Seeing the Impossibility of Seeing or the Visibility of the Undead
Giorgio Agamben's Gorgon
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9857158 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert Buch (0000-0001-6809-2800, University of Chicago, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 82 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 179-196 |
| Publication date | 2007-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Germanic Review Literature Culture Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-8890 • E-ISSN: 1930-6962 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3200/gerr.82.2.179-196 |
| OpenAlex | W2025596193 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 11 |
In his Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben situates the so-called Muselmann of the Nazi death camps in two iconographic traditions, that of the Medusa and that of the Christian vera icon. The Muselmann is blind to himself and invisible to others; yet, this figure of blindness and suffering undergoes a transfiguration. As the "true image" of man, he affords us insight into the violence at the hidden center of Western (bio)politics. A similar dialectics of blindness and revelation is at work in Homo Sacer. I argue that the structural blind spot of Agamben's construal of bare life (of which the Muselmann is perhaps the most prominent instantiation) is revealed in the unresolved tension between claims about the putative continuity of Western biopolitics, from Antiquity to the present, and the crisis it it supposed to have entered in the twentieth century
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Biopower · Blindness · Dialectic · Epistemology · German · Icon · Impossibility · Literature · Nazism · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Revelation · State of exception · Uncanny · Vitalism · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,11 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2017 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |