Gerçek dünyayı aşan karmaşık öğretiler ortaya koymuş bir filozof o dünyayla karşılaşınca ne görür, ne duyar, o dünyadan ne öğrenir? İtalyan filozof Giorgio Agamben, bu eserinde, hayatı boyunca gezip gördüğü yerleri zamansız bir kronik şeklinde bize sunar; filozof seyyahın gezileri içsel ve derin bir macera haline dönüşür. Agamben bu izlenimleri bize nihayet ahir ömründe aktarır; kısa ama yoğun notlar halinde aktarılan bu izlenimler belki de filozofun karmaşık öğretilerinin bir özetidir.
Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.
In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.
He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.
...we exist solely in the intermittence of our being, and that what we call I is just a shadow continuously bidding farewell and saying hello, barely mindful of its own dissipation. All the machinery of our body serves solely to provide that break, that inversion of breath in which dwells the I - the intercessor of its own absence, unforgettable, neither living nor speaking, but the only reason we're given life and language.
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...to love someone means seeing them simultaneously in God and in time. The tenderness and shadow of their existing here and now - the amber and crystal of their being in God.
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During the instant of contemplation - an eternal instant - you can no longer distinguish between mind and body, and that's what beatitude is.
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...we write in order to escape adult life and rebuild the paradise of childhood.
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Writing, I learned that happiness lies not in poetizing, but in being poetized by something or someone we cannot know.
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From infancy: the words are the only thing left from when we were not yet speaking beings. We've lost everything else - but words are the ancestral relics that hold our memory of that time, the little portals through which we can, briefly, return.
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What is important is that one day, someone like us will live and act without obstacle, freely doing what we tried to live and do.
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...intimacy is something like a political substance, otherwise men wouldn't act as if sharing it were the most precious good in the world.
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...colour - which is the form of ecstasy - is also intelligence and constructive reason...Intelligence is not solely a cognitive principle: it is, deep down, something that bestows blessings...
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...the enigma posed to man by the existence of language cannot be solved...it's also ultimately a childish riddle, like the ones fishermen pose to the poet on the seashore.
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...the intellect is one...when we think the true, the multiplicity of opinions fades and, ultimately, it is no longer I who is thinking.
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In the mirror I saw that between us and ourselves there is a small gap, a delay that can be measured exactly by the amount of time it takes us to recognize our own image...Had we recognized ourselves immediately, had there not been that fleeting intermission, we would be like the angels...
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...the new never comes about through the destruction of the old, because the age to come doesn't annihilate the age that is passing, but rather completes the figure contained therein. And that the ages of the world succeed one another like leaf, stalk and spike.
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Contemplation contemplates the sensation within sensation, the mind within the mind, the thought within the thought, the word within the word, the art within art. That is what makes it so happy.
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...what is important about pleasure is only its smallest degree, the one that coincides with the lower limit of sensation, the simple, everyday sensation of being. To rise each morning with this miniscule joy and hear it softy summoning friendship.
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...a political task and a political intensity can be conveyed solely through language...this task...cannot be assigned by anyone, it can only be assumed by the poet in lieu of an absent people.
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From Saint Francis: 'speak and write simply and purely...and understand just as simply and without gloss'.
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...philosophy is a poet's attempt at making inspiration coincide with justice...
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From living together: that the existence of the other is an enigma that cannot be resolved; it can only be shared. Sharing this enigma is what humans call love.
i am too young for this. too young to be truly conscious of the heterogeneity of self brutalising me into meat pulp; to not neurotically try to overcome the silence that accompanies thought. will check again in fifty years or so.
En leert mij dat ik eigenlijk niet zo heel anders ben dan Elsa van Arendelle. 👑❄️ “That if you make fiction your soul reality, you find certainty, but you lose all hope”
«Da Giovanni, ho appreso che ci si può innamorare dei propri errori fino a farne una ragione di vita, ma che, alla fine, questo significa che la verità non potrà apparirci che come volontà di morire. E da Bachelard che non esiste una verità prima, esistono solo errori primi. La verità è sempre ultima, o penultima.»
4 ⭐️ Bello bello bello, Giorgio dice anche che scrivendo ha imparato che la felicità non consiste nel poetare, ma nell'essere poetato da qualcosa o qualcuno che non conosciamo.
Destaco especialmente a parte final, as coisas que Agamben diz não ter visto, ouvido, aprendido, identificando um vazio em torno do qual toda a sua produção intelectual teria se construído a fim de contorná-lo. O autor admite o fracasso de tal tarefa, mas compreendendo toda a filosofia como uma tentativa que se destina sempre a fracassar melhor
Italy's foremost philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, was a friend and collaborator of everyone from Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino to Ingeborg Bachmann and Jacques Derrida.
