Giorgio Agamben. On Contemporaneity. 2007 3/4

http://www.egs.edu/ Giorgio Agamben speaking about the notion of contemporaneity, what does it mean be contemporary, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, paradigm, anachronism to the present, history, demands of the time, distancing from and belonging to a period, a relationship to time, Alain Badiou, the century, personal experience, blood, and life, historical collective time, the beast, backbone. Free public open philosophy and politics lecture for the students of the European Graduate School EGS, Media and Communication Studies department program, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, 2007, Giorgio Agamben.

Giorgio Agamben, born 1942, is an Italian philosopher who teaches at the Università IUAV di Venezia, the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and previously at the University of Macerata in Italy. He also has held visiting appointments at several American universities, European Graduate School and at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf.

Agamben's best known work includes his investigations of the concepts of state of exception and homo sacer. Agamben received the Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon in 2006. Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where he wrote a thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. Agamben participated in Martin Heidegger's Le Thor seminars on Heraclitus and Hegel in 1966 and 1968. In the 1970s he worked primarily on linguistics, philology, poetics, and medievalist topics, where he began to elaborate his primary concerns, though without as yet inflecting them in a specifically political direction. In 1974--1975 he was a fellow at the Warburg Institute, where he wrote Stanzas 1979.

Close to Elsa Morante, on whom he has written, Pier Paolo Pasolini in whose The Gospel According to St. Matthew he played the part of Philip, Italo Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, his strongest influences include Walter Benjamin, whose complete works he edited in Italian translation, and the German jurist Carl Schmitt, whom he frequently cites. Agamben's political thought draws on Michel Foucault and on Italian neo-Marxist thought.

In his published writings and interviews he represents himself as a public thinker interested in language and social conflicts on a global scale. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. University of Minnesota Press 1993, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience 1993, The Coming Community 1993, Idea of Prose 1995, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press 1998, The Man without Content 1999, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics 1999, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy 1999, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics 2000, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive 2000, The Open: Man and Animal 2004, State of Exception 2005, The Time That Remains: A Commentary On The Letter To The Romans 2005, Various articles published by Multitudes, The State of Emergency, extract from a lecture given at the Centre Roland Barthes-University of Paris VII, Denis Diderot, Italian Nei campi dei senza nome, Il Manifesto, 1998 November 3, French Gênes et la peste Genoa and the plague, L'Humanité. Saas Fee August 2007

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