It's a Powerful Life: A Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy

Casarino, Cesare; Negri, Antonio

doi:10.1353/cul.2004.0003

Cited by 25 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Our cultural studies colleague Cesare Casarino responded to Grosz. He is a specialist on autonomist Marxism, Deleuze, and Spinoza (e.g., Casarino and Negri 2008) and is one of the few in that field with an interest in Lacan. The critical theorist and German scholar A. Kiarina Kordela from Macalaster College responded to Copjec.…”

Section: Genesis Of the Bookmentioning

confidence: 99%

Full Issue PDF Volume 4, Issue 4

2016

The AAG Review of Books

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Section: Genesis Of the Bookmentioning

confidence: 99%

Full Issue PDF Volume 4, Issue 4

2016

The AAG Review of Books

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“…There are, for instance, several Foucauldian accounts that criticize Agamben's use and abuse of 'biopower'; see Fitzpatrick (2001), Genel (2006), Patton (2007). Furthermore, Agamben's account of 'potentiality' and 'power' has been subjected to critical scrutiny by Antonio Negri, who draws on Spinoza (Casarino and Negri, 2004;Negri, 2007). Agamben's analysis of 'sovereignty' has been criticized by William Connolly (2007), who turns to Tocqueville and Deleuze, and Andreas Kalyvas (2005), who draws on Plato.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity

Gündoğdu

2011

Contemp Polit Theory

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Giorgio Agamben presents us with one of the most powerful and controversial criticisms of human rights. He contests conventional understandings of human rights as normative setbacks on sovereign power, and shows instead how these rights reinforce sovereignty by producing bare lives that are irredeemably exposed to violence. This essay aims to understand the distinctive aspects of Agamben's critique and assess his concluding call for a politics beyond human rights. It suggests that this call is necessitated by a counternarrative of Western politics that ties human rights inextricably to the logic Agamben ascribes to biopolitical sovereignty. Within this stringent logic, any politics organized around human rights cannot help but reproduce sovereign violence. The essay questions this counternarrative in two ways: First, it shows how this counternarrative, which aims to unveil all the myths that sustain sovereignty, ends up repeating what it identifies as the distinctive mythologizing gesture: rendering the contingent necessary. Second, it turns to Agamben's notion of 'potentiality' to break the binding spell of his narrative of fated necessity and reclaim the contingent, equivocal and unpredictable effects of modern rights declarations and struggles. The essay concludes with a discussion of contemporary rights struggles of sans-papiers to illustrate the strengths and limits of Agamben's critique of human rights.

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“…The parallels do not end here. Writing in the late twelfth century, Averroës had not only been tried and exiled by the caliph Yaqub Al-Mansur for his rationalist belief that truth can only be attained through philosophical reason; his works had also been banned and burned (Casarino and Negri, 2008: 249 n.21). If such ideas were once seen as “dangerously heretical”, they also “constituted a crucial antecedent of modern secular arguments for the separation of church and state, religion and philosophy, [and] faith and reason” (2008: 249 n.21), as Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri have argued.…”

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confidence: 99%

Secularism and the death and return of the author: Rereading the Rushdie affair after Joseph Anton

Morton

2018

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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In what ways has the contemporary British novel served to contribute to the ethos of secular liberalism that underpins the ideology of the colonial present before and after the “War on Terror”? This article seeks to address this question through a rereading of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and its critical reception. Beginning with a discussion of the secularism/theology binary in Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author”, the paper considers how the ideology of secularism that Barthes attributes to the birth of the reader has shaped and influenced the public understanding of the Rushdie affair before and after 9/11. With close reference to Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton, the essay proceeds to address how Rushdie’s own account of the production and reception of The Satanic Verses in Joseph Anton might be regarded as a particular form of secular misreading that calls the authority of the book’s implied author into question. By addressing questions such as these, this article suggests that Rushdie’s literary reworking of Islamic history in The Satanic Verses and his defence of this reworking in Joseph Anton demand a rethinking of the relationship between the ideology of secularism and postmodern theories of reading. Such a rethinking, I suggest, also demands a consideration of the ways in which the contemporary figure of the emancipated reader is implicated in the secularist ideology of the colonial present.

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It's a Powerful Life: A Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy

Cited by 25 publications

References 11 publications

Full Issue PDF Volume 4, Issue 4

Full Issue PDF Volume 4, Issue 4

Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity

Secularism and the death and return of the author: Rereading the Rushdie affair after Joseph Anton

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