I enjoyed the point about the camp being the proper site of analysis, with it being sort of improper to try and get inside the nazi brain. I missed that in my reading of homo sacer so very cool to be reminded of it here. Do you agree with Agamben on that point? How does that mesh with your interests in Adorno, Freud etc ?
Thanks for reading and for your comment! I think, despite the ultimate divergence in precisely where the analyses of Agamben and Adorno(-Horkheimer) are articulated, the two examinations of the catastrophe of fascism come together in that they seek its deep historical roots in ancient Greece, that is, the beginning of our entire civilisation. Jessica Whyte in her book on Agamben and politics sort of gestures towards this; but, as you know, most people think Agamben with Foucault – which, of course, makes sense, given it was Agamben who largely popularised Foucault’s discourse of biopolitics after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the resultant decline of Marxism as a theoretical apparatus. Returning to my point, though: Agamben makes Auschwitz legible in Greek politics, as I discussed here, while Adorno makes it legible in Greek literature (specifically the illustration of the simultaneous domination of inner and outer nature that Homer provides). What I like about both of these analyses is that they challenge us to rethink the constitutive terms of our entire civilisation – to deal with the fact that something, many thousands of years ago, went very badly wrong, and we have been living with this disaster ever since. This sort of grand analysis seems appropriate to the terrifying dimensions of the catastrophe – which makes us feel like we are drowning. The head (the pathology of a mutilated inner nature) and the camp, I would think, are privileged objects for working what went wrong through and retrieving alternative possibilities (whether a politics beyond biopolitics, or a reconstituted Enlightenment with substantial aims such as progress and freedom); so, in this sense, I see these two inquiries as having a sort of correspondence, or even unity.
I enjoyed the point about the camp being the proper site of analysis, with it being sort of improper to try and get inside the nazi brain. I missed that in my reading of homo sacer so very cool to be reminded of it here. Do you agree with Agamben on that point? How does that mesh with your interests in Adorno, Freud etc ?
Thanks for reading and for your comment! I think, despite the ultimate divergence in precisely where the analyses of Agamben and Adorno(-Horkheimer) are articulated, the two examinations of the catastrophe of fascism come together in that they seek its deep historical roots in ancient Greece, that is, the beginning of our entire civilisation. Jessica Whyte in her book on Agamben and politics sort of gestures towards this; but, as you know, most people think Agamben with Foucault – which, of course, makes sense, given it was Agamben who largely popularised Foucault’s discourse of biopolitics after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the resultant decline of Marxism as a theoretical apparatus. Returning to my point, though: Agamben makes Auschwitz legible in Greek politics, as I discussed here, while Adorno makes it legible in Greek literature (specifically the illustration of the simultaneous domination of inner and outer nature that Homer provides). What I like about both of these analyses is that they challenge us to rethink the constitutive terms of our entire civilisation – to deal with the fact that something, many thousands of years ago, went very badly wrong, and we have been living with this disaster ever since. This sort of grand analysis seems appropriate to the terrifying dimensions of the catastrophe – which makes us feel like we are drowning. The head (the pathology of a mutilated inner nature) and the camp, I would think, are privileged objects for working what went wrong through and retrieving alternative possibilities (whether a politics beyond biopolitics, or a reconstituted Enlightenment with substantial aims such as progress and freedom); so, in this sense, I see these two inquiries as having a sort of correspondence, or even unity.