© Radical Philosophy Review Volume 14 number 1 (2011) 85-100
From Inoperativeness to
Action: On Giorgio Agamben’s
Anarchism
Lorenzo Fabbri
Discussed in this Essay:
Giorgio Agamben, What is An Apparatus? and other
Essays. Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 80 pp.
$15.95, paperback. ISBN: 0804762309.
Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical
Introduction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009. 448 pp. $24.95, paperback. ISBN:
9780804761437.
T
he recent publication by Stanford University Press of Giorgio Agamben’s
What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays and Leland de la Durantaye’s
massive introduction to Agamben’s works constitutes a very welcome
occasion. The essays included in What Is an Apparatus? offer a very accessible
anticipation of the move from sovereignty to governmentality performed
spectacularly by Agamben in his 2007 Il Regno e la Gloria: Homo sacer II.2,
as well as providing some hints on the vectors that the announced Homo
Sacer epilogue on forms-of-life will pursue. So while What In an Apparatus?
in a certain sense is a projection into the future of Agamben’s research, in
his Critical Introduction de la Durantaye is looking backward, in a very brave
attempt to reconstruct the trajectory of Agamben’s thought up to the present