Plato and the Invention of Life Itself

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Naas
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
The Body ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Life Itself

The final chapter takes many of the insights from the previous chapters in order to show, through a more general reading of Plato’s dialogues, how Plato attempts always to move from what is commonly called life, that is, from a more biological conception of life, a life of the body or of the animal, to a spiritual life or a life of the soul, that is, from something like bare life to real life, from particular life-forms to an essence or form of life itself, the only life, in end, worthy of the name for Plato. This chapter thus concentrates on several later dialogues in which Plato begins to distinguish two different valences of life, human life in the polis (bios) as opposed to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” (zōē), but also, and more importantly, human life as opposed to something like real life. It is the initial distinction between human life and bare life that allows for this reinscription or transformation of bare life into something like real life or life itself, a transformation, it is argued, that is decisive not just for Plato but for the entire neo-Platonic and Christian tradition that takes its inspiration from him.

Soul Incorporated

Slavic Review ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 772-800
Author(s):  
Nariman Skakov
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Biology I ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
A Site ◽  
Animal World

In this essay I explore how Soviet policymakers, biologists, and writers negotiated the borderline dividing the human and animal domains and conceptualized the animal world for ideological purposes. I link the classic Soviet clash betweenstikhiinost’(spontaneity) andsoznatel‘nost’(consciousness) with biological experiments of the 1920s that were set to deconstruct the human-animal hierarchy and to create a vision of “classless” biology. I show whyDzhan, one of Andrei Platonov’s first earnest attempts to evolve into a socialist realist writer glorifying the Soviet state’s firm strides toward the communist future, fails to achieve the semantic certitude of the Stalinist text. Various recurrent and profoundly unconventional themes, often connected with animality and corporeality, drastically muddle the ideological coordinates of the text and preclude the possibility of a clear passage from stikhiinost' to soznatel'nost'. The (a)political status of the Dzhan people as a newly formed Soviet collective body manifests itself in the complex interplay between two rather commonplace categories:bodyandsoul. The body acquires abstract political qualities by becoming collective, while the soul, as a designator for the Dzhan people and as a category, gains flesh. The novella reveals the “Turkmen” nation as a site of bare life itself in its indestructible corporeal glory.

scholarly journals Introduction: Andrei Platonov, an Engineer of the Human Soul

Slavic Review ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-726 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nariman Skakov
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Biology I ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
A Site

In this essay I explore how Soviet policymakers, biologists, and writers negotiated the borderline dividing the human and animal domains and conceptualized the animal world for ideological purposes. I link the classic Soviet clash between stikhiinost’ (spontaneity) and soznatel'nost’ (consciousness) with biological experiments of the 1920s that were set to deconstruct the human-animal hierarchy and to create a vision of “classless” biology. I show why Dzhan, one of Andrei Platonov's first earnest attempts to evolve into a socialist realist writer glorifying the Soviet state's firm strides toward the communist future, fails to achieve the semantic certitude of the Stalinist text. Various recurrent and profoundly unconventional themes, often connected with animality and corporeality, drastically muddle the ideological coordinates of the text and preclude the possibility of a clear passage from stikhiinost’ to soznatel'nost'. The (a)political status of the Dzhan people as a newly formed Soviet collective body manifests itself in the complex interplay between two rather commonplace categories: body and soul. The body acquires abstract political qualities by becoming collective, while the soul, as a designator for the Dzhan people and as a category, gains flesh. The novella reveals the “Turkmen“ nation as a site of bare life itself in its indestructible corporeal glory.

scholarly journals Hybrids of Mind and Body: The Forms and Freedoms of the Cyborg in Posthumanist Science Fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Berman Ghan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Divine Law

[Introduction] The Cyborg as a figure in popular culture – the body in a literal state of “human/machine symbiosis” (Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman 112) – has sometimes been conceived as a monstrous figure, as a figure of otherness, a being whose status as a hybrid has placed them into the figure of what Giorgio Agamben might refer to as “the Homo Sacer, a person [who] is simply set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law” (Agamben, Sovereign Power and Bare Life 82). The Homo Sacer, in other words, is a being who has been stripped of all recognition and humanity, deserving neither the rights of a human being or any other animal, and has come to be acknowledged only as an object. Agamben further defines the life of Homo Sacer’s exclusion as “unsacrificeability and [yet] is included in the community in the form of being able to be killed” (82), meaning that Homo Sacer can be killed, but that their killing would never constitute murder, as their life has no recognizable value.

Epilogue

Forms of Life ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 352-368
Author(s):  
Andreas Gailus
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Distinct Kind

The final chapter, the epilogue, articulates in compressed and axiomatic form the book's major theoretical positions and claims, which are: (1) German vitalism conceives of life as a process of self-constitution; (2) the notion of life replaces the earlier model of nature-culture; (3) life's immanent normativity is built around a dialect of force and form; (4) speaking is a form of life; (5) a mutual absorption of the natural and the social; (6) forms exert a distinct kind of force; (7) human life is open to the threat of unintelligibility; (8) vital and social norms; (9) a short critique of recent ontologies; (10) the place of politics in human life; (11) from politics to biopolitics; and finally (12) beyond biopolitics.

