Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Use of Bodies. By Giorgio Agamben. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015. xxii + 291 pp. $85.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper).With English publication of The Use of Bodies, we now have final volume of Giorgio Agamben s remarkable series of investigations into ontological foundations of Western politics. Beginning with eponymous volume in 1995, nine entries of Homo Sacer series attempt an elucidation of deepest philosophical and theological foundations of contemporary Western politics. As Agamben specifies his project, he is after the very originary structure of politics, in order to try to bring to light arcanum imperii that in some way constituted its foundation and that had remained at same time fully exposed and tenaciously hidden in (p. 263).In book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Agamben famously claimed that Western politics is based on aporiatic exception, where natural life (zoe) was distinguished from a political life (bios). We see this distinction most acutely in Roman legal figure of homo sacer or sacred man. The homo sacer is paradoxical because it is a life that can be killed (because it has been stripped of its political meaning), yet not sacrificed (also because it has been stripped of its political meaning). Precisely because of its (former) life in political order, figure of homo sacer has been stripped of its political being and exists merely as bare life (zoe). It is included in political order only, paradoxically, by exclusion.Through an intricate analysis of both ontological and theological themes, Agamben claims this divlsio is fundamentally constitutive of Western political order. Politics, then, is founded on a specific definition and attendant understanding of life. In so doing, West produces a politics that brings natural life, or very fact of living, into question. Moving beyond Foucault and Arendt, Agamben controversially names concentration camp as bio-political paradigm of Western modernity, place where sovereignty can both produce and have absolute power over bare life. The paradigma of camp is representative instance of bio-political control that sovereign power wants to achieve; not then as an aberration of modern West, but rather its truest expression.In The Use of Bodies, Agamben returns to series' origin and takes up again topic of life, giving us perhaps most complete genealogy of philosophical concept of life ever to appear. In particular, Agamben wants to think a conception of life that cannot be separated from its form, a life that cannot be rendered bare. Herein, we are finally treated with Agamben's full conception of form-of-life, long awaited in his work. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.086 | 0.066 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".