21. Giorgio Agamben - Opus Dei

"The problem of the coming philosophy is that of thinking an ontology beyond operativity and command and an ethics and a politics entirely liberated from the concepts of duty and will"

Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty, written by Giorgio Agamben and translated by Adam Kotsko, is the chronological and conceptual culmination of his long-standing Homo Sacer project. It could be conjectured that the overarching goal of the project has been to understand the present: to explain why we do things the way we do them and how the world as it is now could have come to be. Frustratingly so, more than pointing the way forward, Agamben reveals how what has and can be conceived of as the foundation for a future is in fact only solidifying the grip upon which the logics of the present impede the coming of history.

The book explicates two radically distinct yet congruous and overlapping modes of existence, one of "being" and one of "having-to-be." In other words, whether the substance of the individual is either their bare fact of existing, or what the individual does, makes, produces, effects. This latter ontology is posited as the dominant mode of the moderns, one in which has resulted in the total economization of time and space. Importantly, this economic ontology, in which what is only is because it can be measured in a particular way and for a particular reason and as such is structurally dependent on that system of measurement, is not itself foreign from a more classical ontology of being, but instead emerged from within it, from its very ambivalence to definition. In fact, the only way in which the ontology of "operativity" could overcome the ontology of "being" is by appropriating its language of virtue and framing it a new way and towards other ends, by making virtue a duty.

By tracing the evolution of existential ontology as akin to a colonial process, Agamben shows the impossibility of utopically returning to this more 'authentic' mode of being, but instead posits the need for a new conceptualization of being, in its reasons and its means.

17. Giorgio Agamben - The Kingdom and the Glory

Published in English in 2011 (originally in Italian in 2007 as Il Reigno e la Gloria), Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory is the decisive turning point of his longstanding Homo Sacer project, tentatively figured as II, 2 (this while temporally written after State of Exception and Remnants of Auschwitz, this book would be situated in between the two). Much like almost every other book in the series (except State of Exception), in lucid fashion the subtitle contains the book's central concepts from which his archaeological method will unfold: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. The summation of the title is perhaps misleading, for the subtitle does not relate in any structural or direct way to the former, but instead by privileging the first two Agamben pre-emptively reveals a conclusion to the book itself by diagnosing a fundamental problematic in the contemporary political sphere in its supposedly secular (i.e. modern) nature. From this point, we could state that the intention of the book is to reveal the essentially theological, religious foundation of Western power that has only recently manifested itself in contemporary forms of biopolitics. Agamben does this by tracing in painstaking detail the contingent historical evolution of certain concepts from Ancient Greece, through Christianity, into the Middle Ages, and into the Enlightenment.

While Foucault might have revealed the metaphysics of power in governmentality, his project was undeniably left unfinished and insufficient for rendering pliable its contemporary manifestations. While certain theorists have continued his project forward towards societies of control and the pharmacopornographic regime, Agamben instead looks back in an eruditic, if not hermetic, fashion that posits the immutable nature of power itself, and as such seeks provides the vocabulary for its contemporary philosophical disentanglement. The chapter titles reveal a surprising amount about his methodological rigor: The Mystery of the Economy, Being and Acting, The Kingdom and the Government, the Providential Machine, Angelology and Bureaucracy, The Power and the Glory. While these concepts seem to be rather general and applicable to many discourses today, Agamben shows how the specific utilization of these terms figured decisively in the evolution of philosophical thought, and more importantly, governmental politics. My intention behind discussing the books structure is not to vault Agamben's methodology above those of other methods, but merely communicate the challenging nature of this book, lest one be from a properly theological background (which I am not).

Agamben ultimately defines the nature of Western power as essentially bipolar, in which he locates a contemporary problematic our inheritance of modern political form in its secularizing gesture (despite explicit reference to theology in the works of Rousseau). The consequences of this are profound, only few of which Agamben details himself, while primarily centering himself on 20th century's catastrophic attempts of reintroducing sacredness into politics in fascism. What if power cannot be reduced to merely the organization of things, but is also what legitimizes that organization and keeps the system running? If government, a unified body of power, is not our source of causality, we can witness some potential consequences from over the past 50 years of money and fame taking its place. If neither the former nor latter are neither suitable nor desirable, it is only through comprehending their fundamental (and necessary) coexistence and coproduction can we potentially conceptualize its total inoperativization and the possibility of a future.

13. Walter Benjamin - Critique of Violence

The purpose of this reflection is to discover whether the agonistic relation between ethics and violence can be overcome. To say that there is a relation between the two may appear as either outright erroneous or as a problem easily solved, but these epistemological reflexes merely advocate further for the need of philosophical inquiry. If we were to define ethics by a lack of violence, for example, it could be conceived that ethics and violence are only joined by their polar opposition. But this dialectical formulation is reactionary, ultimately forbidding an autonomous ethics: for if there was no originary violence, there would be no possibility of ethics. This view is furthermore utopian and transcendental, implying that violence can be erased and that ethics can (and should) champion. In fact, this theoretical proposition is strictly the result of a properly ethical judgement that is genealogically tied to the development of Western humanism which must itself be subject to criticism, and therefore should not ground a metaphysical foundation of judgement. In an attempt to find a way out of this spectacular condition that has merely generated an unprecedented proliferation of violence and ethics-in-vain, I will henceforth investigate the liminal space offered by both concepts in an attempt to reveal their absolute congruency and ultimately their mutual contemporary insufficiency for the existential justification of our lives.

11. Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen - Critical Spatial Practice

Politics in and of the printed word

A mainstream public discourse of apprehension and reconciliation has emerged over the past ten years, as architects have begun to rediscover the inherent power of creating space. In this spirit, the Critical Spatial Practice book series, edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen, takes as a historical starting point the post-financial crisis social movements and seeks to uncover a deeper affinity and significance underlying the recent compulsion to “be political”. The series follows on Miessen’s trilogy on Participation, and accompanies his recently initiated Architecture and Critical Spatial Practice program at the Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt. Critical Spatial Practice attempts to understand how creators of space can act as active political agents, and how space can facilitate political agency itself. Tactfully avoiding a preemptive answer to such broad issues, the editors construct a larger discursive foundation about how space can be interpreted as a political medium within which action can take place.

9. Ian Bogost - Alien Phenomenology

Alien Phenomenology is more of a re-articulation of the arguments for and developments of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) than a book that seeks to introduce a radical new theory. Since the movement's official foundation in 2010 with a series of conferences organized by Bogost at Georgia Tech, published in 2012, this book puts for the declaration 'this is where we are' rather than 'this is what we are.' The reasons for which I have endeavored into such a book is not so much as to discover new concepts or insights, which are developed in more detail elsewhere, but to return my gaze towards OOO for its metaphysical deployment of metaphor as a way to draw a cartography of the contemporary architectural discipline. In this essay I will seek to investigate the idea of metaphor as it relates to the architectural design of the late avant-garde, and through its analysis reflexively determine a more operative definition for architecture as a political dispositif for the new.

8. Walter Lang - Desk Set & Ian Bogost - Procedural Rhetoric

Desk Set is a 1957 movie by Walter Lang that features Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. What is perhaps most unique about the medium of film, and is particularly encountered in the Golden Age of Hollywood, is that despite whatever attempts it may make to do otherwise, film is a historical document, an expression of spirit. Film, and perhaps all other expressive mediums, are trapped within the time of its making: the future is the future of that moment, the past is the past of that moment.

Procedural Rhetoric is the first chapter to Ian Bogost's book titled Persuasive Games, published in 2010. The book looks at video games as the expressive medium of our historical epoch, much like film was half a century ago. As film was infamously championed as the ideal medium of continuity, computer software, and video games in particular, is claimed to be the ideal medium of procedurality. Both of these mediums are considered to be ideal not because the processes they employ did not exist beforehand, but that the form of the mediums themselves are those processes.

7. Jean Baudrillard & Jean Nouvel - The Singular Objects of Architecture

It is only since the time this book was published, in 2002, as we have grown accustomed to seeing it next to the likes of Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, et al, that it would appear odd to find Jean Nouvel's name next to a philosopher of Baudrillard's kind. Despite his inauguration into the world order, it is perhaps no coincidence that these two came together on two separate occasions to converse, from which this book, The Singular Objects of Architecture, is the result (it would behoove us to remember that Nouvel started his architectural career by collaborating with Paul Virilio and Claude Parent).

Their dialog is extremely deep, yet at times non sequitur, as if the two were not talking directly to each other, but past, and towards a common point outside of each somewhere in the distance. Although Baudrillard famously wrote about the Beaubourg and a resident of Paris during the construction of Nouvel's seminal Arab World Institute and Foundation Cartier, and Nouvel's vocalized recognition of Baudrillard's work, the conversation is not about architecture per se, nor philosophy. The two settle on what we can call 'the metaphysics of space' and the future of the city.

4.X. The Thermodynamics of Ethico-Political Architecture

This essay was originally written as my reflection of Bernard Tschumi's Architecture and Disjunction (you will notice the first paragraph or so is the same). I in fact wrote this one beforehand, and subsequently decided to delete most of the essay and rework it more suitable for a blog post. But that said, as my current writings build off of certain concepts discussed in this essay, I have decided to post it here. It is unfinished, yet conclusive in attempting to construct a theoretical foundation for ethico-political architecture.

3. Simon Critchley - Infinitely Demanding

Written in 2007, Infinitely Demanding sets itself out towards establishing a subjective framework for ethical and political action. By discursively tracing ethical approaches from ancient, Kantian, post-Kantian, religious, psychoanalytic, and contemporary political philosophies, Critchley is able to craft a compelling argument for the radical polemic that subject-hood is essentially founded by our ethical position itself. In order to avoid any confusion in the following discussion about ethics and politics, let me 'cut to the chase' of the book, which at this point I hope proves rather inutile but will merely serve to quell the exclamations 'but what about politics!': "Politics is an ethical practice"(p92).