(Des)troços: revista de pensamento radical
(Des)troços: Journal of Radical Thought (e-ISSN 2763-518X) is a semi-annual electronic journal with open access and continuous publication. It is affiliated with the research group "The State of Exception in Contemporary Brazil: Towards a Critical Reading of the Emergency Argument in the National Political-Legal Scenario" from the Department of Labor Law and Introduction to the Study of Law at the Faculty of Law of the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Our editorial line proposes to brush against the grain the philosophical tradition and give voice to underground or marginalized currents of thought. We seek to promote a radical and interdisciplinary critique of the discourses that have shaped and continue to shape the construction of Law and the State in the West. These discourses, based on authoritarian views of politics, conceal structures and mechanisms of domination, such as gender, class, race, and sexuality, which ultimately normalize exception and legitimize the violence of political and legal power. The journal accepts papers in continuous flow for the two issues of the annual volume, in addition to contributions to thematic dossiers.
Belo Horizonte MG: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Faculdade de Direito e Ciências do Estado, Departamento de Direito do Trabalho e Introdução ao Estudo do Direito (DIT)
Benedictus de Spinoza bene dictus de Anarchia
Ethics becomes psycho-sexual-politics when it turns into the art of mutually learning how to compose new relations of potency (between our collective potencies of thinking and acting) that enable us to create for ourselves both a new liberatory society without servitude (in which it is worth living and working together with others), and a new liberatory subjectivation without psycho-sexual domination (in which it is worth affecting and being affected by others). The present article addresses the following problems: Does Spinoza merely repeat what all modern philosophers (Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Burke, Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer) have repeated—namely, that desire (cupiditas) and conatus are defined by their negativity, lack, privation, longing for pleasure and jouissance, and by their welding to the Law?? What conception does Spinoza have of sexuality as it pertains to our already-statized subjectivations? How does he characterize sexual desire (coeundi cupiditas), sexual arousal (coeundi libido), pleasure (titillatio), and satisfaction? How can we characterize in a divergent (acratic) way male psyco-sexual violence (e.g., prostitution)? How can we surpass—following the Spinozist line of flight—the the dominant phallic-pimp State sexuality toward a sexuality of univocity or of the non-human sex (a question for a new sexual ethics)?
Copyright (c) 2025 Martin Chicolino https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The conceptual links between the crab and the people who lived on the banks of the mangrove swamp in the city of Recife were pointed out by Josué de Castro (1960), and were highlighted in his novel “Homens e Caranguejos” (Men and Crabs), in which the author uses poetic and autobiographical writing about the boy João Paulo to highlight the socio-geographical issues that were gaining momentum with the modernization of the capital of Pernambuco, highlighting the way in which the riverside populations were plagued by hunger and misery as the city expanded. Later, in the mid-1990s, the manguebit movement returned to Josué de Castro and broke with the notion of the crab destined for death. This article seeks to discuss the shift from Josué de Castro's necessary denunciation, with the crab man doomed to misery and death, to the position of Chico Science's mangueboy whose insurgent impetus produces another experience of the city. operated by the manguebit movement, mapping the transition from the crab identity as one destined for death to the place of the crab as co-author of the city. To analyze this process, we use the concept of becoming in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to situate the ethical-aesthetic-political character of the mangrove movement as an intensifier of the power of the margins on the coast of Pernambuco.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ana Rackel de Paula Quintas, Patricia Oliveira Lira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Gosmic Art, stronghold of Planetary Politics
This text conceptually develops the idea of a gosmic art, linked to the body-shell-house activities of different animal architects. The term gosmic art arises from a doctoral research in Performing Arts in which the author studied barnacles – sessile crustaceans that inhabit intertidal zones – and proposes a transformation of the notion of the cosmic – the force that monopolizes the description of reality through the architecture of numinous, immeasurable relations that govern relations beyond the human – to the notion of the (neologism) gosmic, to deal with visceral forces, bodies of gosma, slime, the organic agglomeration that produces unfoldings upon itself as practices of creating territories. Gosmic art proposes to establish relationships in ecologies of planetary practices, returning to the bodies of the earth, to those who inhabit planet Earth, the capacity to act in relation to the environment and as subtle forces in the operation and constitution of the landscape.