This year, Seagull Books (publishers of great work like Hélène Cixous' Well-Kept Ruins, and Hussein Barghouthi's Among the Almond Trees) offered their latest title from the 81-year-old.
What I Saw, Heard, Learned is a series of startling, wise and often beautiful aphorisms and reflections. One chapter reads: "What water taught me: delight, when our foot no longer finds its hold and our body almost unwillingly gives in and swims." Or how about this? "Writing, I learned that happiness lies not in poetizing, but in being poetized by something or someone we cannot know."
The book is an intellectual and spiritual summa from a thinker who has meant much to many. Remarkable and thrillingly evocative, it closes with a moving account of Agamben being given a page of writing he made at the age of eight or nine by his mother, a piece that foreshadowed "the secret core of my philosophy".
Like the parables of Walter Benjamin or Zhuangzi, the memory approaches a kind of Daoist enlightenment, accepting that every work is only a failed iteration of some more fully realised ambition.
As Agamben writes, if "I really tried to cross the threshold of silence that accompanies every thought, I wouldn't have written a thing." (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-0...)
"Da Kafka: che c'è salvezza, ma non per noi: che siamo, cioè, salvi solo quando non c'interessa piú esserlo. Avviene come quando volevamo andare a tutti i costi in un certo luogo, ma poi, lungo la stra da, camminando e vivendo, ce ne dimentichiamo. Se qualcuno ci avverte che siamo arrivati, scrolliamo le spalle come se la cosa non ci riguardasse."
"Ciascuno di noi esiste in uno stato di complica zione, in cui tutto è involto in se stesso, in modo da restare inapparente in ogni manifestazione e informulabile in ogni parola e, insieme, in un gesto per così dire disinvolto, in cui tutto è compiuta mente aperto ed esplicato. E in questo modo che si deve intendere la tesi panteista secondo cui tutte le cose sono complicate in Dio e Dio è dispiegato in tutte le cose. Le due realtà sono in ogni istante contemporanee, così che il segreto è sempre esposto in piena luce e, insieme, ciò che è svelato sembra sprofondare e quasi affogare dentro di sé verso un centro inesplicabile."
Agamben has written short books through much of his career. But this one ... Ummmm... There is a sense that the great scholar is taking us all for a bit of a ride.
As we'd say in my country, 'Are you taking the piss?'
The answer is probably - yes.
68 pages in length.
OK...
Most pages have four lines on them...
Oh.
Sort of prose-poetry. Sort of vibe. Sort of weird, pseudo reflections after a couple of chiantis...
As always, there are profound sentences in this 'book.' But, I did need more than the pithy phrase and provocative sentence...
"From the twentieth century: that I certainly belong to it and I wandered out into the twenty-first only to get a breath of fresh air. But that air was so unbreathable that I immediately turned back—not to the twentieth century, but to a time within time, which I’m not able to place within any chronology, but which is also the only time that now interests me."
The last fragments of Agamben. Although still alive, it reads as a posthumous reflection on all the things Agamben has seen, heard and understood, and all those things that have escaped his eye-sight, hearing and thinking.
Agamben is someone to whom this style of writing really lends itself to, and you catch at the end a reflective moment examining the "unsaid" that is elsewhere treated far less delicately.
Çocukluğa, aşka ve incinmeye dair söyledikleri hoşuma gitti. Şiirsel yazmış aslında, felsefe gerçekten de şiire yakın, gün geçtikçe daha çok inanıyorum buna.
Giorgio Agamben’in Quel che visto, udito, appreso (Gördüklerim, Duyduklarım, Öğrendiklerim), otobiyografi, felsefe ve edebiyat eleştirisini harmanlayan derinlemesine kişisel ve düşündürücü bir eser. Agamben, bu notlar ve anılardan oluşan kitapta, entelektüel yolculuğunun şekillendiği anları takip ederek, etkileyici düşünürlerle karşılaşmalarını, düşüncelerini biçimlendiren deneyimlerini ve sanat, dil ve siyaset üzerine düşüncelerini paylaşıyor. Agamben’in eseri, samimi ve parçalı bir yapıya sahip; yapılandırılmış bir argümandan ziyade felsefi bir günlük niteliğinde. Agamben’in egemenlik, biyopolitika ve dilin doğası üzerine olan temel meseleleri yoğunluklu olarak kendini gösteriyor ancak daha anekdotsal ve şiirsel bir yaklaşımla ele alıyor bu meseleleri. Kitap, yalnızca yazarın entelektüel etkilerini değil, aynı zamanda estetik duyarlılığını da açığa çıkararak Agamben’in düşüncesine yeni adım atanlar için nefis bir metin sunuyor…
Agamben’den bir alıntıyla bitireyim:
“Yaşadığımız şehir bir dil gibidir; antik ve ahenkli bir merkezi vardır, çevrede de benzin istasyonları, otoban kavşakları ve korkunç varoşlar.”