Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism By Thanos Zartaloudis (Routledge, Uk, July 2011)

Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism

Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism

By Thanos Zartaloudis

Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism is a thorough engagement with the thought of the influential Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. It explores Agamben’s work on language, ontology, power, law and criticism from the 1970s to his most recent publications.

Introducing Agamben's work to a readership in legal theory, as well as in the humanities and social sciences more generally, Thanos Zartaloudis argues that an adequate understanding of Agamben's Homo Sacer project requires an attention to his earlier philosophical writings on language, ontology, power and time. It is through this attentive and creative analysis of Agamben's work that Zartaloudis here presents a rethinking of the ideas of justice and criticism.

Contents: 1. Sacred Foundations: Mythologemes of Law and Power 2. From Transcendental Sovereignty to Neo-Governmentality: The Oikonomia of Power 3. Secular Sovereignty: A Gigantomachy Over a Void 4. The Biopolitical Nomos of Insignificant Lives 5. The Sacrament of Power and the Sacrament of Language 6. The Experience of Potentiality 7. The Idea of Justice


Thanos Zartaloudis researches and teaches at the School of Law, Birkbeck College of the University of London.


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Topology V: Spaces of Transformation. Contemporary Art as the Space of Liturgy @ Tate Modern, London (March 31, 2012)

Topology

Spaces of Transformation
Contemporary Art as the Space of Liturgy

Philosopher Giorgio Agamben in conversation with Thanos Zartaloudis and Anton Schütz.


Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian philosophy and radical political theory. His central focus is on questions of language and representation, history and temporality, the force of law, politics of the spectacle and the ethos of humanity. He is currently Baruch Spinoza Chair at European Graduate School EGS, is a Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy and teaches Philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He has taught at various universities, including the Universities of Macerata and Verona and was Director of Programmes at the Collège Internationale de Paris. He has been a visiting professor at various universities in the US, and was a Distinguished Professor at the New School, University in New York. He is the author of Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1992), The Coming Community (1993), The Man Without Content (1999), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Potentialities (2000) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III (2002), The Open: Man and Animal (2004), State of Exception(2005), What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (2009), Profanations (2008), The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath (2011) and many others.


Dr Thanos Zartaloudis is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck University of London. He studied Law and European legal studies at Kent University, at Canterbury and at the Universiteit Van Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Previously he was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Jewish Law (Yeshiva, NYC). He was also co-founder and co-editor of a book series entitled Archaeologies for Edinburgh University Press and co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Law & Film (forthcoming 2011). His most recent publication is Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the uses of Criticism (2010). He is currently working on a collection of essays on Robert Walser and a genealogy of the idea of property.


Dr Anton Schütz is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck, University of London. He holds a JD in Law from the University of Vienna and a post-graduate degree in Social Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He has been a teacher of European Legal and Religious History at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He is a member of a research centre based at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (Paris). Dr Schütz publishes in the fields of Continental Philosophy, Jurisprudence, the History of Religion and Secularisation and the Evolution of Scientific Methodology. He is the co-editor of Law, Text, Terror (with Peter Goodrich and Lior Barshak) (2006). He is the author of Fictio Iuris: La Politique Classique de la Reference, a study of medieval legal forms (forthcoming).


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Please note: Topology V is cancelled