Need to seem to glimpse
Browsing in Borders today, I saw a copy of the stiff-backed magazine Radical Philosophy. Didn't expect it to be online, still less to see anything more than a referral to a subscription form when I clicked on a link to an article. But here's a review of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, the first time I've seen anything much in English about this most interesting of modern philosophers.
"Agamben asks us to evaluate the metaphysical structure and implications of the activity of politics as such. Instead of asking us to consider the true or proper nature of political identity, Agamben asks us to consider a threshold state of the non-identical, the liminal. And far from bringing concepts such as rights, authority, public interest, liberty or equality more clearly into view, Agamben operates at a level of abstraction at which such concepts blur into their opposites."
No, I don't get it either, but his essays do repay re-reading. Collections such as The End of the Poem and The Man Without Content are recommended. Mighty fine editions for under a tenner.
Unfortunately, the site is not up to date. The edition I browsed had an obituary of Maurice Blanchot (the link goes to a new French site, still in development) by his translator Ann Smock. She fails to cover herself in glory by misquoting Samuel Beckett on the first line; not once but twice. She writes (something like) "As Samuel Beckett asked: What's the word" (she was right, at least, not to include a question mark). The line is, in fact, "what is the word", from the staggeringly beautiful poem of the same name. It's a delight to see that online too.