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mateus Scota https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The following thought exercise begins with Heidegger's problematization of animality, attempting, based on the criticisms of authors such as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, to account for the possible limitations of Heidegger's approach to non-human animals. To do this, it will be necessary to expose and rethink the metaphysical status of the animal in the face of the criticized valorization of the human in its anthropocentrism. The aim is to re-evaluate how the theme of animality was taken into the territory of metaphysical thought, specifically in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. The exclusion of animal life has been a fundamental element in the very construction of the idea of man throughout the history of the West. The way in which the notion of the world is grounded in the theses of Heideggerian ontology reveals that Western metaphysics has mainly taught us to live within the spirit as a determination of man's humanity. On the contrary, in this article I argue that we should learn, like animals, to live outside the spirit, potentially qualifying its non-place in fundamental ontology as extramundanity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mateus Vinícius Barros Uchôa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From the People-Subject to the Antagonistic Subject
The article “From the People-Subject to the Antagonistic Subject” by Dario Gentili reconstructs the trajectory of Italian Marxism through three decisive moments: Gramsci’s humanist historicism, Galvano Della Volpe’s scientific materialism, and Mario Tronti’s operaismo turn. Gentili examines how Gramsci’s interpretation, consolidated by Togliatti, embedded Marxism in the Italian idealist tradition by promoting the people as the political subject. Della Volpe breaks from this by advocating a scientific-materialist reading of Marx, free from Hegelian mediation. Tronti radicalizes this move by centering theory on the working class as an antagonistic subject, opposing both the concept of “people” and the logic of synthesis. The modern factory becomes the privileged site of class conflict and the production of workers’ knowledge. With the decline of Fordism, Tronti revises his theory, exposing the limits of operaismo and traditional revolutionary politics. Gentili argues that the true legacy of this tradition lies in affirming antagonism as irreconcilable separation, rather than conciliatory synthesis.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dario Gentili; Raphael Guazzelli Valerio, Matteo Allegrezza https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Bases for a materialist ethic on the body
Societies convulse when they fail to reach moral agreements or when pacts generate numerous victims. In the last two centuries, the dominant mode of production, technological capitalism, has considerably transformed ways of life and brought the patriarchal morality into crisis. As a result, women have secured the right to induced abortion and the LGBTIQ+ community achieved marriage equality, but other rights remain disputed; in particular, this is the case with sex work and surrogacy, so their legalization is not foreseeable in the short term. Both issues fracture feminism and, at times, distance it from the LGBTIQ+ community, which is more inclined to accept them. The most controversial matter is surrogacy, which some consider an exploitation of the female body; however, the practice has always existed among family members. This problem is taken as the basis for analysis in order to develop an ethics of the body that does not differentiate its parts according to criteria of dignity. Such an ethics also does not accept that committees of experts decide which rights are granted to citizens, although these committees may present their reflections. That problem is taken as the main basis of analysis to develop a materialist ethic that does not differentiate the areas of the body according to criteria of dignity. Such ethics also does not accept that committees of experts decide the rights granted to citizens, although they can present their reflections.
Copyright (c) 2025 Javier Ugarte Pérez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article offers a critique of the aestheticization and depoliticization of the multispecies approach in social sciences, art, and academic production. Drawing on a situated and anti-colonial perspective, the text analyzes the risks of turning multispecies into an innocuous category, disconnected from the structural violence shaping human and non-human relations. Methodologically, it combines theoretical review with critical analysis of concrete experiences, exploring themes such as frictions, tactical alliances, animal resistance, and situated cohabitation practices. The central argument asserts that a transformative multispecies ethics requires embodied and politicized practices that confront structural speciesism, colonialism, and capitalism. The article concludes by advocating for an urgent ethical and material commitment to insurgent forms of more-than-human coexistence.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martina Davidson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this theoretical-political essay, we problematize, based on a scene from our work with the homeless population, the animalization of black bodies. Our goal is to question the impacts of a split between human and animal that would establish access to the category of human for all people. To uncover this fallacy, it is necessary to analyze racism as a mechanism for the animalization of humans, in the case of peoples described as soulless/logosless. An ideological-political fiction responsible for constituting the process of racialization of the world and consequently its central weaponization for the annihilation of black and indigenous bodies. What can a black woman who finds herself homeless teach us about racism and animalization?
