Matter that does not remain beneath form, but surrounds it with a halo. - Giorgio Agamben

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Matter that does not remain beneath form, but surrounds it with a halo.

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About Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) is an Italian philosopher, and Professor at the Università IUAV di Venezia. He became famous for his investigations on the concepts of a "state of exception" and homo sacer. He is particularly critical of the United States' response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the use of terrorism as a permanent condition that legitimizes a "state of exception" as the dominant paradigm for governing in contemporary politics.

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Additional quotes by Giorgio Agamben

Today, in the era of the complete triumph of the spectacle, what can be reaped from the heritage of Debord? It is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans. This means that a fuller Marxian analysis should deal with the fact that capitalism (or any other name one wants to give the process that today dominated world history) was directed not only toward the expropriation of productive activity, but also and principally toward the alienation of language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of that logos which one of Heraclitus' fragments identified as the Common. The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle of our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle remains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it.

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[M]odern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.

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