The new issue of Epoché has just appeared. This is a special volume on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the central theme and essays were put together by Professor Alejandro Vallega as guest editor of the journal.
As Professor Vallega explains in his introduction, the selected essays show that, on the one hand, “Agamben’s thought remains critically committed to the history of philosophy. On the other hand… Agamben’s engagement with the history of Western thought occurs as the site of a transformative critical thinking that seeks a path for philosophy out of its concrete contexts. In this sense his work follows a discipline of exposure that seems to violate history. This occurs as he critically reaches for what has been included through exclusion – in the name of history, language, the law, the human, and life – and as he thinks these operative fundamental conceptual structures out of the concrete negativity figured by ‘life’ under the sovereign exception. Thus, on the face of normalizations and biopolitics, of Western hegemonic power and globalizing, we are invited to think at the limit of our understanding of language, community, humanity, and freedom.”
The selections in the volume take their departure from discussions of Agamben’s work in relation to specific historical figures and periods (Plato, Hegel, German Romanticism, Foucault, and deconstruction), and they engage critically with questions of language, community, the political, play and infancy, aesthetics, and the spectacle.