Copyright (c) 2025 Arthur Cândido Lima, Lisandra Espíndula Moreira, Wanderson Vilton Nunes da Silva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Rights and Liberation for the Non-Existent: the Implications of De-Extinction
De-extinction is an emerging biotechnological innovation that has seen a sudden uptick of media and investment attention, holding considerable implications for animal populations of all sorts. This paper, after providing an overview of de-extinction discourse, rhetoric, and ideas, contextualizes this innovation within the works of Catia Faria and Sue Donaldson & Will Kymlicka. Said contextualization provides impetus for animal theory to engage with de-extinction in more detail, and beyond an immediate rejection of the practice. De-extinction holds grave implications for animal populations that must be considered in theory, both to critique the practice, and to better understand the importance of theoretical framework in the context of the ongoing “animal turn” in political theory.
Copyright (c) 2025 Richard Giles https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Through social media, contemporary societies, interwoven by biopower and capitalism, produce imitations and copies of scenes that have already become part of social convention and norm. Faced with this type of imitation that has become current currency, it is possible to imitate the cynical type of imitation in an attempt to change, alter, or falsify it, using the lives of other animals as models of imitation, as well as the act of living in accordance with nature. In this way, it would be possible to disobey social conventions and confront the established order. The elaboration of the proposal, structured as a biopoetics of imitation, compiles elements from three examples of imitation to expose the contrast between imitation resulting from contemporary biopower and capitalism; three proposals that encourage the imitation of animality: ethology, community, and biopoetics; and the way of living in accordance with nature related to the organism-centered biological perspective. The conclusion holds that living biopoetically in accordance with the way of being of organisms promises a community whose power of life and telos point to coexistence and coproduction among organisms related to the environment.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jorge Vélez Vega https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article offers a philosophical reflection on the presence of animal life in urban environments, grounded in a philosophy of nature situated in Mexico City. The first part of the text problematizes the category of the animal as an ontological and territorial condition, challenging classical dichotomies between nature and culture. It argues that the animal must be considered in relation to its environment and the technical, symbolic, and political mediations that shape its presence. The second part presents a case study of two species: the opossum and the axolotl, whose trajectories reveal distinct ways of inhabiting the city and being inhabited by it. The text invites us to consider the city as an ontological device that produces the realm of the sensible, where the animal appears as situated, irreducible, and challenging presence.
Copyright (c) 2025 María Antonia González Valerio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A video art piece, an audiovisual experiment, a solar fabulation. A process of co-creation between human and nonhuman creatures. An instantiation of modes of existence that do not exist (according to our anthropocentric standards of existence). An animal-image. Sunlight-creatures, morning sun. A beam of sunlight transformed into hand-distorted reflections. Reflections that not only multiply the light, but also unsettle boundaries, bend realities, and open cracks for existences that slip beyond the visible and the nameable. An animal-music. Sounds of the sun, sounds of the wind, sounds of human and nonhuman beings. An animal-dance, a dance that distorts the rational and celebrates the irrational, the unclassifiable, the not-knowing. A space outside space, a time outside time. A darkness in which everything is possible. A solar fabulation, in the fissures between the known and the unknown, between reality and fiction. Light-beings: other kinds of matter. Magical matter, matter made of poetry, delighting in its own inexplicability. A magical and poetic composition in which the sun is not merely the source of the light that shapes the creatures, but is itself a composer. The sound of solar wave frequencies is also part of the composition—lower frequencies, almost inaudible to humans… (headphones are recommended for a more intense audiovisual experience). The animal-image and the animal-music of this audiovisual experiment meet in their refusal of rationalizations; they are images and sounds fabulated in partnership with the sun, not to represent or explain the sun. A partnership between humans and nonhumans, moving toward the end of the world (the anthropocentric, patriarchal/colonial/capitalist world ruled by human exceptionalism), moving toward the instantiation of other possible worlds.
Copyright (c) 2025 Débora Curti, Édio Raniere https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"All things clothed in the glory of superb equality". Two nineteenth-century United States concepts of biopolitics
This paper analyzes two contrasting contemporary concepts of biopolitics, from the late nineteenth century United States. The first, by Edward Payson Evans, recognized in works on ecology and animal rights as a pioneer against anthropocentrism and biocentrism. The second, by Voltairine de Cleyre, is excluded by the same literature. For these objectives, it interprets the texts of both on animals, nature and culture, law and justice using a transdisciplinary approach and a critical decolonial ecofeminist perspective. Methodologically, it deploys bibliography and tools from philosophy, political, intellectual, and legal history, history of science, biology and ethnobiology. It introduces the problem of the lack of context of Evan´s current, in order to address, in the second and third sections, his conception of animal politics, and of justice and law, respectively. In the fourth and fifth sections it studies the work of Voltairine de Cleyre on the same topics. The results are that Evans' biopolitics was a necropolitics, in contrast with de Cleyre, whose biopolitics was a non-essentialist ecofeminist one. It concludes by arguing that her perspective, like those of other silenced voices, needs to be included in ecological histories to sustain life on our shared planet.
