scholarly journals What Is a Form-of-Life?: Giorgio Agamben and the Practice of Poverty

Author(s):  
Steven DeCaroli

This chapter, and the one following, focus on Agamben’s recent work on form-of-life and the Franciscan practice of poverty. DeCaroli argues that form-of-life should be understood as a particular form of life that is aware of the contingency of the rules that govern our existence, and does not attempt to replace them, but to patiently expose the machinery of their operation. Franciscanism was an incomplete attempt to develop such a form-of-life through a community of non-appropriative use that claimed no social or juridical foundation. The name for this way of living was poverty – which does not mean poverty in material things (although the Friars did live modestly) – but rather poverty in those less tangible things, such as possession and privilege, that profoundly shape our social reality, but whose operation we are often only faintly aware of.

1970 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-71
Author(s):  
Лариса Міщиха

У статті зроблено спробу проаналізувати феномен "досвід" у форматі дослідження творчого потенціалу особистості. Теоретико-методологічними засадами заявленої вище проблеми стали концептуальні засади гуманістичної психології, феноменологічного підходу. Досвід, як вагома складова творчого потенціалу особистості, розглядається у співвідношенні таких провідних тенденцій, як стереотипність та оригінальність. Наголошується, що досвід, з одного боку, може сприяти все більшій алгоритмізації та стереотипізації, консерватизму у розв’язанні нових задач, що безумовно перешкоджає творчості. З іншого боку, в осіб з високим творчим потенціалом він стає інтегрованою формою життєтворчості, де в структурі старих знань завжди знайдеться місце новим знанням як привнесених "ззовні", так і знанням, що їх отримує автор через власні ініціації, пошук, накреслюючи власноруч вектор руху. Звідси він отримує "побічний продукт" творчої діяльності – саморозвиток. Відтак творчий досвід трактується як такий, що містить у собі акумуляцію та інтеграцію усіх прижиттєвих творчих напрацювань особистості, готовність її до творчої діяльності та безперервної освіти. Суб’єкт творчої діяльності залишається відкритим новому досвіду, сповнений готовності до нового пізнання, творчих пошуків. In the article there was an attempt to analyze the phenomenon "experience" in the form of investigating a person’s creative potential. The theoretic methodological background of the performed above problem is conceptual background of humanistic psychology and phenomenological approach. Experience as an essential part of a person’s creative potential is regarded in relation to such leading trends as stereotype and originality. On the one hand, the experience is emphasized to be able to promote the model of algorithm and stereotype, conservatism in solving new tasks that is certain to inhibit creativity. On the other hand, personalities with high creative potential have an experience that is becoming an integral form of life work where in the structure of old knowledge you can always find a place for both new ones coming out "from inside" and the ones the author takes due to his own initiation and search. In this way he sketches motion vector and gets the "by-product" of his creativity, it means self-development. Hence, creative experience is interpreted as the one to absorb accumulation and integration of all creative experience in a person’s life; also his/her readiness to creativity and continuing education. The subject of creativity remains opened to a new experience that is fully ready for a new cognition and creativity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 157-175
Author(s):  
Wécio Pinheiro Araújo

