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Giorgio Agamben

The Highest Poverty

The acclaimed philosopher and author of Homo Sacer contemplates the possibility of true human freedom through a deep analysis of monastic stricture.
What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule? It is to these questions that Giorgio Agamben’s new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis.
The Highest Poverty meticulously reconstructs the lives of monks, with their obsessive attention to temporal articulation and to the Rule, to ascetic techniques and to liturgy. But Agamben’s thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which “life” is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the “highest poverty” and “use” challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today.
How can we think a form-of-life, that is, a human life released from the grip of law, and a use of bodies and of the world that never becomes an appropriation? How can we think life as something not subject to ownership but only for common use?
207 printed pages
Original publication
2013
Publication year
2013
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Quotes

  • Jan Nohas quoted6 years ago
    cenoby” (koinos bios, the common life), the perfection of a common life in all and for all
  • Jan Nohas quoted6 years ago
    And what is a human life, if it can no longer be distinguished from the rule?
  • Jan Nohas quoted6 years ago
    radical reformulation of the very conceptuality that up until that moment articulated the relationship between human action and norm, “life” and “rule,
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