Copyright (c) 2025 Eva Botella Ordinas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Subalternities and asymmetrical power dynamics in Mexico
The concept of subalternity extends beyond a mere marginal social position; it describes a political condition where certain groups lack power, voice, and representation. These collectives are dominated by established ideologies and institutions, with their narratives historically silenced. However, this condition doesn't nullify their agency; on the contrary, it fuels resistance and disobedience, key actions to assert their dignity and rights. We'll analyze how power is reproduced through structural mechanisms present even in education, and how certain systems prevent the voices of subordinate groups from being genuinely heard, beyond just the absence of speech. It's crucial to recognize the diverse categories of exclusion that generate these situations, from social class to gender or ethnicity. In this context, self-representation emerges as a powerful tool for empowerment, allowing these groups to construct and express their own identities and narratives. Finally, we'll explore concrete examples in Mexico, such as indigenous peoples, women, and the working class, to illustrate the complex dynamics of subalternity and their ongoing fight for visibility and justice.
Copyright (c) 2025 Abril Uscanga-Barradas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article proposes a reinterpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy through the lens of animality and its relationship with the political, challenging the Aristotelian tradition of the zōon politikon and its hierarchy based on logos. It argues that Nietzsche not only critiques the exclusion of animality from the political sphere but also recognizes within it a creative and insurgent force capable of reconfiguring notions of community and the political body. Through concepts such as the "will to power," "the innocence of becoming," and "great health," Nietzsche subverts the human/animal dichotomy and anticipates contemporary biopolitical critiques, suggesting a "multispecies" politics grounded in corporeality and instinct, as opposed to sovereign rationality. The article engages with theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Donna Haraway, and Frans de Waal to explore Nietzschean implications for a post-anthropocentric reinvention of the political.
Copyright (c) 2025 Matheus Becari Dias https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The politics of sight and bearing witness to animal suffering
Bearing witness is a strategy used by both Human and Animal rights activists. For Animal Justice Citizen Activists (AJCAs), bearing witness is linked to a politics of sight enacted through farm occupation. This article draws on previous analyses of the Canadian context: text media coverage of four farm occupations, two provincial ag-gag laws, and in-depth interviews with AJCAs. Using Kurasawa’s critical substantive approach, we conceptualize this politics of sight as a mode of ethico-political practice that draws attention to the tasks and perils of bearing witness. This approach, we argue, reveals challenges otherwise concealed by existing sociological frameworks.
Copyright (c) 2025 Annie Bernatchez, José Julián López https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The article proposes expanding the Aristotelian definition of “political animals” to include nonhuman animals. It focuses on dogs, specifically free-living ones, as a possible paradigm for a new interspecies community and politics. However, before examining free-living dogs, the definition of “dog” must be reclaimed from its Western reduction to “pet.” Additionally, the cohabitation of dogs and humans must transcend the ethical and political limitations of the “companion species” paradigm, which is based on a Western, minority model (the dog as a human companion) and never questions the power dynamics and hierarchies of this historically and geographically specific model, ultimately reinforcing them. The free-living dog paradigm opens up the relationship to different forms of cohabitation and politics. After briefly examining two examples of legislation that grants free-living dogs the right to inhabit the polis (in India and Turkey), the article concludes with a list of key points for reorienting politics along interspecific lines.
Copyright (c) 2025 Carlo Salzani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The objective of this paper is to analyze Foucault's reading of Nietzsche from the perspective of the relationship between human beings and animals. To do so, we will begin by mentioning two interpretations of the human-animal relationship based on Nietzsche's Second Untimely Consideration: one continuist and the other discontinuist. We will then contrast these interpretations with Foucault's two-part reading of Nietzsche: 1) in the 1950s reading, animals serve as a mask that dissolves the anthropological knot and frees human beings from their own truth; 2) while in the late 1960s reading, genealogy implies the perpetual intertwining of human history with that of animals. This interpretation helps to complexify the role that animals play in Foucault's reading of Nietzsche and in the philosophical context that gives rise to concepts such as biopolitics and biohistory.
