[백남준] 아감벤과 백남준 다음 세대는 유전자 예술(Bios Art) 예상

 

[아감벤 사상은 백남준 80년대 조선일보와 인터뷰에서 이미 언급하다 백남준 왈 "당분간 비디오시대-다음 세대는 유전자 예술(Bios Art) 예상된다"]

<현대 민주주의 국가의 허황된 주장을 극복하는 수단은 바로 위기 자체에 있다> <니코마코스 윤리학에서 아리스토텔레스가 bios 내에서 3가지 구분(사색적인 삶, bios theoretiko; 쾌락적인 삶, bios apolaustikos; 정치적인 삶, bios politikos) 한다는 점을 지적>Giorgio Agamben / 미셸 푸코와 통한다 푸코는 우리는 지금 우리의 성기(Bio-politics)까지 감시당하고 있다 // Baruch Spinoza Chair and Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Biography / Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) is one of the leading figures in philosophy and political theory. His unique readings of literature, literary theory, continental philosophy, political thought, religious studies, and art have made him one of the most innovative thinkers of our time.

Agamben was educated in law and philosophy at the University of Rome, where he wrote an unpublished doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. As a post-doctoral scholar in Freiburg (1966–1968), he participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus and was later a fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, from 1974 to 1975. Agamben then began teaching and–over the course of the next four decades–taught at the University of Macerata, the University of Verona, the Collège Internationale de Paris, the Università della Svizzera Italiana, the Università Iuav di Venezia, the New School in New York, and The European Graduate School / EGS, where he holds the Baruch Spinoza Chair.

Although Agamben’s doctoral thesis focused on the work of Simone Weil, his greatest influence is more likely Walter Benjamin. Much of his work is an elaborate and recursive engagement with the issues introduced into Western philosophy by the enigmatic work of Benjamin. While this continual return to the theses of Benjamin underpins his work, Agamben’s roots and influences are expansive and include many canonical figures of Western philosophy. Indeed, his indebtedness and engagement with Aristotle, Heidegger, Michel Foucault, G.W.F. Hegel, Carl Schmitt, and Sigmund Freud, among others, is clear and profound. In addition to this philosophical heritage, Agamben has critically engaged with religious and legal texts from the Torah to Greek and Roman law, as well as with some of the most important literary figures and poets in Western culture, including Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, Dante Alighieri, and Giorgio Caproni. The breadth of his scholarship, in concert with the critical precision of his readings and interpretations, contributes to the challenging density of his work.

It is impossible to summarize Agamben’s oeuvre in a brief biography. However, we can consider the outlines of a small, but significant, focus throughout his work. Since the 1980s, much of the philosopher’s work can be read as a movement towards the Homo Sacer project, which begins with the book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). The work takes up and builds upon issues raised by a number of theoreticians from the twentieth century, most notably, Michel Foucault. In brief, the project is a response to questions surrounding totalitarianism and bio-politics. To date, there are four volumes of the Homo Sacer: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), State of Exception – Homo Sacer II.1 (2003), The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government – Homo Sacer II.2 (2007), The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath – Homo Sacer II.3 (2008), Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty – Homo Sacer II.5 (2013), Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Homo Sacer III (1998), and The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Forms-of-Life – Homo Sacer IV.1 (2013).

In the first volume, Agamben develops his analysis of the condition of bio-politics, first identified by Foucault in Volume One of his History of Sexuality (1976). According to Foucault, modern power is characterized by a fundamentally distinct logic from that of sovereign power: the fundamental principle of the former is the sovereign right over life and death, while modern power assumes a productive relation to life, captured in the dictum “fostering life or disallowing it.” Bio-politics is an instrument for molding life and keeping it alive. According to the French philosopher, this shift from sovereign power to bio-power is what inaugurates modernity. From the outset of the Homo Sacer project, Agamben confronts this clear distinction and suggests that sovereignty and bio-power are fundamentally inter-connected. According to Agamben, the production of biological life is the first and elementary objective of sovereign power.

His genealogical analysis begins in antiquity, wherein there was an essential distinction between zoe, or biological life, and bios, the form or way of living proper to an individual or community. In fact, Agamben notes in Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes three distinctions within bios: the contemplative life of the philosopher, bios theoretiko; the life of pleasure, bios apolaustikos; and political life, bios politikos. In the classical world the latter was included in politics, while natural life was excluded from the polis and confined to the sphere of oikos, home. In Politics, Aristotle repeatedly affirms a qualitative distinction between these two realms: the polis and oikonomos, or the simple act of living and the politically qualified life.

According to Foucault, the threshold of modernity is crossed when natural life is included into the instruments and calculations of the State and politics becomes bio-politics. This shift, he suggests, can be articulated as the passage from “territorial State” to the “State of population” or from “Sovereign power” to a “government of men.” Without bio-politics, without the capacity to discipline and control bodies, Foucault proposes that the very development and triumph of capitalism would have been impossible.

