Negativity and politics: Dionysus and dialectics from Kant to poststructuralism [made in istanbul]

by Diana H. Coole

Although frequently invoked by philosophers and political theorists, the theory of negativity has received remarkably little sustained attention.Negativity and Politicsis the first full-length study of this crucial topic within philosophy and political theory. Diana Coole explores the meaning of negativity in modern and postmodern thinking, and examines its significance for politics and our understanding of what constitutes the political. Beginning with an insightful reading of Kant'sCritique of Pure Reasonand a consideration of the work of Hegel, Coole goes on to discuss the importance of negativity in the thought of a number of key theorists including Nietzsche, Adorno, Kristeva, Freud, Foucault, Habermas, Deleuze, Derrida and Butler. Throughout, Coole clearly and skillfully shows how the problem of negativity lies at the heart of philosophical and political debate.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/0im1mm2jwty/NEGATIVITY_AND_POLITICS__DIANA_C.pdf

see google books

Politics, Theology and History

Politics, Theology and History
(Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion)
by Raymond Plant

# Paperback: 396 pages
# Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (January 29, 2001)

This major new book by a prominent academic and an active politician ranges widely across the disciplines of theology, political theory and philosophy. Lord Plant focuses on the role of religious belief in argument about public policy in a pluralistic society. He examines the political implications of Christian belief and its application in political debate. The book discusses the place of religious belief in the formation of policy and asks what issues in modern society might be the legitimate objects of a Christian social and political concern.

go!

Autonomia: Post-Political Politics

FROM GENERATION ONLINE

Autonomia: Post-Political Politics
(Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)
by Sylvère Lotringer (Editor) & Christian Marazzi (Editor)

Most of the writers who contributed to the issue were locked up at the time in Italian jails.... I was trying to draw the attention of the American Left, which still believed in Eurocommunism, to the fate of Autonomia. The survival of the last politically creative movement in the West was at stake, but no one in the United States seemed to realize that, or be willing to listen. Put together as events in Italy were unfolding, the Autonomia issue--which has no equivalent in Italy, or anywhere for that matter--arrived too late, but it remains an energizing account of a movement that disappeared without bearing a trace, but with a big future still ahead of it.
--Sylvère Lotringer

Semiotext(e) is reissuing in book form its legendary magazine issue Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, originally published in New York in 1980. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi with the direct participation of the main leaders and theorists of the Autonomist movement (including Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone, Paolo Virno, Sergio Bologna, and Franco Berardi), this volume is the only first-hand document and contemporaneous analysis that exists of the most innovative post-'68 radical movement in the West. The movement itself was broken when Autonomia members were falsely accused of (and prosecuted for) being the intellectual masterminds of the Red Brigades; but even after the end of Autonomia, this book remains a crucial testimony of the way this creative, futuristic, neo-anarchistic, postideological, and nonrepresentative political movement of young workers and intellectuals anticipated issues that are now confronting us in the wake of Empire. In the next two years, Semiotext(e) will publish eight books by such Italian "Post-Fordist" intellectuals as Antonio Negri, Christian Marazzi, Paolo Virno, and Bifo, as they update the theories of Autonomia for the new century.

download from Generation Online (4 seperate links)
or
via Mediafire (4in1 link)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: thanks to generation online for this wonderful work.

VIVA LA CRISE!

Lacoue-Labarthe - Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics

Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics
(Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)
by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Jacques Derrida (Introduction)
Christopher Fynsk (Translator)

Paperback: 308 pages
Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (January 1, 1998)

Philosopher, literary critic, translator (of Nietzsche and Benjamin), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is one of the leading intellectual figures in France. This volume of six essays deals with the relation between philosophy and aesthetics, particularly the role of mimesis in a metaphysics of representation.

Comment [1997]

“Typography is a book whose importance has not diminished since its first publication in French in 1979. On the contrary, I would say, it is only now that one can truly begin to appreciate the groundbreaking status of these essays. The points it makes, the way it approaches the questions of mimesis, fictionality, and figurality, is unique. There are no comparable books, or books that could supersede it.” —Rudolphe Gasché,

State University of New York, Buffalo

“Lacoue-Labarthe’s essays still set the standards for thinking through the problem of subjectivity without simply retreating behind insights already gained. But this book is much more than a collection of essays: it constitutes a philosophical project in its own right. Anybody interested in the problem of mimesis—whether from a psychoanalytic, platonic, or any other philosophical angle—cannot avoid an encounter with this book. Lacoue-Labarthe is a philosopher and a comparatist in the highest sense of the word, and the breadth of his knowledge and the rigor of his thought are exemplary.” —Eva Geulen,

New York University

Review

“In demonstrating how mimesis has determined philosophical thought, Lacoue-Labarthe provokes us into reconsidering our understanding of history and politics. . . . Together with the introduction, these essays are essential reading for anyone interested in Heidegger, postmodernism, and the history of mimesis in philosophy and literature.” —The Review of Metaphysics

salute!

[photo by Arif Aşçı]

BONUS TRACK

Sylvia Plath - On the Decline of Oracles

Agamben - The Coming Community

The Coming Community (Theory Out of Bounds, Vol 1)
by Giorgio Agamben
# Paperback: 105 pages
# Publisher: University of Minnesota Press (March 1993)

In this extraordinary and original philosophical achievement, Agamben develops the concept of community and the social implications of his philosophical thought. Agamben's exploration is, in part, a contemporary response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures.

