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2019 | 89 | 95-110

Article title

Ademia: Agamben and the Idea of the People

Content

Title variants

Languages of publication

EN

Abstracts

EN
In the volume Stasis. Civil War as a Political Paradigm, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben advances the thesis that ademia – the absence of a people (a-demos) – is a constitutive element of the modern state. When confronted with the fact that modern political and juridical thought elevated the people to the role of the sole chief constituent agent and the ultimate source of the legitimacy of constituted orders, this thesis turns out to be rather problematic. In this work, I will explore Agamben’s notion of ademia, retracing the main lines of its theoretical development and reconsidering it in relation to different interpretations of the idea of the people. Most notably, I will demonstrate how Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Carl Schmitt in challenging the conundrums that the idea of the people inevitably entails ended up in revealing the ultimate absence of the people in the political space of the constituted order of the state. In doing so, I will try to show how Agamben’s notion of ademia is helpful is grasping some of the main paradoxes and conundrums underpinning the meaning and the uses of the idea of the people in legal and political thought.

Keywords

Year

Volume

89

Pages

95-110

Physical description

Dates

published
2019-12-29

Contributors

  • University of Kent; Uczelnia Łazarskiego

References

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  • Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Cesare Casarino, Vincenzo Binetti. Minneapolis–London: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
  • Agamben, Giorgio. 2015. Stasis. Civil War as a Political Paradigm. Translated by Nicolas Heron. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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  • Possenti, Vittorio. 1988. “Sul concetto di popolo: momenti della filosofia pubblica antica e moderna”. Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica 80(3): 395–423.
  • Rash, William. 2014. “Carl Schmitt’s Defence of Democracy”. In The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt. Edited by Jens Meierhenrich, Oliver Simons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2002. The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses. Edited by Susan Dunn. New Heaven: Yale University Press.
  • Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology. Four Chapter on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  • Schmitt, Carl. 2008. Constitutional Theory. Translation by Jeffery Seitzer. Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Schmitt, Carl. 2014. Dictatorship. Cambridge: Polity Press.
  • Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph. 2003. Political Writings: Including the Debate Between Sieyès and Tom Paine in 1791. Indianapolis: Hackett Classics.
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Document Type

Publication order reference

Identifiers

YADDA identifier

bwmeta1.element.ojs-doi-10_18778_0208-6069_89_07
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