Reading this fucking nonsense, still confused as fuck 50 pages in. What the fuuuuuuck is a sovereign relation of ban? What the fuck is nomos basileus? Why is this cunt even talking about metaphysics and Aristotle? Does this piece of shit even follow any logical structure or is that too much to expect from the fucking continent?
>homo
nice try
>>7845272
Shut up you cunt and help me understand this
State of Exception
Political Theology
etc.
>>7845304
I've read concept of the political, stacks of foucault, and some derrida so someone who has also read this book would be good thanks.
>>7845263
finish the book, then talk.
Agamben's not light-weight shit.
>>7845317
Yeah I see that. Just buttmad that I'm reading but not really getting all of it. Any help on even some of those would be good!
I say that because he really isn't like a lot of current philosophers (not to mention, he's been writing for over 40 years). I read a collection of his essays, as well as Profanations, and had trouble occasionally but on the whole it wasn't that bad. Re-reading a sentence (two or ten times) goes a long way with Agamben. That's about all I can say. I plan on reading Homo Sacer, The State of Exception, What is a Device?
I really dig his work.
He's alive. You should directly email him and ask him what the fuck he's on about. Don't forget to mention that you frequent a literature forum on a website dedicated to Chinese cartoons.
>>7845263
>a sovereign relation of ban
It's the peculiar situation in which the law attempts to relate itself outside itself to that which it sets aside as outside the law. Sans rhetorical flourish, the sovereign relation of the ban is in which the law is fully operational as pure force but has no real distinct form. The only relation one has to the law is to be held outside the law by the law, subject to the pure force of law.
Sovereignty is tied to this exceptional capability, this ability to construct a system in which there is a definite form and limit to power and yet the ability to still hold that outside the bounds of that limit "within" in the space of exception.
The jews were completely expelled from German law (stripped of all legal subjecthood) and yet were held in a relation to the law that didn't free them from its force. The law was in complete potentiality, with no limits on its passage into actuality. Whatever they did in the camps was law--not done according to the law's form.
The philosophy stuff is Heideggerean wank.
Nomos basileus is how the sovereign attaches itself to law.
Just read The State of Exception and get a good reading of Homo Sacer. Everything else is wank.
>>7845501
The Other is good as well, tbqh, but good post.
>>7845501
Op here, thank you, that actually makes sense now. I hope that the next time you post i have something useful to contribute
>clearly negatively biased towards continental philosophy
>"gee I'll pick up homo sacer"
you're a fucking idiot did you want to confirm what you already knew you'd think or something? start with the germans if you're actually interested
>>7845639
Of course I'm actually interested, why else would i buy and read the book? And i really like continental philosophy but i think they are taking the piss sometimes with the way they write. I'm still sad that zizek was just a meme. Do you mean heidegger, Benjamin, Schmitt, and...?
>>7845263
>>7845263
are you reading this for school, op?
>>7845263
Refer to the Chomsky doctrine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Nz03cROXAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Nz03cROXA
>What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.
>>7845315
Read more Schmitt, you need a basis on Schmitt's soveignty before you jump into Agamben
>>7846491
>taking chomsky seriously
>>7846491
>he still hasn't grown out of Chomsky
>>7846485
Kinda, i want to study a masters of law in a few years so I'm going through the readings for the courses i want to take. That said, i am under no illusion that as far as succeeding in graduate study goes, that strategy is lots of effort for little pay-off. I just love philosophy about law, politics, and power.
>>7846503
So political theology, and then?
>>7845639
...from what the anon above described about the sovereign relation of the ban, agamban sounds extremely analytic. What are you talking about?
>>7847948
Political Theology and The Concept of the Political are the two cornerstones of Schmitt's thought - the first about sovereignty and the second about the realm in which sovereignty is exercised. I'd say Legality and Legitimacy is the other essential work on law, since it is a thorough and unflinching examination of constitutional legal paradox.
>>7848892
Agamben has a very peculiar reading of Schmitt contra Benjamin though so even reading something like Political Theology and The Concept of the Political will leave one with a reading that thinks Agamben is merely reflecting Schmitt rather than treating him as a case study in the internal tendency of the law and the sovereign.
Agamben's whole deal can basically be summed up in Heidegger's citation of Holderlin: "But where danger is, grows the saving power also."
Schmitt obscures and yet places in plain site the position at which the law appears to strengthen itself and yet, undoes itself. Benjamin tears through the concealment of the law's finitude by attempting to formulate an exception to the law that undoes the law, rather than allows it to exist in suspended form.
State of Exception if literally the only thing Agamben wrote that is worthwhile. His political economy is shit. His holocaust wank is shit. His theology is messianic drivel.
But nigga knows the logic of the law within modern political economy.
>>7849019
State of Exception is an interesting book (I thought Homo Sacer was too), but I recall finding certain passages as obscure as the foggiest parts of its predecessor. Not the case with Schmitt, who I think is a relatively clear writer even if his concepts are difficult and who I think writes with admirable passion and flavour.
Unfortunately I am unacquainted with Benjamin outside the obvious and widely read 'Art in the Age of...' If you have any suggestions on where to start on his political and legal philosophy I would be interested since his writings appear hard to navigate to somebody who is not an initiate. It would be helpful too since I didn't really see where Agamben built on Schmitt in any significant sense - he seemed to obscure much of what Schmitt made clear, but put the decisive concept to interesting use in his exposition of a biopolitical analysis of modernity in HS.
On State of Exception: Joel Isaac, an intellectual historian at Cambridge, is currently working on a project about emergency government and American liberalism in the mid twentieth century which should clarify many of the points Agamben makes about FDR in the text. I was fortunate enough to study it as a Special Subject and found it more enlightening than I later found Agamben. Hopefully it results in a good volume.
>>7845263
It's retarded deconstrutivist cultural marxism.
Nobody reads this shit unless assigned by liberal professors, and even then it is easier to just read a review and pretend you've read it.
