Edited by Valeria Bonacci and Flavio Luzi

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most renowed and discussed contemporary philosophers: estimated as well as roughly criticized in the academic field, he has received an equally controversial reception within the theoretical positions of the movements emerged on the political scene since the end of the Nineties. With the twenty-year philosophical project Homo Sacer (of which the complete edition was recently published in Germany, France, United States, England, Spain and Italy) he has committed to a meticulous destitution of the ontological and political categories of the Western tradition, developing a toolbox capable of attacking the consolidated disciplinary boundaries – one can think of expressions such as naked life, exception, threshold, remnant, inoperativity, gesture, which, from the sphere of international philosophical reflection, have now penetrated the lexicon of human sciences, as well as of architecture and of art. At the same time, Giorgio Agamben could be considered as the pseudonym of a changing conceptual character, an epigone in the literal sense of one who is generated from others, authors and works belonging to the most different periods and fields. His writing moves ceaselessly between present and past, dialogue and archaeology, politics and philology, in a tension field it traces original constellations of. 

Under the title The Gesture that Remains. Contemporary Agamben, this issue of “Pólemos. Materiali di filosofia e critica sociale” aims at fostering a reflection on the author’s contribution to the current philosophical and political debate, taking part to a scientific production that, in Italy, has grown significantly only recently. Particularly, the title invites to deepen, and/or to critically reflect on, the notions through which Agamben formulates the philosophical-political proposal of Homo Sacer, with special regard for the ones which come to delineate its epilogue, such as inoperativity, destituent power, form of life, use, gesture. (more…)