"This book needs to be sampled for its purity and effervescence. There is an antic humor that I experience reading Agamben as well, and that occurs in acrobatic leaps from popular culture to writers like Aquinas. Beautifully translated by Michael Hardt, with the help of Brian Massumi, Mike Sullivan, and the author, Agamben comes through clearly in English, with an incandescence that is to be treasured, especially when it crops up in the realm of questions that point us in the direction of the very ground/lessness of our being—beings in the same spaces, yet not together." —SubStance

"A superb introduction to English-speaking readers of this important thinker and writer." —Rebecca Comay

"Giorgio Agamben, Italy's leading philosopher and essayist, is one of the most delicate and probing writers I have encountered in recent years. His work, which belongs to the type of writing we tend to associate with Walter Benjamin, is elegant, cheerful and--to resurrect a somewhat exhausted term--utterly revolutionary." —Avital Ronell

"Agamben's text is a rare philosophical meditation on community as a kind of linguistic belonging that moves beyond both identity and universality. Erudite and expansive, yet delivered with epigrammatic ease, this writing brings forth the most promising equivocations of meaning in Talmudic tales, Plato, Spinoza, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein to avow the contingency and communal 'being' within a history whose value is its irreparability. This is a moving and disruptive work that brings what is most dynamic in ontological thought to bear on what is most difficult to think about: contemporary forms of sociality." —Judith Butler

"The Coming Community tries to designate a community beyond any conception available under this name; not a community of essence, a being-together of existences; that is to say: precisely what political as well as religious identities can no longer grasp. Nothing less." —Jean-Luc Nancy

here

Agamben - State of Exception

State of Exception (Paperback)
by Giorgio Agamben
# Paperback: 104 pages
# Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (January 15, 2005)

From the Inside Flap
Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states.

The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a working paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt.

except me

The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the making of State Power

The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the making of State Power


Islamism is often associated with oppositional social movements. However, increasingly, Muslim states too have served as agents of Islamism. They have adopted Islamization strategies, and realigned state ideology and policy-making to reflect Islamist ideals and to fulfill demands of Islamic ideology. They have done so not only as a reaction to Islamist challenges from below but also to harness the energies of Islamism to expand state power and capacity. By co-opting Islamism, they have strengthened the postcolonial state. Pakistan during the Zia ul-Haq period, and Malaysia under Mahathir Mohammad have been at the forefront of this trend, devising Islamization from above strategies that allowed these weak states to effectively alleviate limitations before exercise of state power and to pursue goals such as economic growth. The Islamization of the postcolonial state underscores the importance of religion and culture to state power and capacity.

"an islamic state is coming soon!" it writes

Agamben - Means Without End

Means without End

Notes on Politics

Giorgio Agamben
Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino

An essential reevaluation of the proper role of politics in contemporary life.

A critical rethinking of the categories of politics within a new sociopolitical and historical context, this book builds on the previous work of the distinguished political philosopher Giorgio Agamben to address the status and nature of politics itself. Bringing politics face-to-face with its own failures of consciousness and consequence, Agamben frames his analysis in terms of clear contemporary relevance. He proposes, in his characteristically allusive and intriguing way, a politics of gesture-a politics of means without end.

Among the topics Agamben takes up are the "properly" political paradigms of experience, as well as those generally not viewed as political. He begins by elaborating work on biopower begun by Foucault, returning the natural life of humans to the center of the polis and considering it as the very basis for politics. He then considers subjects such as the state of exception (the temporary suspension of the juridical order); the concentration camp (a zone of indifference between public and private and, at the same time, the secret matrix of the political space in which we live); the refugee, who, breaking the bond between the human and the citizen, moves from marginal status to the center of the crisis of the modern nation-state; and the sphere of pure means or gestures (those gestures that, remaining nothing more than means, liberate themselves from any relation to ends) as the proper sphere of politics. Attentive to the urgent demands of the political moment, as well as to the bankruptcy of political discourse, Agamben's work brings politics back to life, and life back to politics

hmmm

Agamben - Homo Sacer

Giorgio Agamben - Homo Sacer

tr by: Daniel Heller-Roazen
Stanford University Press 1998


The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy’s most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault’s fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle’s notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over “life” is implicit.The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign’s status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective “naked life” of all individuals.

life

Lacoue-Labarthe - Heidegger, Art and Politics

Heidegger, Art and Politics by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

from wikipedia
Lacoue-Labarthe received his doctorat d'état in 1987 with a jury led by Gérard Granel and including Derrida, George Steiner and Jean-François Lyotard. The monograph submitted for that degree was La fiction du politique (1988; trans., Heidegger, Art, and Politics), a study of Heidegger's relation to National Socialism. These works predate the explosion of interest in the political dimensions of Heidegger's thought which followed the publication of a book by Victor Farías.

all that silence prevails

UNHEIL

Technology And Inequality

Technology And In/equality - Questioning The Information Society

This piece explores the diverse implications of the new information and communication technologies through case studies of their applications in three main areas - media, education and training, and work. Questions of access to, and control over, crucial resources such as information, knowledge, skills and income are addressed, drawing upon insights from science and technology studies, innovation theory, sociological and cultural studies. Some of the key issues addressed include: democracy and broadcasting technologies; gender, class and ethnicity in technological education and lifelong learning; class, gender and skills in the workplace; and the global economic inequalities associated with technological innovation. All of the chapters question the meanings of the terms 'technology' and 'inequality' and of the widespread association of technology with progress. Contributors to this book develop a critique of the information society by addressing questions of equality and inequality in ways that combine structural analysis with an analysis of individual and collective agency. Written with a non-specialist readership in mind, all complex theories and key concepts are carefully explained making the book easily accessible and relevant to a wide range of actors. (Review)

download in order to demolish the inequality of information