Copyright (c) 2025 Josué Imanol López Barrios https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The roles of animals—particularly pigs and nonhuman primates—in xenotransplantation reveal complex ethical and symbolic dynamics. Nonhuman primates, due to their cognitive proximity to humans, were increasingly positioned as recipients rather than organ sources, reflecting an ethical “hierarchical upgrade.” Pigs, genetically engineered to provide organs, embody an ambiguous status: highly alienated through biotechnological manipulation and sterile confinement, as “biocapital” commodified and embedded in market logics. Their “humanization”, besides a change of their genetic-make, also features as standing in for humans, even though in a different role than their primate counterparts. The ethical connotation of this may benefit those animals in the long run. Recognizing animal alterity—not merely as biological bodies but as intentional subjects—as, for example, suggested by Amerindian metaphysics, reshapes the understanding of identity and medical practice amid molecular and semiotic conceptions of life. These considerations call for nuanced reflection on the boundaries between nature, culture, and species in contemporary biomedicine.
Copyright (c) 2025 Johannes Kögel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The life of Gianfranco Sanguinetti (1948–2025), a prominent member of the Situationist International (SI), was marked by uncompromising criticism of the society of the spectacle. His most notable intervention was “Operation Censor” (1975). Using the method of “subversive imposture,” Sanguinetti published an anonymous pamphlet exposing the Italian state intelligence services use of “false flag” terrorism in the repression of the “hot autumn” of 1969. This denunciation was later taken up again in his polemical On Terrorism and the State (1979), published after the defeat of the 1977 movement. In his final years, Sanguinetti returned to publishing political essays in the European alternative press, denouncing the emergence of a new form of domination: “Western despotism,” originating from the dissolution of the USSR and the simultaneous death of the constitutional state in Western countries.
Copyright (c) 2025 Erick Quintas Corrêa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Between Celestial Bodies and Animal Bodies
Partindo das reflexões de Hans Jonas acerca da Revolução Científica, este artigo busca analisar o impacto epistemológico das novas metodologias de investigação do universo para o estudo da existência animal. Utiliza-se, no presente estudo, uma pesquisa bibliográfica de caráter analítico-reflexivo. Em um primeiro momento, analisa-se o grande resultado ontológico das descobertas de Copérnico e de seus seguidores, a saber, a homogeneidade da natureza. Seu tratado quinhentista, muito mais do que revolucionar o entendimento do cosmos e estabelecer o heliocentrismo como hipótese, postula que uma mesma substância rege o comportamento dos corpos abaixo e acima dos céus. Com o sucesso de suas descobertas, os naturalistas que investigavam os corpos animais quiseram provar o sucesso epistemológico da empreitada copernicana. Assim, aplicaram a experimentação e a matemática aos seus “objetos” de estudo e operaram verdadeiros feitos ao desvendarem os mecanismos de funcionamento da vida. Não perceberam, no entanto, que ao seguirem os passos da exitosa Filosofia Natural, acabavam por deixar de lado importantes aspectos da existência animal, como a consciência, a senciência e os sentimentos. Definitivamente banidos do registro científico como “tabus” da empresa científica, tais aspectos tornaram a vida animal ainda mais enigmática do que antes.
Copyright (c) 2025 Bruno Henrique do Rosario Xavier https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Decolonizar o decolonialismo: notas para uma tra(d)ição não-dialética
Copyright (c) 2024 Andityas Soares de Moura Costa Matos, Thaisa Maria Rocha Lemos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
La théorie politique contemporaine oppose couramment le pouvoir constituant et le pouvoir destituant. Je me propose dans cet article de contester cette opposition et de démontrer leur complémentarité. Je montre tout d’abord que certaines caractéristiques du pouvoir destituant, héritées des pensées de Benjamin et de Sorel, ainsi que de l’anarcho-nihilisme du XIXème siècle, peuvent être comprises comme les conditions de possibilité du pouvoir constituant. Ces caractéristiques, que je qualifie de pratiques de la négativité, conduisent ainsi à une situation de nihilisme parfait dans laquelle une communauté peut prendre une décision fondamentale sur son existence politique. Puis j’interroge cette complémentarité à un second niveau en m’appuyant notamment sur l’anarchisme de Landauer. Après avoir défendu l’idée que seule la réitération du pouvoir constituant permet la préservation de la liberté propre aux périodes révolutionnaires, je conclus qu’une fondation sans archè et la préservation de la dimension contingente de l’ordre constitué – rendues possibles par cette réitération – répondent à certaines exigences de la théorie du pouvoir destituant d’Agamben.
