These are excerpts from Weil’s essay, “La Personne et le sacré,” translated by Richard Rees into English as “Human Personality.” At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience…

A new essay by David Cayley. I refer you to his blog. “In early April I posted an essay called ‘Questions About the Pandemic from the Point-of-View of Ivan Illich.’ It was written mainly to clarify my own mind and to share my thoughts with a few like-minded friends, but…

This is a translation of Sul tempo che viene (“On the Coming Time”) by Giorgio Agamben from his blog, November 23, 2020. To followers who receive email notifications: apologies for an earlier post of this, now deleted. Everything on this blog is set for free distribution with zero monetization. What…

Requiem for the Students (Giorgio Agamben) A translation of a short intervention by Agamben on the blog Diario della crisi at the website of the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici (23 May 2020). As in many of his recent blogs, Agamben refers specifically to developments in Italy. As we foresaw they would, university lessons next…

Agamben has written about a paradigm for governance emerging on the basis of biosecurity concerns “whose efficacy will exceed that of all forms of government known thus far in the political history of the West.” The question of how the security of bios, life, came to be a concern for…

Biosecurity and Politics (Giorgio Agamben) A translation of Agamben’s blog, 11 May 2020. The original is here. What is striking about the reactions to the apparatuses of exception that have been put in place in our country (and not only in this one) is the inability to observe them beyond the immediate context in which…

New Reflections (Giorgio Agamben) A translation of Giorgio Agamben’s blog today. It’s an excerpt from a longer interview that was published in an Italian newspaper: Are we experiencing, with this forced confinement, a new totalitarianism? In many quarters, the hypothesis is now being formulated that we are experiencing the end of a world, that…

David Cayley’s Questions About the Current Pandemic from the Point of View of Ivan Illich If you read my blog, you might already know who David Cayley is. He accomplished a remarkable task in recording and publicizing the thought of Ivan Illich, especially his later thinking. The other day, he posted this to his blog, and it was promptly re-blogged by Giorgio Agamben at Quodlibet…

Snapshots from Oaxaca de Juárez during the “Contingency” So far, there have been efforts in Mexico — not at all uniformly made — to avoid the language of emergency and emergency powers in favor of a discourse of contingency planning and risk management, along with a focus on pressured but mostly voluntary adherence to the “stay at home”…