Force and Interest Seminar Series: Marx versus Agamben

This lecture will presented by Jason E. Smith from the Art Center College of Design. He will discuss his paper "Form-of-Life or Mode of Production: The Figure of the Slave in Giorgio Agamben’s Use of Bodies". What is fascinating about Agamben's text is the almost total absence of the conceptual persona with which the series opened, homo sacer. In its stead is another figure drawn from classical sources, in this case not Roman law but Greek philosophy: the slave. Smith critically responds to Agamben's use of the figure of the slave within his conceptual economy, asking where this conceptual strategy should have lead his thinking, but did not.