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| Photograph: Alexander Lyubavin |
To Be and to Do
The Life’s Work of Giorgio Agamben
Leland de la Durantaye
Jan 26 2016
In June of 1968, twenty-six-year-old Giorgio Agamben left Paris, scene of spectacular unrest, for the first of two unusual seminars he would attend that year. Held at Harvard University and directed by Professor Henry Kissinger, it hosted participants from around the globe who had been selected by their governments as “future world leaders.” One day in class, Agamben interrupted Kissinger to inform him that he “simply knew nothing about politics.” Kissinger smiled. By the end of the year, he was President Nixon’s assistant for national security affairs, the first of many high-ranking government posts he was to hold. The second seminar, in the south of France, was hosted by poet and hero of the French Resistance René Char and taught by the seventy-nine-year-old éminence grise of European philosophy, Martin Heidegger. There were eight members. One day Heidegger said to those present that he could not see his own limits, although they might—for that was the nature of a limit, and the nature of students.
In the aftermath of those seminars Agamben abandoned his legal studies, and his activity as a poet, to become a philosopher. And, at last, in 1995 he ceased to be a philosopher known in certain philosophical circles and instead came to be known in all. The catalyst of his sudden renown was the publication of the first volume in his Homo Sacer series, the ambition of which was to link political questions such as those discussed in Kissinger’s seminar with the kind discussed in Heidegger’s. Scandalously, Agamben drew a parallel between the juridical spaces of modern life and those of the Nazi concentration camp. The next volume, Remnants of Auschwitz (1999), won even greater infamy. Now, seven books and twenty years later, this political and philosophical project has come to an unexpectedly dramatic close...link
Agamben in the catalog