Resumo: Em O Capital, Marx nos alertou que a mercadoria tem um caráter misterioso que carrega “sutilezas metafísicas e argúcias teológicas”. Este artigo tenta decifrar um pouco desse mistério buscando decodifica-lo naquilo que denominamos como a estranha objetividade do valor. Para isso, analisamos a relação entre a ideologia e o valor a partir da crítica marxiana à mercadoria, consignada à lógica de Hegel. Vemos que o valor se constitui como razão ontológica da mercadoria enquanto produto do processo de trabalho que carrega uma racionalidade imanente, isto é, um espírito socialmente produzido que se objetiva à medida que é vivenciado pelos indivíduos como uma lógica social que rege as relações nesta sociedade. Isso se dá por meio de “sutilezas metafísicas” na formação da realidade social marcada por contradições estabelecidas entre, de um lado, o conteúdo objetivo das relações sociais, e de outro, a forma como essas relações são vivenciadas pela consciência na sociedade capitalista. Nesta relação entre conteúdo e forma, encontramos determinações de profundidade ontológica entre o valor e a ideologia, enquanto forma social que opera harmonizando as contradições constituintes da realidade social, a exemplo do que acontece no trabalho assalariado. A mediação ideológica se põe como uma progressão imanente à materialização da vivência concreta da relação entre capital e trabalho no salário, de maneira a naturalizar a exploração que se esconde na estranha objetividade do valor que se realiza na troca de mercadorias. Concluímos que a conexão ontológica entre o ser social e a mercadoria é socialmente ubíqua, precisamente por conta do seu caráter ideológico na formação da sociabilidade a partir do processo de trabalho subjugado ao capital.  Palavras-chave: Valor. Ideologia. Trabalho, Capital. Salário.  Abstract: In Capital, Marx warned us that the commodity has a mysterious character bearing "metaphysical subtleties and theological insights." This article attempts to decipher a little of this mystery by decoding it into what we call the strange objectivity of value. For this, we analyze the relation between ideology and value from the Marxian critique of the commodity, consigned to the Hegelian logic. We see that value is constituted as the ontological reason of the commodity as the product of the labor process that carries an immanent rationality, that is, a socially produced spirit that is objectified as it is experienced by the individuals as a social logic that governs the relations in this society. This is done through "metaphysical subtleties" in the formation of social reality marked by contradictions established between, on the one hand, the objective content of social relations, and on the other, the way in which these relations are experienced by consciousness in capitalist society. In this relationship between content and form, we find determinations of ontological depth between value and ideology, as a social form that operates by harmonizing the constituent contradictions of social reality, as in wage labor. Ideological mediation is seen as an immanent progression to the materialization of the concrete experience of the relation between capital and labor in wage, in order to naturalize the exploitation that is hidden in the strange objectivity of the value that is realized in the exchange of commodities. We conclude that the ontological connection between the social being and the commodity is socially ubiquitous precisely because of its ideological character in the formation of sociability from the labor process subjugated to capital.  Keywords: Value. Labor. Ideology. Capital. Wage.  REFERÊNCIAS  ADORNO, Theodor W. Teoria Estética. [Asthetische Theorie]. Tradução de Artur Morão. – São Paulo : Livraria Martins Fontes, 1988.  ADORNO, Theodor W. Três estudos sobre Hegel. [Drei Studien zu Hegel]. Tradução: Ulisses Razzante Vaccari. – 1. Ed. – São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2013.  ARAÚJO, Wécio Pinheiro. Ideologia e capital: crítica da razão imanente à sociedade moderna. Tese de doutorado. João Pessoa, PB; Leipzig, Saxônia, UFPB/UFPE/UFRN-HGB, 2018.  ARTHUR, Christopher J. A nova dialética e “O Capital” de Marx. Tradução de Pedro C. Chadarevian. – São Paulo : Edipro, 2016.   DUSSEL, Enrique. A Produção Teórica de Marx: um comentário sobre os Grundrisse. Tradução de José Paulo Netto. – 1 ed. – São Paulo : Expressão Popular, 2012. GERAS, Norman. Marx and the Critique of Political Economy. In: Ideology and Social Science: politics, sociology, anthropology, economics, history. – Ed. by Robin Blackburn, Fontana/Collins, 1977, p. 284-305.  JAEGGI, Rahel. Alienation: News directions in Critical Theory. Columbia Uni. Press, 2014.  HERÁCLITO, de Éfeso. Heráclito : fragmentos contextualizados. Tradução, apresentação e comentários Alexandre Costa. – São Paulo : Odysseus Editora, 2012.  HEGEL, G. W. F. Fenomenologia do Espírito [Phänomenologie des Geistes]. Tradução de Paulo Meneses; com a colaboração de Karl-Heinz Efken, e José Nogueira Machado. – 5. ed. – Petrópolis, RJ : Vozes : Bragança Paulista, Editora Universitária São Francisco, 2008.  MARX, Karl. Das Kapital: Der Produktionprozess des Kapitals. Erster Band, Erstes Buch (Kapitel XVI-LII). Hamburg, Nikol Verlag., 2016.  MARX, Karl. Grundrisse: manuscritos econômicos de 1857-1858 : esboços da crítica da economia política. – supervisão editorial Mario Duayer; tradução Mario Duayer, Nélio Schneider (colaboração de Alice Helga Werner e Rudiger Hoffman). – São Paulo : Boitempo; Rio de Janeiro: Ed. UFRJ, 2011.  MARX, Karl. Manuscritos econômico-filosóficos. [Ökonomie-philosophische Manuskripte] Tradução, apresentação e notas de Jesus Ranieri. - 2. reimp. - São Paulo : Boitempo Editorial, 2008.  MARX, Karl. O Capital – Crítica da Economia Política. Livro 1 – O Processo de Produção do Capital. Vol. I – 10 ª. Edição, Tradução de Reginaldo Sant’ Anna. Do original em alemão: DAS KAPITAL – Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Buch I: Der Produktionsprozes des Kapitals, Quarta edição, 1890). São Paulo : DIFEL, 1985.  MARX, Karl. O Capital – Crítica da Economia Política. Livro 1 – O processo de produção do capital. Do original em alemão: DAS KAPITAL – Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Buch 1: Der Produktionsprozess des Kapitals.  – São Paulo: Boitempo, 2013.   NICHOLS, Bill. Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.


