August 28, 2003 - 10:46am -- hydrarchist
Anonymous Comrade submits:
Giorgio Agamben. Stato di eccezione.
Torino: Bollati Borighieri. 2003
Brett Neilson
University of Western Sydney
Review by Brett Neilson (University of Western Sydney)
At a time when Australians face trial before U.S. military tribunals,
asylum seekers languish in camps like Baxter and Nauru, and new government
legislation allows the detention of Australian citizens themselves, the
prose of Giorgio Agamben burns with relevance for those who live on the
southern continent. Stato di eccezione is Agamben's latest offering, an
extension and deepening of Homo sacer (1995)--of which it announces itself
as Volume II, Part 1. Growing more directly from this earlier text than
Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998), Volume III of Homo sacer, the book is
at once more historically grounded and more politically audacious. Agamben
steps away from the pessimistic analytic of 'bare life' to recover some of
the redemptive energy that inhabits La communità che viene (1990), his
best-known work among English language readers. Perhaps it is the force
with which emergency powers have gripped the world in the past two years
that lends Stato di eccezione a political intensity that remains wholly
current even as it interrogates Roman republican law and plummets the
ontological depths of early 20th-century thinkers like Carl Schmitt and
Walter Benjamin.