A Revision without Reserve. Agamben’s Homo Sacer
Over the course of two decades, from 1995 to 2015, Giorgio Agamben published a series of nine books, not in sequence but conceived from the beginning as parts of a project sharing the title of its first volume, Homo sacer. These nine books have now been collected into a single volume edition in French (2016), English (2017), and Italian (2018), rendering visible the extent to which the project as a whole amounts to a radical revision of Western philosophy yet also enacted a painstaking self-revision in its course. With the entire trajectory of Homo sacer now evident in its completed arch and rearranged order, the symposium sets out to explore crucial concepts and issues at stake in the project and the new contours they reveal within the larger framework, while also interrogating the hidden spots in the work, unresolved points from which new researches will depart, as Agamben himself has incessantly done with his ever-growing meshwork of references and interlocutors. As he vowed in 1995, at the very outset of his endeavor: ‘… many of these notions demanded — in the urgency of catastrophe — to be revised without reserve.’
The day-long symposium includes a morning workshop on the last text Agamben added to the single-volume edition, well after the individual publication of its last book Stasis — a fourteen-page ‘Note on War, Play, and the Enemy’, in which Agamben takes a newly measured distance from Carl Schmitt’s understanding of the political as resting on the possibility of violent conflict. After two panels with short presentations and time for discussion, the symposium will conclude with an evening event with Bettine Menke and Francesca Raimondi, a discussion revolving around the relationship between Agamben’s project and its historical context, the urgencies and catastrophes he sought to address, as well as alternative modes of addressing them.
In English
With
Christiane Frey
Francesco Giusti
Damiano Sacco
Filippo Trentin
Katrin Trüstedt
Tom Vandeputte
Facundo Vega
Arnd Wedemeyer
Evening event with
Bettine Menke and Francesca Raimondi
Organized by
An ICI Event organized by Francesco Giusti, Damiano Sacco, and Facundo Vega, in cooperation with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Berlino