Author(s):  
Vadim Markovich Rozin

This article formulates the task of constructing a new concept of art that corresponds with the challenges of time and the transformed artistic practice. The author aims to solve the problem relevant to his time, which is similar to the problem solved by Aristotle in the context of creating the “Poetics”. The theoretical provisions of the new concept are preceded by reconstruction of the work of the prominent Israeli writer Meir Shalev and the creators of the American TV series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”. These examples demonstrate that although these works describe the events of everyday life, the latter are taken not as the facts typical for cognition, but are being transformed for the construction of artistic reality. Analysis is conducted on the techniques and expressive means used in creating the artistic reality. The hypothesis is advances that the comprehension of the nuances of artistic reality requires the analysis of artistic communication, as well as conceptualizations of art. Within the framework of artistic communication, the author examines the position, motives and activity of the writer and the audience. It is assumed that on the one hand, they live through their problems in the artistic form and create their works (writer, artist), or they enter the artistic reality and live through its events (reader, viewer). All these statements are supported by the results of the research of the genesis of art conducted by the author. In conclusion, the author lists the ground plan of the new concept of art, namely the introduction.


LingVaria ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2(32)) ◽  
pp. 301-316
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Sękowska

Multilingualism in the Literature of Personal Document: Functions of Transcode Markers The article is dedicated to semantic functions of transcode markers in Polish émigré literature. Two diaries, written respectively by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and Jan Lechoń, constitute the exemplification material. The diary genre, similarly to letters and memoirs, lends itself to introducing this kind of markers. Their presence reflects the multilingual competence of the author, as well as his mental, social, and psychological experience. The second language enables broadening the referential space of the first language and conveying emotions. The strategy of code switching depends on the motivation and goal of writing a given text. In Herling-Grudziński’s Journal Written by Night, foreign words from different languages abound. They fulfill several functions in the text, namely: metalinguistic, index and stylistic function. Their presence is justified by the content and by the role adopted by the author – the one of an interpreter of the political and social reality. The Diary by Lechoń is different in terms of types of predominant functions which can be distinguished in his text. Besides commenting on the émigré life, the author focuses on his emotions and experiences. Therefore, index and metalinguistic functions turn out to be the most important. Pointing out different strategies of introducing transcode markers in a text by its author is fundamental for the research on bilingualism in émigré writing.


Konturen ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Jonathan Monroe

Opening questions about “things” onto the bureaucratically-maintained, compartmentalized discursive, disciplinary claims of “philosophy,” “theory,” and “poetry,” “Urgent Matter” explores these three terms in relation to one another through attention to recent work by Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, the German-American poet Rosmarie Waldrop, and the German poet Ulf Stolterfoht, whose fachsprachen. Gedichte. I-IX (Lingos I-IX. Poems) Waldrop rendered into English in an award-winning translation. The difference between the "things" called "poetry" and "philosophy," as now institutionalized within the academy, is not epistemological, ontological, ahistorical, but a matter of linguistic domains, of so-called concrete "images" as the policed domain of the former and of "abstraction" as the policed domain of the latter. Challenging the binary logics that dominate language use in diverse discursive/disciplinary cultures, Waldrop’s linguistically self-referential, appositional procedures develop ways to use language that are neither linear, nor so much without direction, as multi-directional, offering complexes of adjacency, of asides, of digression, of errancy, of being “alongside,” in lieu of being “opposed to,” that constitute at once a poetics, an aesthetics, an ethics, and a politics. Elaborating a complementary understanding of poetry as “the most philosophic of all writing,” a medium of being “contemporary,” Waldrop and Stolterfoht question poetry’s purposes as one kind of language apparatus among others in the general economy. Whatever poetry might be, it aspires to be in their hands not a thing in itself but a form of self-questioning, of all discourses, all disciplines, that “thing” that binds “poetry” and “philosophy” together, as urgent matter, in continuing.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-221
Author(s):  
Barbara Józefik

