جستجوی مقالات مرتبط با کلیدواژه "agamben" در نشریات گروه "فلسفه و کلام"

The main concern of Agamben in The Man without Content is the problem of art as a result of and even the foundation of contemporary nihilism. He believes that art since it has begun to be treated as a subject of aesthetics and taste has lost its fundamental functions and powers in opening the human world and revealing the truth. Drawing on Heidegger, Benjamin, and Baudelaire, this article attempts to analyze and interpret the thoughts of Giorgio Agamben about the destruction of aesthetics, what he means by that and how he proceeds. Following Heidegger, Agamben intends to destroy aesthetics in search of rediscovering and reviving the origins (archai) that are hidden and forgotten in the ruins of the tradition. Based on the concept of poiesis as the essential feature of art, in contrast to praxis as the only action of man in modernity, he tries to diagnose the contemporary condition of art. In the search of original structure or the essence of art as poetic action of human beings, Agamben believes that the role of art in our contemporary situation is to fill the gap between the past and the present because in our nihilistic situation tradition cannot transfer its meaning and truth to us, so we encounter it just as a cultural heritage.

Despite Agamben’s assertion that his project somehow corrects or completes Foucault’s political thoughts, it seems that there are some deep and fundamental differences between them. Foucault rejects any kind of theory of power and believes that the analysis of power in the contemporary world should be freed from juridical-theological presuppositions. In contrast, in Agamben’s thought we come across some obvious elements of the classical understating of power and its theological presupposition so that political theology is a basic constituent of his theory about sovereign power. Though Foucault’s aim is mostly to analyze power’s mechanisms according to a micro-politics, he never thinks about the role of a person or state and his/her or its decision as a foundation for political situation. In contrast, he regards such a point of view as the feature of the classical theories about power. For him power is a Nietzschean concept which is the foundation of everything. Agamben, following Schmitt, regards power as the sovereign power. He believes that there is a logic for our contemporary political situation called “the state of exception”, that is the result of sovereign decision. This article tries to analyze the meaning and mechanism of biopower and biopolitics in both thinkers and explain the way that Agamben’s political theory can be said to be rooted in Foucault’s analysis.