How to Read Agamben

“A striking feature of Agamben’s work is its tendency to leap immediately from the tiniest detail to the broadest possible generalization.”

“while his late works boast increasingly large-scale ambitions, they are nonetheless written in a fragmentary form and always make room for digressions and asides (often in the form of notes inserted right into the middle of the text, introduced by the Hebrew letter “aleph”)”

“These idiosyncratic traits can, I believe, be traced back to Agamben’s two most significant influences: Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger.”

“It’s clear that Agamben admires the compression and vast interdisciplinary range of Benjamin’s work and aspires to similar effects in his own writing.”

“The link to Heidegger is perhaps even closer: as a student in one of Heidegger’s postwar seminars, Agamben picked up the great philosopher’s ambition to provide an overarching account of the history of the West, and use that history to shed light on the contemporary world.”

“From both Heidegger and Benjamin, Agamben inherits, on the one hand, a careful attention to philological detail and questions of translation, and, on the other, a marked tendency toward conceptual abstraction.”

“The entire Homo Sacer series can be read as a follow-up on Benjamin’s suggestion, in his Critique of Violence (1921), that someone really ought to look into the origin of the concept of the sacredness of human life.”

“His study of animality in The Open is, by contrast, centered on one of Heidegger’s writings on that question, and many of the chapters expand on Heidegger’s own key references.”

“Agamben’s work can be read in part as a series of footnotes to the two great thinkers who have most inspired him, even if very few of his writings presuppose detailed knowledge of either.”

“Some of his originality can be traced to the way he brings together Heidegger and Benjamin, along with other major figures such as Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Aristotle.”

“much of what is most distinctive about Agamben’s style of thought comes from his love of paradox and contradiction”

“This love of paradox is not simply a rhetorical tic. It deeply shapes Agamben’s political analysis, which seeks out places where our accustomed categories begin to overlap and break down”

“Agamben’s political work is a little too complex to fit easily into this kind of moralizing discourse”

“For Agamben, the answer to the problem posed by sovereign power cannot be to return to the “normal” conditions of the rule of law, because Western political systems have always contained in their very structure the seeds that would grow into our universalized exception. It can’t be a matter of refraining from reducing people to “bare life,” because that is just what Western legal structures do.”

“The extreme, destructive conjunction of sovereign authority and bare life is not a catastrophe that we could have somehow avoided: for Agamben, it represents the deepest and truest structure of the law.”

“Kafka story about Alexander the Great’s horse Bucephalus, entitled “The New Attorney.””

“For Agamben, this provides an image of what it might look like not to go back to a previous, less destructive form of law, but to get free of law altogether:”

“One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good…. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.”

“The law will not be simply done away with, but it is used in a fundamentally different way. In place of enforcement, we have study, and in place of solemn reverence, play.”

“Reading The Open — or other Agamben books in a similar vein, such as The Coming Community (1990; 1993) or Nudities (2009; 2010) — before coming to the more imposing political works may be useful, as they help to clarify the way Agamben thinks before one is faced with the issue of what he thinks.”

“For all their sweeping ambition and programmatic claims, the political works fundamentally represent the same fragmentary and improvisational style of intellectual exploration as the more miscellaneous entries in Agamben’s canon; in all his writings, he exemplifies the “study or play” with the Western cultural and political tradition that he advocates.”

“Whatever else Agamben’s works manage to achieve, they may ultimately be most successful when they serve to invite us to join him in the serious pursuit of study as play.”

“Adam Kotsko is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College in Chicago and the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, and Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty. His other books include Žižekand Theology, The Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation, Awkwardness, and Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television.”