Tag Archives: Agamben

Giorgio Agamben: “On Anarchy Today”

Posted on March 8, 2023 by

“Anarchy, therefore, is first and foremost the radical disavowal not so much of the state or simply of administration but rather of power’s claim to make the state and administration coincide in the government of men. It is against this claim that the anarchist fights, in the name ultimately of the ungovernable, which is the vanishing point of all community among men.”

Posted in anarchism, disengagement, governance, Nota Bene, power

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Kiersten Solt, V.I.: “Seven theses on destitution”

Posted on June 24, 2021 by

Constituent vs. destituent insurrections

Posted in agonism, anarchism, disengagement, Nota Bene, power, revolt, revolution

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Amador Fernández-Savater: “Reaching for a politics of pure potentiality, or trying to keep power at bay”

Posted on July 13, 2019 by

‘In the state of disappointment, we no longer have any position to “defend”, no formula to “sell”, we are all, as it is said, “in the same shit”. It is a moment of not knowing where new knowledge can be elaborated, if we avoid falling into the crossroads of accusations, the settling of accounts, the search for the guilty and the logic of the court.’

Posted in defeat, governance, Nota Bene, power, resistance, tragic politics

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Revolutionary states of emergency

Posted on April 23, 2018 by

“Modern states of emergency follow close on the heels of modern revolutions. They are, per Agamben, ‘a creation,’ ironically, ‘of the democratic-revolutionary tradition and not the absolutist one’ [State of Exception, 5]. Though he does not himself make this point explicitly, we cold consider emergency an instrument that emerges from within the revolution to turn its most radical tendencies back. When a revolutionary government suspends its own constitution, it undermines the constituent politics – that is, the popular power to form a truly egalitarian body politic – that originally precipitated the revolution and which the constitution is supposed to enshrine. Emergency decrees are, in this regard, the counterinsurgent practice par excellence. They circumscribe constituent power withing the sovereign voice” (Ahmed, Archaeology of Babel, 2017, 189).

Posted in Blog, crisis, revolution, tragic politics

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