Agambens Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art

This volume develops the central (though neglected) Agambenian concept of nudity along with its crucial political implications. The book discovers within The Use of Bodies a philosophical path to Agambens "ontology of nudity," as it is subtended by his notion of the messianica dual temporality of form in motion reflected in the image of a whirlpool that is autonomous although no drop of water belongs to it separately. Drawn from Paul and Benjamin (rather than Derrida), Agambens messianic is elaborated in this study through its embodiment in literatureWoolfs To the Lighthouse, Jamess The Aspern Papers, Brodskys Watermark, and Manns Death in Venicein response to Agambens insistence on the wedding of poetry and philosophy. In particular, Coetzees Disgrace gives poetic form to Agambens focus on the dissolution of the human/animal border, the salvation of the unsavable, and "nudity"all to illustrate Agambens Open without a closedness. This text shows how art serves as the house of philosophy also by taking up the nude in visual art, making the case that, in comprising chronos and kairos (the two messianic components of Agambens ontology of nudity), art demonstrates the constitution of form-of-life for the viewer. Emphasizing Agambens privileged non-unveilability/nudity, this book finally examines two major missed encounters, with Heidegger and Lacan, philosophers of the veil. Veiling to Agamben correlates with the sovereignty/bare life structure of the exception, which his ontology of nudity is meant to deactivateas there is no such thing as a bare life.