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When one starts to read the work of Giorgio Agamben, one cannot not be struck by his erudition, his eye for previously overlooked or under-interpreted details in the philosophical, political, artistic and legal archives, not to mention his commitment to rethinking those received traditions according to new means. Yet what is also very striking is Agamben's unceasing attention to the apparition and construction of what I will term figures of power. At the beginning of Means Without End, Agamben asks himself "Is today a life of power available?". If Agamben's word here is 'life', it is just as critical to understand that such a term is not to be taken in its biological acceptation; on the contrary, what he means by 'life' must be something other than a scientific category. I will make a number of suggestions as to why the word 'figure' has some pertinence in this context, and why it leads, on the one hand, to a new analysis of operations of negation, and, on the other, to a paradoxical kind of non- or extra-ontological act of impotentiality.

Članek prinaša sinoptični pregled nekaterih tem sodobnega Blakovega kriticizma, sklene pa se z recenzijo knjige Davida Fallona: Blake, Mit in razsvetljenstvo: Politika apoteoze, v kateri je apoteoza obravnavana z vidika mitične, literarne in realistične uporabe. ; This paper provides a synoptic account of some of the themes of contemporary Blake criticism, culminating in a review of David Fallon's Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment: The Politics of Apotheosis, in which apotheosis is considered through its mythic, literary and realist uses.

In this paper, I will argue that Giorgio Agamben has provided for a radical theory of the import of torture on human life, one that provides a different genealogy and projects different implications for the relation between torture and politics than have otherwise been given. I will begin by examining some of the features of the current, post-September 11 'debate' about torture, before moving to an exegesis of Agamben's theses and their import for thinking politics today. ; En este ensayo, defenderé que Giorgio Agamben ha propuesto las bases de una teoría radical de la importancia de la tortura sobre la vida humana, que proporciona una diferente genealogía de la misma y proyecta diferentes implicaciones para la relación entre tortura y política de las que se han dado hasta la fecha. Quiero comenzar por examinar alguno de aquellos rasgos del debate actual sobre la tortura tras el 11 de septiembre, antes de pasar a una exégesis de las tesis de Agamben y su importancia para el pensamiento político actual.

Alain Badiou is one of the world's most influential living philosophers. Few contemporary thinkers display his breadth of argument and reference, or his ability to intervene in debates critical to both analytic and continental philosophy. Alain Badiou: Key Concepts presents an overview of and introduction to the full range of Badiou's thinking. Essays focus on the foundations of Badiou's thought, his ""key concepts"" - truth, being, ontology, the subject, and conditions - and on his engagement with a range of thinkers central to his philosophy, including Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Heidegger an

What can Roger Rabbit tell us about the Second Gulf War? What can a woman married to the Berlin Wall tell us about posthumanism and inter-subjectivity? What can DJ Shadow tell us about the end of history? What can our local bus route tell us about the fortification of the West? What can Reality TV tell us about the crisis of contemporary community? And what can unauthorized pictures of Osama Bin Laden tell us about new methods of popular propaganda? These are only some of the thought-provoking questions raised in -Avoiding the Subject,- which highlights the feedback-loops between philosophy, technology, and politics in today's mediascape.