The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics

To Imagine a Form of Life #2

by David Kishik

Giorgio Agamben's work develops a new philosophy of life. On its horizon lies the conviction that our form of life can become the guiding and unifying power of the politics to come. Informed by this promise, The Power of Life weaves decisive moments and neglected aspects of Agamben's writings over the past four decades together with the thought of those who influenced him most (including Kafka, Heidegger, Benjamin, Arendt, Deleuze, and Foucault). In addition, the book positions his work in relation to key figures from the history of philosophy (such as Plato, Spinoza, Vico, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Derrida). This approach enables Kishik to offer a vision that ventures beyond Agamben's warning against the power over (bare) life in order to articulate the power of (our form of) life and thus to rethink the biopolitical situation. Following Agamben's prediction that the concept of life will stand at the center of the coming philosophy, Kishik points to some of the most promising directions that this philosophy can take.

Genres: Philosophy

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 2012

About the author

David Kishik is the author of To Imagine a Form of Life, a series of five paraphilosophical books. He also translated, from Italian, two of Giorgio Agamben's essay collections. Some of his shorter pieces appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lapham's Quarterly, 3:A.M. Magazine, and Public Seminar. His work has been translated into German, Russian, Korean, Farsi, and Hebrew. Previously he was a fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Currently he is a professor at Emerson College in Boston. Usually he lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Sara-Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

One may then begin to see oneself, one’s own life, as something thought. 42

agamben (through mbembe) has resonance with the things I study and care about. But I find his work, especially read through others, tedious and bordering on inconsequential. This book though, well, it plainly subverts standard “thinker” studies formats—those “my study on Benjamin will discuss his use of melancholia throughout his oeuvre” books that are somehow both reductionist and obfuscating in their parsing, and most woefully extinguish the original thinker’s sparkle and verve. Even if they permit you to contextualize canonicity and leap logically between texts and influences, secondary literatures read to me too often as inferior translation.

And although it is no doubt very stupid to speculate on authorial intention, I believe Kishik follows what interests and intrigues him. His work is beautiful and unique and suggestive, as if he took time to rummage through a cherished journal from his impressionable years and extrapolate with sensitive maturity on why he holds certain phrases dear, and how they now form his tenebrous conceptual constellations. I would like to write this way; it is the telling of a story and it shows the shortfalls of so much continental philosophising.

*update. Some brief internet sleuthing, and I find most of the chapters of this book were formulated on his blog. I find further that he writes with lovely reflexivity on “the alienation of theory.”

[Bahman Bahman · Rating 2 out of 5]

دریدا خاستگاه متافیزیک حضور را در گرایش به فکر کردن درباره‌ی زبان -پیش و بیش از همه- به منزله‌ی گفتار ردیابی می‌کند، که در آن آوای حاضر یک کلمه‌ی گفته‌شده می‌تواند مستقیماً با موجودیتی حاضر همخوان باشد. اما، ما نوشتن را در درجه‌ی دوم نسبت به گفتن می‌پنداریم، مانند رد پای چیزی که دیگر آنجا نیست. برای مثال، من به بیرون پنجره‌ام نگاه می‌کنم و می‌گویم: الان شب است. سپس این حقیقت بدیهی را در یک ایمیل به دوستم می‌نویسم. اما شأن همین جمله‌ی یکسان، زمانی که پس از یک خواب خوب شبانه یا در یک منطقه‌ی زمانی متفاوت خوانده می‌شود، چیست؟

یک بخش تعیین‌کننده از استراتژی دریدا این است که تلاش می‌کند با وارونه کردن این تصویر سنتی بر متافیزیک حضور غلبه کند، با لحاظ کردن نوشتن به جای گفتن، به منزله‌ی پدیده‌ی ارجح. در این شیوه، جمله‌ی نوشته‌شده درباره‌ی شب، یک زندگی از آن خودش به دست می آورد بدون آنکه به خود شب پای‌بند باشد.

[امیرمحمد حیدری · Rating 1 out of 5]

خزعبل.

[Rui Coelho · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book in itself is disappointing. It is an introduction to Agamben.s theories on biopolitics and says very little about foms-of-life. But the last chapter is very good. Under the title "how to imagine a form of life", Kishik adventures into the interesting questions posed by agambean philosophy. A shorter version of this text is posted online for free in his old blog (Notes for the Comming Community) as a set of posts called "Thesis on the Concept of Form of Life".