PresentaciónMathew Abbott
University of Sydney, Australia
PhD candidate
Mathew Abbott is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. His thesis focuses on the philosophical and political consequences of the human ability to form concepts of the world. It engages with the philosophy of language in Heidegger and the political ontology of Giorgio Agamben. He has tutored in philosophy, poetry and political theory, and will be lecturing in 2009 on the philosophy of film.
Abstract
Nietzsche, Biopolitics and the Enigma of Animal Life
In this paper I work to place Nietzsche’s philosophy of life with and against the biopolitical perspective opened up by Giorgio Agamben. I begin with an explanation of the concepts of life operative in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, showing that what they share is an idea of the human as delivered over to a blind, amoral force it is unable to assimilate; that this represents not a break with but a radicalization of the Kantian theory of desire, morality and duty (albeit with a crucial change in perspective). This radicalization produces two key results as evident in Nietzsche’s work: the claim that illusion plays a necessary role for human beings, who have a kind of «transcendental blindness» before the fact of their being alive; the idea that these problems are of a fundamentally political character, because resentment against life is a structuring principle for politics. Agamben’s approach to this Nietzschean problematic begins with an ingenious transposition of the ontological difference onto biological categories, such that the human being appears not just as that being whose being is an issue, but also as that animal whose animality is an issue. This approach, like Nietzsche’s own, is predicated upon the possibility of transformation: the idea that human beings could experience a change in their relation to their lives. Against Nietzsche, however, Agamben’s Pauline concept of redeemed humanity presents a resolutely non-hierarchical, properly universalistic nihilism.