Social Madness

Social Madness Ronald Aronson In The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope I have analyzed the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Problem’ as an act of societal madness . We ordinarily use this term ‘madness’ quite freely in conversation, but then abandon it upon moving into serious discourse and study – perhaps in trying […]

The exemplary exception: Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer

The exemplary exception Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer Andrew norris rights. More specifically, the Nazi death camps are not a political aberration, least of all a unique event, but instead the place where politics as the sovereign decision on life most clearly reveals itself: ʻtoday it is not the city but […]

Petrified life: Adorno and Agamben

In his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, Adorno maintained that ʻthe form in which metaphysics impinges on us urgently todayʼ is ʻthe question whether it is still possible to liveʼ. [1] Such a question is speculative, since the possibility of life is taken to have migrated to the margins of human experience. For Adorno, life in […]