Giorgio Agamben

David Kishik

Stefan Pedatella

In his new collection of essays, Giorgio Agamben addresses the most urgent themes of his recent research.

Nudities

The Manhattan Project is a sharp and witty study of a book never written: an imaginary sequel to Walter Benjamin'sArcades Project, dedicated to New York, capital of the twentieth century.

A Theory of a City

The Manhattan Project

"In The Manhattan Project, David Kishik dares to imagine a Walter Benjamin who did not commit suicide in 1940, but managed instead to escape the Nazis to begin a long, solitary life in New York. During his anonymous, posthumous existence, while he was haunting and haunted by his new city, Benjamin composed a sequel to his Arcades Project. Just as his incomplete masterpiece revolved around Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, this spectral text was dedicated to New York, capital of the twentieth. Kishik's sui generis work of experimental scholarship or fictional philosophy is thus presented as a study of a manuscript that was never written. The fictitious prolongation of Benjamin's life will raise more than one eyebrow, but the wit, breadth, and incisiveness of Kishik's own writing is bound to impress. Kishik reveals a world of secret affinities between New York City and Paris, the flâneur and the homeless person, the collector and the hoarder, the covered arcade and the bare street, but also between photography and graffiti, pragmatism and minimalism, Andy Warhol and Robert Moses, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs. A critical celebration of New York City, The Manhattan Project reshapes our perception of urban life, and rethinks our very conception of modernity."--Publisher's website.

a theory of a city

The Manhattan project

Giorgio Agamben's work develops a new philosophy of life. On its horizon lies the conviction that our form of life can become the guiding and unifying power of the politics to come. Informed by this promise, The Power of Life weaves decisive moments and neglected aspects of Agamben's writings over the past four decades together with the thought of those who influenced him most (including Kafka, Heidegger, Benjamin, Arendt, Deleuze, and Foucault). In addition, the book positions his work in relation to key figures from the history of philosophy (such as Plato, Spinoza, Vico, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Derrida). This approach enables Kishik to offer a vision that ventures beyond Agamben's warning against the power over (bare) life in order to articulate the power of (our form of) life and thus to rethink the biopolitical situation. Following Agamben's prediction that the concept of life will stand at the center of the coming philosophy, Kishik points to some of the most promising directions that this philosophy can take.

Agamben and the Coming Politics

The Power of Life

This sharp, witty study of a book never written, a sequel to Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, is dedicated to New York City, capital of the twentieth century. A sui generis work of experimental scholarship or fictional philosophy, it analyzes an imaginary manuscript composed by a ghost. Part sprawling literary montage, part fragmentary theory of modernity, part implosive manifesto on the urban revolution, The Manhattan Project offers readers New York as a landscape built of sheer life. It initiates them into a world of secret affinities between photography and graffiti, pragmatism and minimalism, Andy Warhol and Robert Moses, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs, the flâneur and the homeless person, the collector and the hoarder, the glass-covered arcade and the bare, concrete street. These and many other threads can all be spooled back into one realization: for far too long, we have busied ourselves with thinking about ways to change the city; it is about time we let the city change the way we think.

In the most radical rereading of the opening chapters of Genesis since the Zohar, David Kishik reveals the post-secular and post-human implications of an ancient text that is part of our cultural DNA.

David Kishik

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