacer and Operaismo, Jason E. Smith; 10. What is a Form-of-Life?: Giorgio Agamben and the Practice of Poverty, Steven DeCaroli; 11. Law and Life beyond Incorporation: Agamben, Highest Poverty, and the Papal Legal Revolution, Miguel Vatter.