Poetic thresholds of Giorgio Agamben's political thought

Abstract

The article presents the book The fire and the tale (2018), by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, discussing some of the poetic thresholds of his political thought. Is departs from Agamben's implicit debates with Jacques Derrida on language and literature, passing by the poetic act as an act of resistance, defining the inoperative potency present in gestures of discursive interruption, and finally arrives at the discussion of life and work in a biopolitical context. Following the order of the chapters, but without intending to accomplish them, the assumption of the article is that the Italian – who has poetry and literature generally linked to a kind of "first phase" of his work – also in the biopolitical series named Homo Sacer used poetry and literature as a strong strategy of resistance and opening of thresholds before the organized logic of the sovereign power. If by one side the book can be read as forming a hermeneutic circle, the chapters, on the other hand, open the main lines in which philosophy, literature, poetry, and politics intersect for the Italian thinker. Therefore, some of the arguments set forth in The fire and the tale report in direct relation to notions and arguments present in other Agamben’s books and in certain interlocutors are also included in the article.