Complex and changing social conditions engender the need to find a language to describe the phenomena and to elucidate their mechanisms. One possibility is the language of psychotherapy, which in itself is complex because it combines the various currents which have emerged in psychotherapy’s more than one hundred years of history. The author’s aim is to analyze the relations between culture, social reality (including Poland’s), and psychotherapy. On the one hand, she attempts to view psychotherapy as a cultural discourse, and on the other, to understand culture and social phenomena from the perspective of a psychotherapy office.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-121

This article offers a critical analysis of Euromodernity through an engagement with the Africana existentialism of Lewis R. Gordon. Drawing on Gordon’s recent work Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021) as well as Frantz Fanon, the author argues for the need to decolonize modernity by decoupling Europe and reason, freedom, knowledge, and power. Understanding what it means to be a human being involves an ongoing commitment understanding its relationship to the larger structures of reality, including social reality.


2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 617-642
Author(s):  
Antonio Di Chiro

In this essay we will try to analyze the thought of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben on the pandemic. The aim of the work is twofold. On the one hand, we will try to demonstrate that Agamben’s positions on the pandemic are not to be understood as mere extemporaneous statements, but as integral parts of his philosophy. On the other hand, we will try to show how these positions are based on a deeply paranoid and anti-scientific vision, since Agamben believes that the effects of the epidemic have been exaggerated by the centers of power in order to create a “state of exception” that allows to crumble social life and to use the fear of poverty as a tool to dominate society. We will try to demonstrate that it is precisely starting from the critique of Agamben’s positions that it is possible to rethink a philosophy and a politic to come and a new reorganization of social and intimate relations between human beings.


Author(s):  
Marinos Diamantides ◽  
Anton Schütz

The globalisation of the Western-Christian institutional order in its manifest legal aspects, but not necessarily of its latent religious aspects, puts a supplement of importance onto the need of grasping its genesis. The most decisive note is located — or so we argue — in unfolding the classical division between polis and politics on the one hand, and the household and the art of handling it (management or oikonomia) on the other, in Christian times. These divides delivered the blueprint for the divide that would differentiate, over more than a millennium, the public power of the Roman Empire in its Eastern and Western re-embodiments from that of the Church. We also refer, by way of contrast, to the pre-Christian biblical model of the divide. Further, by contrast to Giorgio Agamben, we specify that while the today thoroughly studied occidental West, availing of a simplified trinitarian creed, instituted legitimate public power as subject to on-going conflictual competition between the so-called ‘two powers’, the still much less studied East struggled to preserve the unity, or as the Byzantines called it, 'symphony', of the Whole in line with its (original) version of Trinitarianism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (7) ◽  
pp. 878-891
Author(s):  
Tyson E Lewis

In this article, the author problematizes two well-known positions on the relationship between means and ends in education. On the one side, there are those who problematize the means of education without necessarily redefining its ends, and on the other hand, there are those who challenge the purported ends of education while maintaining certain means. These two positions can take any number of progressive and conservative forms. While there are virtues to these projects, this article argues that both take for granted an underlying sense of education as a means to an end, and thus lend themselves to some version of instrumentality. Proposing a radically different formulation, this article turns to Giorgio Agamben and his notions of the impotential act, pure means, and use. The author suggests that the current challenge to think education beyond instrumentality ought to conceptualize education not as a means to an end or an end in itself but as a pure means. The article then offers three versions of education as a pure means: allowing, preferring not to, and contemplating. Each of these examples proposes a specific kind of inoperative, non-instrumental form of educational life for teachers and studiers, respectively.


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