Giorgio Agamben. Resistance in Art. 2014

http://www.egs.edu/ Giorgio Agamben, Italian philosopher and writer, delivers a lecture in which he takes up a Deleuzean thread considering the act of creation as an act of resistance. Agamben discusses potentiality, impotentiality and actuality which is a philosophical problem dating back to Aristotle. The potential in the act of creation not only resists an external force, but also the impotentiality itself which is internal. This relation is unique to humans and allows for the act of creation such that it exists in no other species. This resistance acts as a critical power which restrains the blind drive of potentiality, leading to the retention of some imperfection and therefore the simultaneous exertion of potentiality and impotentiality. This, Agamben will call, Poetics of Inoperativity. Further, he will claim that true human praxis, by making inoperative works and functions of humans, will open the possibility for new works and usage. Open lecture delivered to the students and faculty of the European Graduate School, August 2014.


Giorgio Agamben, Phd., Baruch Spinoza Chair at European Graduate School EGS, is a professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy and teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. As a post graduate he participated in seminars with Martin Heidegger in Freiburg and directed the Italian Walter Benjamin Edition. Agamben's unique blending of literary theory, continental philosophy, political thought, religious studies, literature and art makes him one of the most challenging thinkers of our time. He was a visiting professor in Paris and has taught at American universities such as UC Berkeley, Los Angeles, Irvine, Santa Cruz, and Northwestern.


With over sixteen titles translated into English so far, Agamben's work covers fields as diverse as Biblical studies, cinema, classical and medieval literature, linguistics, juridic philosophy, as well as commentary on world politics, theories of language, friendship, art, aesthetics, poetics and more. Agamben, continuing the work of both Foucault and Derrida through incisive studies of history and philosophy, as well as philology, seeks to confront and unwind the aporias and gaps which bind us in our mundane existence. His best known work includes his investigations of the concepts of state of exception and homo sacer.