Preceding Foucault, Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), attributes the transformation and decadence of politics to the primacy of natural life over political life. Following Arendt, Agamben posits the inclusion of zoe into politics as the decisive step into modernity and echoes the declaration that this event demands a radical transformation of classical politico-philosophical categories. The “Homo Sacer project” starts from both Foucault’s and Benjamin’s suggestion that all modern ideologies maintain a secret alliance by their common inclusion of bare life into politics and from the wager that only an interrogation of this link “will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same time, return thought to its proper calling” (Homo Sacer 4–5). In the “Introduction” to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben situates the point of departure of the entire project at an unresolved point in Foucault’s work on bio-politics. In the last years before his death, Foucault abandoned juridical institutional models of power in the name of investigating concrete ways that power penetrates forms of life and the very bodies of subjects.

While Agamben’s overall analysis in the Homo Sacer project is highly critical of the contemporary state and its apparatuses, his conclusion is not one of complete despair. Rather, for Agamben, the means for overcoming the aporias of the modern democratic state lie precisely within the heart of the crisis itself. To the project of such an overcoming, he gives the name “coming politics,” an idea first developed in The Coming Community (1993) and Means without End: Notes on Politics (2000). In brief, the “coming politics,” a politics of pure means, is a politics wherein “politics is the sphere neither of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end; rather, it is the sphere of an end intended as the field of human action and of human thought” (Means without End 117). More specifically, such a new politics would be a politics without any reference to sovereignty or any of its associated concepts: such as nation, people, democracy, etc. Such a new politics would require the formulation of a new form of life, wherein bare life is not separable as a political subject and what is at stake is the experience of community itself.

 

<사람들에게 일시적으로 자의적인 폭력을 가하는 것을 어떻게 허용하는지 조사하고 연구> What is biopolitics according to Giorgio Agamben? / The privilege of suspension is what constitutes sovereign power for Agamben as well. By extending his research to pre-modern history, he examines how the biopolitical logic of liberalism allows the sovereign to be exempted from the law and inflict temporary arbitrary violence on people.

 

<시민권과 주권을 생물정치적 측면으로 재정의하다> What is Agamben's theory? : Giorgio Agamben's theory of 'bare life' redefines citizenship and sovereignty by emphasising its biopolitical aspects. This means that sovereign power directly influences forms of life, reducing them to 'bare life', thus complicating binary divisions between citizen and non-citizen.

 

 

조르조 아감벤Giorgio Agamben 1942년 4월 22일(82세) 이탈리아 철학자 // 프랑스 파리의 국제철학원Collège International de Philosophie(1986-92)과 마체라타(Macerata) 대학, 베로나(Verona) 대학을 거쳐 현재 2003년부터 베네치아 건축대학IUAV 디자인 예술 학과 교수로 재직하고 있다. 또한 Saas-Fee에 위치한 European Graduate School 철학 교수이기도 하다 / 피에르 파올로 파솔리니 감독의 영화 《마태복음》에서 빌립의 역할을 맡다 /마르틴 하이데거와 발터 베냐민으로부터 강한 영향을 받았다. 미학과 정치를 넘나들며 인간을 '말하는 동물'로 정의하기도 하였다 / 카를 슈미트의 비상사태를 토대로 로마시대의 호모 사케르(homo sacer)를 현대 정치를 비추어 쓴 "호모 사케르"로 주목받았다. 푸코는 '근대가 생정치를 낳았다'고 하였으나, 아감벤은 이에 반대하여 정치는 그 기원으로부터 생정치였다고 주장하였다. 아감벤에 의하면 로마시대의 특이한 수인(囚人)이었던 '호모 사케르'란 bios（사회적, 정치적 삶）을 박탈당하고 zoe（생물적 삶）밖에 가지지 못한 존재였다. 아감벤은 그러한 삶을 베냐민을 따라 "박탈의 삶"이라 하고 생정치는 이 "박탈의 삶"을 표적으로 하고 있다고 주장하였다.

 

조르조 아감벤Giorgio Agamben 저서 목록

"내용 없는 인간"　L'uomo senza contenuto (1970)

"방들"　Stanze (1977)

"유아기와 역사"　Infanzia e storia (1978)

"언어와 죽음"　Il linguaggio e la morte (1982)

"산문의 이데아"　Idea della prosa (1985)

"도래하는 공동체"　La comunita che viene (1990)

"바틀비"　Bartleby (1993)

"목적 없는 수단"　Mezzi senza fine (1995)

"호모 사케르"　Homo Sacer (1995)

"이탈리아 카테고리"　Categorie italiane (1996)

"아우슈비츠의 남은 자들"　Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998)

"남겨진 시간"　Il tempo che resta. Un commento alla lettera ai Romani (2000)

"열린 것"　L'aperto (2002)

"예외상태"　Stato di eccezione (2003)

"세속화 예찬"　Profanazioni (2005)

"사고의 잠재력"　La Potenza del pensiero (2005)

"왕국과 영광"　Il Regno e La GloriaLa (2007)