Ype de Boer invites you to rethink what you know about the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. In a compelling and original argument, De Boer contends that, in the work of Agamben, ethics takes primacy over politics. Presenting a careful evaluation of Agamben's overlooked contribution to ethics, this book explores his enigmatic yet central concept of the 'happy life'. By reading Agamben's philosophy in terms of a 'poetico-philosophical experiment' – a term coined by the Italian philosopher himself, and one through which he questions our very mode of existence – De Boer assesses the variety of ethical paradigms that Agamben's work offers. This not only challenges the widespread misconception of Agamben as the 'dark prophet' known for his pessimistic, even nihilistic political critiques, but reveals how understanding the various facets of the 'happy life' allows for a better appreciation of his attacks on the ethico-political condition. Agamben's Ethics and the Happy Life demonstrates that ultimately Agamben seeks to formulate an alternative notion of ethics, politics and ontology that will lead us out of nihilism. Tracing Agamben's positive moral philosophy through his key works, including the seminal Homo Sacer series, De Boer uncovers how, for Agamben, a happy life is one directed not by responsibility, guilt, action and duty, but by receptivity, love, use and potentiality.

By contrast, Freedom and Law argues that only in an account of revelatory law can divine freedom and human freedom be thought of without contradiction.The first part analyzes the logic of exceptionalism. In the second part, the author argues that one cannot invoke a doctrine of election without rigorous scrutiny of texts that portray an electing God and an elected people. Once we scrutinize these texts, the character of freedom and law within the divine-human relationship shows itself to be different from that found in exceptionalist logics.The third and final part examines the impact of the logic of the law on Jewish-Christian apologetics. Rather than require that one defend one's position to a nonbeliever, this logic situates all epistemological justification within the order or freedom of God.

Istanbul's AemberlitaAY HamamA provides a case study for the cultural, social and economic functions of Turkish bathhouses over time

Bringing together leading academics hailing from different cultural and scholarly horizons, this book revisits legal hermeneutics by making particular reference to philosophy, sociology and linguistics. On the assumption that theory has much to teach law, that theory motivates and enables, the writings of such intellectuals as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, Giorgio Agamben, Jürgen Habermas, Ronald Dworkin and Ludwig Wittgenstein receive special consideration. As it explores the matter of reading the law and as it inquires into the emergence of meaning within the dynamic between reader and text against the background of the reader’s worldly finiteness, this collection of essays wishes to contribute to an improved appreciation of the merits and limits of law’s hermeneutics which, it argues, is emphatically not to be reduced to a simple tool for textual exegesis.

One of the many challenges for readers of Agamben’s sprawling and heterogeneous body of work is what to make of his increasingly insistent focus on theology. Agamben’s Coming Philosophy brings together Colby Dickinson, the author of Agamben and Theology, and Adam Kotsko, the translator of several of Agamben’s more recent theologically-oriented books, to discuss Agamben’s unique approach to theology—and its profound implications for understanding Agamben’s philosophical project and the deepest political and ethical problems of our time. The book covers the whole range of Agamben’s work, from his earliest reflections to his forthcoming magnum opus, The Use of Bodies. Along the way, the authors provide an overview of Agamben’s project as a whole, as well as incisive reflections on individual works and isolated themes. This volume is essential reading for anyone grappling with Agamben’s work. The theological starting point leads to a thorough examination of Agamben’s methodology, his relationship with his primary sources (most notably Walter Benjamin), and his relevance for questions of politics, ethics, and philosophy.

Both Giorgio Agamben and Franz Kafka are best known for their gloomy political worldview. A cautious study of Agamben's references on Kafka, however, reveals another dimension right at the intersection of their works: a complex and unorthodox theory of freedom. The inspiration emerges from Agamben's claims that 'it is a very poor reading of Kafka's works that sees in them only a summation of the anguish of a guilty man before the inscrutable power'. Virtually all of Kafka's stories leave us puzzled about what really happened. Was Josef K., who is butchered like a dog, defeated? And what about the meaningless but in his own way complete creature Odradek? Agamben's work sheds new light on these questions and arrives, through Kafka, at different strategies for freedom at the point where this freedom is most blatantly violated.

This volume provides the first in-depth collection of essays aimed at critically examining the work of political philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

This book analyses how international criminal institutions, and their actors – legal counsels, judges, investigators, registrars – construct witness identity and memory. Filling an important gap within transitional justice scholarship, this conceptually led and empirically grounded interdisciplinary study takes the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) as a case study. It asks: How do legal witnesses of human rights violations contribute to memory production in transitional post-conflict societies? Witnessing at tribunals entails individuals externalising memories of violations. This is commonly construed within the transitional justice legal scholarship as an opportunity for individuals to ensure their memories are entered into an historical record. Yet this predominant understanding of witness testimony fails to comprehend the nature of memory. Memory construction entails fragments of individual and collective memories within a contestable and contingent framing of the past. Accordingly, the book challenges the claim that international criminal courts and tribunals are able to produce a collective memory of atrocities; as it maintains that witnessing must be understood as a contingent and multi-layered discursive process. Contributing to the specific analysis of witnessing and memory, but also to the broader field of transitional justice, this book will appeal to scholars and practitioners in these areas, as well as others in legal theory, global criminology, memory studies, international relations, and international human rights.

The volume revisits memory laws as a phenomenon of global law, transitional justice, historical narratives and claims for historical truth. It will appeal to those interested in the conflict between legal governance of memory with values of democratic citizenship, political pluralism, and fundamental rights.

Focusing on the moment when social unrest takes hold of a populace, Law and Disorder offers a new account of sovereignty with an affective theory of public order and protest. In a state of unrest, the affective architecture of the sovereign order begins to crumble. The everyday peace and calm of public space is shattered as sovereign peace is challenged. In response, the state unleashes the full force of its exceptionality, and the violence of public order policing is deployed to restore the affects and atmospheres of habitual social relations. This book is a work of contemporary critical legal theory. It develops an affective theory of sovereign orders by focusing on the government of affective life and popular encounters with sovereignty. The chapters explore public order as a key articulation between sovereignty and government. In particular, policing of public order is exposed as a contemporary mode of exceptionality cast in the fires of colonial subjection. The state of unrest helps us see the ordinary affects of the sovereign order, but it also points to crowds as the essential component in the production of unrest. The atmospheres produced by crowds seep out from the squares and parks of occupation, settling on cities and states. In these new atmospheres, new possibilities of political and social organisation begin to appear. In short, crowds create the affective condition in which the settlement at the heart of the sovereign order can be revisited. This text thus develops a theory of sovereignty which places protest at its heart, and a theory of protest which starts from the affective valence of crowds. This book’s examination of the relationship between sovereignty and protest is of considerable interest to readers in law, politics and cultural studies, as well as to more general readers interested in contemporary forms of political resistance.