AGAMBEN'S PASSAGE THROUGH ANTIPHILOSOPHY

In the preceding chapters, I tried to show how psychoanalysis emerged as an antiphilosophy and, in this emergence, came to establish certain routines as its own: the diagnosis of slavery as the consequence of the encounter between the body and language, a concomitant intrication of sexual protest, the ambivalence of love as at once mediating, obscuring and transforming this relation between slavery and sex, and, finally, the development of an ethics of poetic invention. This chapter, by contrast, turns its attentions to a different kind of thinker: one who begins as a self-nominated ‘philosopher’, but who, in covertly drawing from the antiphilosophical powers of psychoanalysis, recovers and remarks phenomena that much contemporary philosophy had felt itself able to overlook; these phenomena include the Muselmann, the potentiality of poetry, and a practical theorisation of study in which stupefaction and stupidity become avatars of messianism.