Seven Red

Whew. That was a week of reading like comps. When I was reading for comps, I tended to measure my progress – at least apart from the giant stacks of notes – on raw pages; if I plowed through 1000-1500 pages in a week, that was good, while 600 was at the low end (i.e., Derrida). Of course, you have to go back and conceptualize all that, but there is only so much time, and there’s so much to get through, so setting yourself page goals always seemed to reduce the despair before the massiveness of it all. So, this week, I plowed through about 1000 pages of Agamben, which I found now remarkably painless, and I did it while teaching the two classes (OK, granted, it was the last week, so the preps were cursory) and going to meetings, and grading and all that. I can see why faculty seems unimpressed when graduate students gripe about their workload, in any case. But this would have been a pretty good week during comps, especially if you throw a few articles into the mix:

Now, I had read some Agamben before, both collections, and a couple of books: Homo Sacer and The Open (both of which I reread this week). In fact, a funny story about The Open. I read it for a reading group in graduate school, and then some months later lent it to the department chair for some reason. Probably more than a year went by, and then it was time for me to leave SC for Chicago. Before I left, the department chair saw me in the hallway and said “Oh, let me return your book.” Huh, I thought. What book? I followed him into his office and he handed me The Open, to which I replied “I think you have me mixed up with somebody else.” I had no memory of ever seeing this book before in my life. Very diplomatically, he pretended to be unsure, but encouraged me to look through it. I opened up the book to see detailed margin notes in my handwriting throughout. “Huh,” I said, “I guess it is mine.” Well, maybe that’s what you get when you’re plowing through a thousand pages a week.

When you don’t completely forget that you’ve read something, the comps style gets you – if it’s not your main area – some fakeable sense of the concepts (sovereign exception, naked or bare life, the remnant, potentiality, space of indistinction between law and life, language and life, human and inhuman, etc.) and a vague sense of the conversations (with Aristotle on potential, with Schmitt on law/politics, with Benjamin on messianic time, with Heidegger on the ontological difference, with Arendt and Foucault – especially with Foucault – on biopower). And that’s about what I got when I read a little of Agamben’s stuff last time. I remember being annoyed at the time by the intro to Homo Sacer in its portrayal of Foucault’s work, which I still think is off the mark, but certainly worth consideration rather than annoyance. I say you, in any case, when I should say me. Maybe some people can integrate the conceptual system across the board when they’re plowing through stuff, but I can’t. I usually just got some slogans, which is sufficient to the task, and probably not completely worthless, either. But this second reading during the last week gave me a more systematic look at the way these concepts play off each other and connect, maybe call it slogan-plus, so I want to take some of that up in the coming weeks. In a sense, this is the continuation of my long-neglected series here on the so-called “Italian ideology,” and I think that Agamben – by not quite being included (the included exclusion? the excluded inclusion?) in the Autonomist tradition – does shed some light on what’s going on with some of the other stuff I’ve discussed (Negri, Virno, Esposito), especially, as I said, when it comes to biopower, and really, the analysis of power more generally. I still have Profanations, the St. Paul book (how Agamben cashes out his early work on kairos from Infancy and History is the real target here), Potentialities, and the latest, What is an Apparatus?, to get through, but I’ll probably be responding here as I go, in the new series … Blogamben (it’s true…we’re so lame).

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