- Title Pages
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Agamben as a Reader
-
1 Aristotle -
2 Walter Benjamin -
3 Guy Debord -
4 Michel Foucault -
5 Martin Heidegger -
6 Paul the Apostle -
7 Carl Schmitt -
8 Hannah Arendt -
9 Georges Bataille -
10 Émile Benveniste -
11 Dante Alighieri -
12 Gilles Deleuze -
13 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel -
14 Friedrich Hölderlin -
15 Franz Kafka -
16 Immanuel Kant -
17 Friedrich Nietzsche -
18 Plato -
19 Plotinus -
20 Marquis de Sade -
21 Baruch Spinoza -
22 Aby Warburg -
23 Theodor W. Adorno -
24 Jacques Derrida -
25 Sigmund Freud -
26 Jacques Lacan -
27 Karl Marx -
28 Antonio Negri -
29 Gershom Scholem -
30 Simone Weil - Conclusion: Agamben as a Reader of Agamben
- Contributors
- Index
Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno
- Chapter:
- (p.219) 23 Theodor W. Adorno
- Source:
- Agamben's Philosophical Lineage
- Author(s):
Colby Dickinson
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
In his somewhat controversial book Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben makes brief reference to Theodor Adorno’s apparently contradictory remarks on perceptions of death post-Auschwitz, positions that Adorno had taken concerning Nazi genocidal actions that had seemed also to reflect something horribly errant in the history of thought itself. There was within such murderous acts, he had claimed, a particular degradation of death itself, a perpetration of our humanity bound in some way to affect our perception of reason itself. The contradictions regarding Auschwitz that Agamben senses to be latent within Adorno’s remarks involve the intuition ‘on the one hand, of having realized the unconditional triumph of death against life; on the other, of having degraded and debased death. Neither of these charges – perhaps like every charge, which is always a genuinely legal gesture – succeed in exhausting Auschwitz’s offense, in defining its case in point’ (RA 81). And this is the stance that Agamben wishes to hammer home quite emphatically vis-à-vis Adorno’s limitations, ones that, I would only add, seem to linger within Agamben’s own formulations in ways that he has still not come to reckon with entirely: ‘This oscillation’, he affirms, ‘betrays reason’s incapacity to identify the specific crime of Auschwitz with certainty’ (RA 81).
Keywords: Theodor W. Adorno, Auschwitz, Infancy and History
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- Title Pages
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Agamben as a Reader
-
1 Aristotle -
2 Walter Benjamin -
3 Guy Debord -
4 Michel Foucault -
5 Martin Heidegger -
6 Paul the Apostle -
7 Carl Schmitt -
8 Hannah Arendt -
9 Georges Bataille -
10 Émile Benveniste -
11 Dante Alighieri -
12 Gilles Deleuze -
13 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel -
14 Friedrich Hölderlin -
15 Franz Kafka -
16 Immanuel Kant -
17 Friedrich Nietzsche -
18 Plato -
19 Plotinus -
20 Marquis de Sade -
21 Baruch Spinoza -
22 Aby Warburg -
23 Theodor W. Adorno -
24 Jacques Derrida -
25 Sigmund Freud -
26 Jacques Lacan -
27 Karl Marx -
28 Antonio Negri -
29 Gershom Scholem -
30 Simone Weil - Conclusion: Agamben as a Reader of Agamben
- Contributors
- Index