Saturday, November 05, 2005
(4:34 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
An Agamben Course
Going through the Agamben books I've read so far, I've been musing about what books I would choose for a hypothetical upper-level undergraduate course on Agamben. Some choices strike me as abundantly obvious. First, one simply must read at least some of the essays in Potentialities. Second, an Agamben course that doesn't include the beautiful Man without Content is simply a wasted opportunity. Also, the only reason anyone really cares about Agamben is ultimately Homo Sacer, so people would feel ripped off if they were not able to do that, I think. I'm disinclined to include State of Exception, however -- it's too easy to go straight into this moralizing mode (which is also a problem for Homo Sacer, but that book is unavoidable), and I don't know that it's really representative of his work as a whole. I would be more apt to include The Coming Community, saving that for last since it's the "hardest." I would also want to have a course packet with at least Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and probably "Critique of Violence."Never having had to lay out a course before, I'm not sure exactly how much could be included -- is it acceptable to assign 20 pages per hour (50 minutes, I assume) of class, or is that too much/too little? I may well be putting the cart before the horse here, since I don't really know how much material one can include, and since I'm trying to plan an upper-level course when I'm certainly not going to be doing that right when I start teaching.
