postmodernism

My experience in reading "Homo Sacer" was, to put it mildly, a frustrating one. Nevertheless, I pushed through, and for the most part, I ultimately understood most of concepts. He certainly has a knack for repeating his arguments. I can say with great confidence that the homo sacer may be killed but not sacrificed. However, I am still confused by the "Being vs. being." The capital letters always throw me off and this is no exception. On page 59, he writes, "That Being abandons the being means: Being dissimulates itself in the being-manifest of the being.

Throughout "Homo Sacer," Agamben makes several references to Foucault's "History of Sexuality." I just finished reading Foucualt's "Madness and Civilization" as well as "Discipline and Punish" for my final paper and their themes are equally resonant in Agamben's arguments. The continuous link between law and violence is an underlying force in both of Foucault's works. In order to implement a society defined by morals and organization, violence must be used on citizens. Anyone who strays from societal "norms" must be punished and in many instances, this entails banning.

Agamben seems to hold out hope for a politics (if the term could still be used) that goes beyond the sovereign-bare life relationship, that is, the relationship of the ban. I get this mostly from sections in which Agamben talks about how hard it is to break with the structure of the ban:

In doing a little online research, I came across this gem: a NYT op-ed piece written by Slavoj Zizek that name-checks Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer theorizations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/opinion/24zizek.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The article refers to events roughly two weeks prior, when Khalid Shaikh Mohammed confessed to organizing the 9/11 attacks. Here's the original NYT article about that.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07E5DB1E31F936A25750C0A...

Did anyone else get really annoyed by Agamben's constant use of parenthesis? I found them incredibly distracting and usually pointless.

I didn't quite understand how a "masterpiece" could be written on "Political Theology" until I re-read "Political Theology" a couple of times and realized "Political Theology" is not political theory. (See how I repeated political theology a bunch there so you could see the difference ;) )(I feel like thats a very postmodern joke the, "See what I did there" when its obvious what you just did. Its a very self referential type joke, a joke that knows its a joke and is therefore funny.

One of the questions that aha and I wanted to pose for class discussion tomorrow is one that I posed briefly in my 'third world bare life' response to mftc's "oh wow" post: namely, to what extent does Agamben support a 'politicization' of bare life, and what would such a politicization look like?

On page 21, Agamben brings up some tricky issues that I’m hoping to get some more clarity on, please! He delineates two opposing modes: inclusive exclusion (which serves to include what is excluded) versus exclusive inclusion (which i think one could infer serves to exclude what is included . . . ?)

During our class on Foucault, I briefly pondered explanations for why the Pro-Life movement argues so vehemently against abortion but not nearly as much against capital punishment. There are undoubtedly those that succeed in connecting these two causes. I feel these people are the exception, though. On a nationwide-scale, The Republican party in general/ 'Dubya' in particular, proposed a 'culture of life'. This 'culture' (for reasons unknown) really wants every baby to be born but does not mind capital punishment.

The sovereign is an idea that really hasn’t been covered up to this point in our adventure through postmodernism; the original source of power, I feel, has been neglected for the end product of that power, namely structures and institutions within society that have come to manipulate it for their own ends and purposes. These institutions and structures I speak of are things such as the media, MNCs, and political institutions, yet none of these things are sovereign in and of themselves; they all derive their power from something else whether it be money or some idea of power.