Bare Life and the Resurrection of the Body

2019 ◽  
pp. 344-364
Author(s):  
Gavin Flood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Life Itself

Vital materialism imbues life with positive value and interfaces with environmentalism. But there is another kind of vitalism in which the political colonizes life in a way that brings into question the value of life itself and brings life into proximity with nihilism. We might call this a dark vitalism, which we see emerging in the European body politic in the twentieth century. While this stream of thought can be read as an attempt to heal the past through creating a utopian and messianic future, it nevertheless negates the values of life and undermines its healing project because fundamentally locked into a form of nihilism, thereby negating life-affirming values. By contrast, spiritual philosophies of life offer a counter-narrative to the dark vitalism that has held such a grip on nations in the last hundred years.

Plato and the Invention of Life

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Naas
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Structural Relationship ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Immortal Soul ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Platonic Dialogue ◽  
Power And Authority ◽  
Being And Becoming

While the question of life (whether bios or zōē) is not the explicit focus of any Platonic dialogue, it is, this book argues, an absolutely central and structuring question for all of Plato’s thought and, perhaps especially, for his ontology. This is nowhere more evident than in the Statesman, where the central myth of the two ages sketches out not only two epochs of human life and two models of human governance but two very different kinds and valences of life. Plato and the Invention of Life begins by offering a reading of Plato’s Statesman in order to ask about the question of life in Plato’s thought more generally. By characterizing being (whether in the form of the Forms or the immortal soul) in terms of life, Plato in many of his later dialogues, including the Statesman, begins to discover—or, better, to invent—a notion of life itself, that is, a real ortrue life that would be opposed to all merely biological or animal life, a form of life that would be more valuable than everything we call life and every life that can actually be lived. This emphasis on life in the Platonic dialogues will, this work shows, at once illuminate the structural relationship between so many of Plato’s most time-honored distinctions (e.g., being and becoming, soul and body, etc.) and help explain the enormous power and authority that Plato’s thought has exercised, for good or ill, over our entire philosophical and religious tradition.

scholarly journals Hybrids of Mind and Body: The Forms and Freedoms of the Cyborg in Posthumanist Science Fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Berman Ghan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Divine Law

[Introduction] The Cyborg as a figure in popular culture – the body in a literal state of “human/machine symbiosis” (Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman 112) – has sometimes been conceived as a monstrous figure, as a figure of otherness, a being whose status as a hybrid has placed them into the figure of what Giorgio Agamben might refer to as “the Homo Sacer, a person [who] is simply set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law” (Agamben, Sovereign Power and Bare Life 82). The Homo Sacer, in other words, is a being who has been stripped of all recognition and humanity, deserving neither the rights of a human being or any other animal, and has come to be acknowledged only as an object. Agamben further defines the life of Homo Sacer’s exclusion as “unsacrificeability and [yet] is included in the community in the form of being able to be killed” (82), meaning that Homo Sacer can be killed, but that their killing would never constitute murder, as their life has no recognizable value.

scholarly journals Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power: Agamben and Foucault

2005 ◽  
pp. 5-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mika Ojakangas
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Social Democrat ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Rationality ◽  
The Third Reich

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben criticizes Michel Foucault's distinction between 'productive' bio-power and 'deductive' sovereign power, emphasizing that it is not possible to distinguish between these two. In his view, the production of what he calls 'bare life' is the original, although concealed, activity of sovereign power. In this article, Agamben's conclusions are called into question. (1) The notion of 'bare life', distinguished from the 'form of life', belongs exclusively to the order of sovereignty, being incompatible with the modern bio-political notion of life, that is univocal and immanent to itself. In the era of bio-politics, life is already a bios that is only its own zoe ('form-of-life'). (2) Violence is not hidden in the foundation of bio-politics; the 'hidden' foundation of bio-politics is love (agape) and care (cura), 'care for individual life'. (3) Bio-politics is not absolutised in the Third Reich; the only thing that the Third Reich absolutises is the sovereignty of power (Aryan race) and the nakedness of life (the Jews). (4) St Paul's 'messianic revolution' does not endow us with the means of breaking away from the closure of bio-political rationality; on the contrary, Paul's 'messianic revolution' is a historical precondition for the deployment of modern bio-politics. (5) Instead of homo sacer, who is permitted to kill without committing homicide, the paradigmatic figure of the bio-political society can be seen, for example, in the middle-class Swedish social-democrat.

‘Man Is Ill Because He Is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Performance

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.

Variations of the Mixed Discourse

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Jaquet
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
States Of Mind ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Shed Light

Lastly, on the basis of this definition, the author shows how affects shed light on the body-mind relationship and provide an opportunity to produce a mixed discourse that focuses, by turns, on the mental, physical, or psychophysical aspect of affect. The final chapter has two parts: – An analysis of the three categories of affects: mental, physical, and psychophysical – An examination of the variations of Spinoza’s discourse Some affects, such as satisfaction of the mind, are presented as mental, even though they are correlated with the body. Others, such as pain or pleasure, cheerfulness (hilaritas) or melancholy are mainly rooted in the body, even though the mind forms an idea of them. Still others are psychophysical, such as humility or pride, which are expressed at once as bodily postures and states of mind. These affects thus show us how the mind and body are united, all the while expressing themselves differently and specifically, according to their own modalities.

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