A Life Undivided

Although the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben s political thought has drawn substantial critical attention in North America over roughly the last decade, this coverage tends to focus on only a few works in isolation. This study is one of the few full-length examinations seeking to correct this limitation by providing a synthetic exposition and analysis of a substantial portion of Agamben s body of work. Not only does this study address the relative lack of attention paid to Agamben s early work on language and aesthetics, it also advances an original assessment of the relative influence on Agamben s work as a whole by two key figures, namely, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. By proceeding in this way, the study has the objective of establishing that Agamben s more recent and explicitly political work does not constitute a shift or break with his earlier thinking, but is an extension and elaboration of it.

Autorentext

Jonathan Short was most recently a researcher in the Theory Department at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands. He holds a doctorate in Social and Political Thought from York University in Toronto, Canada. He is also the author of several articles on the interconnections between sovereignty, neo-liberalism, and biopolitics.

Klappentext

Although the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben s political thought has drawn substantial critical attention in North America over roughly the last decade, this coverage tends to focus on only a few works in isolation. This study is one of the few full-length examinations seeking to correct this limitation by providing a synthetic exposition and analysis of a substantial portion of Agamben s body of work. Not only does this study address the relative lack of attention paid to Agamben s early work on language and aesthetics, it also advances an original assessment of the relative influence on Agamben s work as a whole by two key figures, namely, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. By proceeding in this way, the study has the objective of establishing that Agamben s more recent and explicitly political work does not constitute a shift or break with his earlier thinking, but is an extension and elaboration of it.