Giorgio Agamben Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction [Paperback]

Agambens thought has been viewed as descending primarily from the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, and, more recently, Foucault. This book complicates and expands that constellation by showing how throughout his career Agamben has consistently and closely engaged (critically, sympathetically, polemically, and often implicitly) the work of Derrida as his chief contemporary interlocutor.

The book begins by examining the development of Agambens key conceptsinfancy, Voice, potentialityfrom the 1960s to approximately 1990 and shows how these concepts consistently draw on and respond to specific texts and concepts of Derrida. The second part examines the political turn in Agambens and Derridas thinking from about 1990 onward, beginning with their investigations of sovereignty and violence and moving through their parallel treatments of juridical power, the relation between humans and animals, and finally messianism and the politics to come.

This remarkably rigorous, lucid, and open-minded study details the important differences between Agamben and Derrida, something many would regard as minor variants in a similarly deconstructive model, but which Derridas late seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign affirm to be profound. Attell meticulously traces the trajectories of Derridas and Agambens careers, demonstrating in an elegant and textually based fashion the incisive nature of Agambens engagement with Derrida, how so many of Agambens major themespotentiality, sovereignty, ban, messianic time, play and profanation, and the animalcould be considered as critical, indeed polemical, responses to Derridas philosophical project. The strong distinction between Agambens and Derridas (and Benjamins and Schmitts) notions of messianic time is particularly dazzling.Traces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agambens engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work in the 1960s to the present, examining his key concepts  infancy, Voice, potentiality, sovelÓ=