Giorgio Agamben

philosopher · 6 mentions across 1 reading

In this course

Agamben theorizes biopolitics through the classical distinction between bios (purposeful, formed life) and zoē (bare biological life), arguing that modern politics has reduced human existence to the latter—a manageable, disposable category that Foucault left unexplored. His framework becomes crucial for the course's concern with how computational systems, algorithms, and machine learning operate as mechanisms of population management, treating humans as quantifiable data points rather than formed political agents. The readings invoke Agamben to articulate what's at stake when AI and automation extend this reduction of life to pure biological or informatic substrates, creating the conditions for Hardt and Negri's counter-proposal of a self-aware, self-producing human multiplicity.

Mentioned in 1 reading

Claire Colebrook

A Globe of One’s Own, In Praise of the Flat Earth

Lamenting the fall of modernity into a biopolitics that manages populations according to a general and quantifiable “life,” Giorgio Agamben argues that it will be possible to arrive again at a genuine politics only by considering what Fouca…The Greek distinction between bios (a life that is formed, bounded and oriented to what man might make of himself) and zoe (mere, bare life that in modernity becomes so much disposable waste, and increasingly the subject of politics) is, fo…Hardt and Negri, reacting more explicitly to a globalism that has precluded any active and intentional formation of a polity, call for the creation of a single, self-producing, self-aware and self-referring open whole of humanity: a single,…

+3 more

Appears alongside

People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.

Michel Foucault 4 Antonio Negri 3 Michael Hardt 3 Edmund Husserl 1 Evan Thompson 1 Jacques Derrida 1 John Donne 1 Robert Wright 1