The Highest Poverty

Name: The Highest Poverty
Price: 103.68 AUD
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ISBN: 9780804784054

Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life

Giorgio Agamben, Adam Kotsko

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Hardback

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English

Stanford University Press
01 May 2013

Philosophy of religion; Islam; Religious institutions & organisations

Series: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics

What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule?

It is to these questions that Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the fascinating and massive phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The book reconstructs in detail the life of the monks with their obsessive attention to temporal articulation and to the Rule, to ascetic techniques and to liturgy. But Agamben's thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which ""life"" as such, perhaps for the first time, is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the ""highest poverty"" and ""use"" challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today.

How can we think a form-of-life, that is, a human life released from the grip of law, and a use of bodies and of the world that never becomes an appropriation? How can we think life as something not subject to ownership but only for common use?

By: Giorgio Agamben
Translated by: Adam Kotsko
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 363g
ISBN: 9780804784054
ISBN 10: 0804784051
Series: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics
Pages: 184
Publication Date: 01 May 2013
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher and political theorist, teaches at the IUAV University in Venice and holds the Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School. His most recent book available in English from Stanford University Press is The Kingdom and the Glory (2011).