Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben. Eichmann, Law and Justice. 2009 1/7

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http://www.egs.edu/ Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben in a public conversation about Eichmann, Law and Justice at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Saas Fee, Switzerland. They discussed Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem in relation to Agamben's work on liturgy and the spectacle, or the "liturgy of law" in Agamben's words. They also spoke of Kafka and the idea of justice versus juridical law. Free Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2009 Judith Butler Giorgio Agamben. Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a post-structuralist philosopher working in contemporary politics, cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics. In her most well known book, Gender Trouble, she argued that traditional feminism had made the mistake of classifying women as a separate category; instead, she argued, gender should be argued not as an absolute value, but a shifting, relational attribute, one which changes and evolves in different circumstances and times. More recently, Butler has turned her exacting insight towards the intractable subjects of the nation state, war, and the hegemonies of power. As a recipient of the 2008 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, Judith Butler has chosen to found a Critical Theory Initiative within the Critical Theory Department at UC Berkely. "Our common task will be to think about how the shifting nature of war changes our idea of critical theory as an effort to understand and transform social relations in ways that ameliorate war and its effects," Judith Butler wrote. "We will also consider the public role of intellectuals in the active criticism of these new forms of war." Judith Butler is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000). In 2004, she published Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning with Verso Press which considered questions of war, representation, and ethics. Her most recent book, Frames of War, was published by Verso in 2009 and explores the precariousness of life in relation to 9/11 and the Iraq War. She is currently at work on a series of essays exploring Jewish Philosophy, both in post and pre Zionist thought. Giorgio Agamben is perhaps Italy's most famous contemporary philosopher; as a leading figure in both philosophy and radical political thought, he has been intimately connected, along with Antonio Neri and Paolo Virno to Italy's post—1968 leftist politics. During his tenure as professor at the Universita di Venizia, he has written widely on philosophy, politics, theology as well as radical critical theory—indeed, there is little in the world of critical theory that he has not at some point touched upon. In his most well known book, Homo Sacer, Agamben uses Roman law as a departure point to investigate how, in contemporary politics, the "state of exception"—in which the law is suspended by the soveriegn (or the republic)—has become not extraordinary, but in fact commonplace. Tracing the history of the state of exception from Aristotle through to contemporary times, he argues that the sovereign has constantly placed the idea of a state of exception—a state that remains outside (or above) both holy and mundane law—as a foundation for its actions. In his most recent book, What Is An Apparatus, Giorgio Agamben seeks to expand Foucault's use of the term apparatus, or dispositif, to include, and implicate, all networks that bind us and and result not in the production of a subject, but a de-subjected subject. Giorgio Agamben's translated books include The Coming Community (U Minnesota, 1993); Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, 1998); The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, 2002); State of Exception (U Chicago, 2003). Giorgio Agamben's most recent book, What Is An Apparatus was published in 2009 by Stanford University Press. He is currently, continuing the work of Michel Foucault, focusing on issues of the liturgy and the church.