XCO READINGS: 090224/Sec.2/Session#7/Agamben-Douglas/Purity&Danger-ComingCommunity

XCO READINGS: 090224/Sec.2/Session#7/Douglas-Agamben

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Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. 1966.

Below overview taken from:
http://www.routledge.com/books/Purity-and-Danger-isbn9780415289955

In Purity and Danger Mary Douglas identifies the concern for purity as a key theme at the heart of every society. In lively and lucid prose she explains its relevance for every reader by revealing its wide-ranging impact on our attitudes to society, values, cosmology and knowledge. The book has been hugely influential in many areas of debate - from religion to social theory. But perhaps its most important role is to offer each reader a new explanation of why people behave in the way they do. With a specially commissioned introduction by the author which assesses the continuing significance of the work thirty-five years on, this Routledge Classics edition will ensure that Purity and Danger continues to challenge and question well into the new millennium.

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Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minnesotta Press. 1993.
(selections)

Below overview taken from:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/A/agamben_coming.html

In this extraordinary and original philosophical achievement, Agamben develops the concept of community and the social implications of his philosophical thought. Agamben's exploration is, in part, a contemporary response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures.

"This book needs to be sampled for its purity and effervescence. There is an antic humor that I experience reading Agamben as well, and that occurs in acrobatic leaps from popular culture to writers like Aquinas. Beautifully translated by Michael Hardt, with the help of Brian Massumi, Mike Sullivan, and the author, Agamben comes through clearly in English, with an incandescence that is to be treasured, especially when it crops up in the realm of questions that point us in the direction of the very ground/lessness of our being—beings in the same spaces, yet not together." —SubStance

"A superb introduction to English-speaking readers of this important thinker and writer." —Rebecca Comay

"Giorgio Agamben, Italy's leading philosopher and essayist, is one of the most delicate and probing writers I have encountered in recent years. His work, which belongs to the type of writing we tend to associate with Walter Benjamin, is elegant, cheerful and--to resurrect a somewhat exhausted term--utterly revolutionary." —Avital Ronell

"Agamben's text is a rare philosophical meditation on community as a kind of linguistic belonging that moves beyond both identity and universality. Erudite and expansive, yet delivered with epigrammatic ease, this writing brings forth the most promising equivocations of meaning in Talmudic tales, Plato, Spinoza, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein to avow the contingency and communal 'being' within a history whose value is its irreparability. This is a moving and disruptive work that brings what is most dynamic in ontological thought to bear on what is most difficult to think about: contemporary forms of sociality." —Judith Butler

"The Coming Community tries to designate a community beyond any conception available under this name; not a community of essence, a being-together of existences; that is to say: precisely what political as well as religious identities can no longer grasp. Nothing less." —Jean-Luc Nancy

Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Language and Death (1991), Stanzas (1992), and Means without End (2000).


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