Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer Series

Colby Dickinson is Associate Professor of Theology at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of Theological Poverty in Continental Philosophy: After Christian Theology (Bloomsbury, 2021), Theology and Contemporary Continental Philosophy: The Centrality of a Negative Dialectics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Continental Philosophy and Theology (Brill, 2018), Words Fail: Theology, Poetry, and the Challenge of Representation (Fordham University Press, 2016), Between the Canon and the Messiah: The Structure of Faith in Contemporary Continental Thought (Bloomsbury, 2013), Agamben and Theology (T&T Clark, 2011). He is co-author of Agamben’s Coming Philosophy: Finding a New Use for Theology with Adam Kotsko (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). He is also the co-editor of The Challenge of God: Continental Philosophy and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Agamben and the Existentialists (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

While Giorgio Agamben is the author of dozens of books spanning many decades, his most influential work and his true intellectual legacy is the monumental Homo Sacer project. In this book, Colby Dickinson provides not only an introduction to this multi-volume oeuvre, but more importantly, demonstrates its urgent relevance for understanding our contemporary world and the indispensable role of philosophy in critiquing and transforming it.

• Introduction: A brief outline of the Homo Sacer seriesReligious and political implications of the Homo Sacer projectThe fiction of sovereigntyOaths, language and the divine nameOn God and gods from the point of view of a modal ontologyAn ontology of demandOn Aristotle, actuality and potentialityAristotle and the problem of ‘potency’Potentiality as a form of resistanceContemplation of the inappropriableDemand, memory and the place of thoughtGlory and the significance of political theologyKingdom, government and sovereigntyThe desire for orderSovereign gloryEconomy and its inoperativityThe bi-polar sovereignty of identitySubjects and the suspension of identityNew uses of the bodyMessianic or hypernomianThe border between the human and the animalThe fiction of the human beingThe problem of anthropogenesisAnthropogenesis and metaphysicsPaul and the messianic division of divisionA possible hermeneuticThe gesture of Pope Benedict XVITowards a negative dialecticDialectics at a standstillThe messianic and the future of dialecticsA form-of-life beyond the lawThe temporality of fashion and artWhat is a form-of-life?Form-of-life as end goalMystery and desireConclusionsBibliographyIndex