Copyright (c) 2025 Erwan Sommerer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Andityas Soares de Moura Costa Matos, Antônio Lopes de Almeida Neto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Artistic historiography and the making of Philosophical Archaeology Space 2009–2019
This visual essay unfolds my research on philosophical archaeology by means of artistic practice, showing how philosophical archaeology—a method of historical inquiry that essentially embodies one’s relation to history and historiographic research—is conceived and carried out as an artistic modus operandi, as an artistic historiography. Thus, at the core of this research lies a broad question: How can artists historicize? The following, being solely a special case, attempts an answer—it exhibits a research space (titled Philosophical Archaeology Space 2009–2019) that was constituted as, and by, philosophical archaeology in my own artistic practice of the years 2009 and 2019. Finally, this research reflects on philosophical archaeology’s potential (as artistic modus operandi, as “Ar[t]chaeology”) to distend the discourse of history and historiography.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ido Govrin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article starts from an analysis of Giorgio Agamben's use of the notion of “boredom” from the point of view of Heidegger and Benjamin in the framework of his philosophy of inoperativity. First, Heidegger's interpretation of the concept of “deep boredom” in L'Aperto and L'uso dei corpi is analyzed. From the perspective of a broader interpretation of the concept of emotional tonality (Stimmung) in the early works, it is shown that, critically, Agamben interprets boredom as a fundamental emotive tonality that would be the last radical but still “metaphysical” attempt to make an “anthropological machine” work. In this sense, boredom would offer a suspensive model for thinking a human life without content but still suggestively “thrown” into a “task” that fails to resolve a certain “affective” biologization of the realization of the human. Secondly, we study the mentions of the figure of the boredom (Langeweile, ennui) that refer to the thought of Walter Benjamin. Although Agamben does not explicitly compare these concepts of boredom in Heidegger and Benjamin, their contraposition allows us to illuminate two different “suspensive” models, close and opposite, that operate in the philosophy of inoperativity. Finally, it is proposed to define the critical potential of an Agambenean philosophy of boredom, as a figure of the “involuntary strike” against the imperatives of the epoch itself.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mercedes Ruvituso https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article deals with three concepts used by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in the Homo Sacer project to explain how they are articulated in Agambenian ethics. According to the philosopher, the political tradition has placed the notion of action at the centre of its reflections which, according to this perspective, has led to an absolute opposition between means and ends, thus establishing a vicious circle in which human actions are irrevocably fated to fulfil a destiny. For this reason, Agamben proposes that action be replaced by use in political reflection. If it is possible to define Agambenian ethics as an ethics of use, this use is not to be confused with utility or instrumentality. It is pure use, which implies not only a deposition of instrumental utility but also a displacement of the property relationship.
Copyright (c) 2025 Caio Paz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
This short essay ponders themes of Giorgio Agamben’s corpus through the story of Colin Smith, the protagonist of the short story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959) by Alan Sillitoe and the film of the same name by Tony Richardson (1962). The essay considers how Smith’s infamous refusal to cross the finish line is paradigmatic of Agamben’s destituent power. The essay, as a sort of love letter to Smith, further engages questions of thought and feeling in the face of the contemporary apparatuses with which, as Agamben phrases it, we are in hand-to-hand combat.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jenny Doussan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper explores Agamben’s philosophy of law, highlighting how his view on the topic relies on his reading of sovereignty and biopolitics. Indeed, within the fertile debate on Foucault’s biopower, Agamben provides an original and radical reading of the political inclusion of life. His exegesis embeds biopolitics within a theory of the very essence of Western tradition, and of its fundamental elements that are law and sovereignty. In the paper, deviations from a Foucauldian “orthodoxy” are traced back to the Italian philosopher’s fascination with Heidegger, Benjamin, and Kafka. Hence, Agamben develops an unedited method and positive political proposal. Last, this paper exhibits some shortcomings of his method, as an ontologizing approach to politics could obliterate, rather than clarify, the manifold historical manifestations of power and make ineffective the positive strategies against its violence.
Copyright (c) 2025 Letizia Konderak https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0