Feb 12, from 6 pm - open end
Sönke Hallmann, Tanja Widmann, Inga Zimprich
Hiatus Gag Gesture - The Place of Speech in Giorgio Agamben’s Ethical Thinking
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The act of reading as a form of collective practice forms the springboard for this, and indeed all, sessions at the Department of Reading, an online reading module established in 2006 that interconnects physical settings to provide opportunities for interaction with given essays—by means of commentary, discussion, or even direct intervention. This allies the Department of Reading with practices of deconstruction as well as appropriation, presenting as it does a space between writing and reading that allows readers, through the figure of a close reading put into writing, to experimentally encroach on the apparent authority of the texts.
This Reading Session for Lakeside takes up texts by Giorgio Agamben. With the concept of the «life form,» Agamben puts forward a figure counter to conventional definitions of life, with the aim of leading us out of the paradox of sovereign power and trying to open up a kind of politics beyond the entanglement of rights with life. In the process, crucial importance is attributed to the interconnection of two concepts - namely, the experience of language in the guise of an experiment, and the addressing of a potential character of life, of life’s possibilities. … >>