The Power of Life

Giorgio Agamben's work may best be described as a new philosophy of life. On its horizon lies the conviction that our form of life can become the guiding and unifying power of the politics to come. Informed by this promise, The Power of Lifeweaves decisive moments and neglected aspects of Agamben's work over the past four decades together with the thought of those who influenced him most (including Kafka, Heidegger, Benjamin, Arendt, Deleuze, and Foucault). In addition, the book positions him in relation to key figures from the history of philosophy (such as Plato, Spinoza, Vico, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Derrida). In so doing, Kishik offers a vision that ventures beyond Agamben's warning against the power over(bare) life--what he calls "biopolitics"--in order to articulate the power of(our form of) life and thus to rethink the biopolitical predicament in which we live. Following Agamben's prediction that the concept of life will stand at the center of the coming philosophy, he points to some of the most promising directions that this philosophy can take.

David Kishik is the author of Wittgenstein's Form of Life (2008) and co-translator, with Stefan Pedatella, of Agamben's What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford 2009) and Nudities (Stanford 2010). He is a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, though he usually lives in New York.