Agamben and Indifference

William Watkin is professor of contemporary literature and philosophy at Brunel University, UK. He is the author of In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001), On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh UP, 2004) and The Literary Agamben (Continuum, 2010).

• Introduction / Part One: The Archaeology of Indifference / 1. The Signature of All Things: Paradigms and Signatures / 2. Philosophical Archaeology / 3. The Language of Death: Indifferent Difference as Such in Hegel and Heidegger / 4. The Coming Community: An Essay on Indifferent Singularities / 5. Towards a Deictic Ontology or Being-thus As-such / Part Two: Difference and Indifference / 6. Derrida and Agamben: Différance Makes Indifference Communicable / 7. Potentiality, Virtuality and Impotentiality: Agamben and Deleuze / 8. The Two Bartlebies: Deleuze, Agamben and Immanence / Part Three: The Indifference of Indifference: Politics, Language, Life / 9. Homo Sacer and the Politics of Indifference / 10. The Kingdom and the Glory: The Articulated Inoperativity of Power / 11. The Sacrament of Language: Language as Communicability / Conclusion: The End of Lying and the Birth of Living / Bibliography / Index

William Watkin's book is certainly an illuminating and profound reading of my entire work. But it is, at the same time, much more than that. According to Walter Benjamin's idea that theory can today only be written in the form of interpretation, Watkin has produced a work of astonishing originality, which any attempt to read twentieth-century philosophy will be obliged to confront.