Friday 8 January 2010

Giorgio Agamben - Theory Out of Bounds

'The movement Plato describes as erotic anamnesis is the movement that transports the object not toward another thing or another place, but toward its own taking-place - toward the Idea.' Whatever 2,2

(Unbaptised children) ' The greatest punishment - the lack of vision of God - thus turns into a natural joy: Irremediably lost, they persist without pain in divine abandon.'2,3

'Ethics begins only when the good it revealed to consist in nothing other than a grasping of evil and when the authentic and the proper have no other content than the inauthentic and the improper....On the contrary, according to etymology of the verb patefacere, which means "to open" and is inked to spatium, truth is revealed only by giving space to a non-truth - that is, as a taking-place of the false, as an exposure of its innermost impropriety.'
Taking Place IV12,5
'every consolidation of the walls of paradise was matched by a deepening of the infernal abyss.'13,5
'The transcendent, therefor is not a supreme entity above all things; rather, the pure transcendent is the taking-place of everything.'14,5

'How can we understand the indifference of the common human form with respect to singluar humans?'17,9

'The passage from potentiality to act, from language to the word, from the common to the proper, comes about every time as a shuttling in both directions along a line of spakling alternation on which common nature and singularity, potentiality and act changes roles and interpenetrate. The being that is engendered on this line is whatever being, and the manner in which it passes from the common to the proper and from the porper to the common is called usage - or rather, ethos.'19,7

'The root of all pure joy and sadness is that the world is as it is.' 90, 1

'Non-thingness (spirituaity) means losing oneself in things, losing oneself to the point of not being able to concieve of anyting but things, and only then, in the experience of the irremediable thingness of the world, bumping into a limit, touching it. (This is the meaning of the word "exposure".)102,3

'Impotence or the power to not-be is the root of evil only in this secondary sense. Fleeing from or own impotence, or rather trying to adopt it as a weapon, we construct the malevolent power that oppresses those who show us their weakness; and failing our innermost possibility of not-being, we fall away from the only thing that makes love possible. Creation - or existence - is not the victorious struggle of a power to be against a power to not-be; it is rather the impotence of God with repsect to his own impotence, his allowing - being able to not not-be - a contingency to be. Or rather: It is the birth in God of love.' 32,3

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