Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction Leland de la Durantaye
Publisher: Stanford University Press

Leland de la Durantaye is the author of Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (Cornell University Press, 2007) and Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford University Press, 2009). The article presents a conception of the end of history, developed on the basis of Giorgio Agamben's critical engagement with Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel. Departing from Agamben's Introducing the figure of the 'workless slave' into the scenario of the Master—Slave dialectic, the article demonstrates how the dialectic of history may be ended in a non-dialectical fashion through inoperative praxis that subtracts itself from the struggle for recognition. The idea of community and identity formation has had a vexed history within critical theory. See 268-272 for a good summary of the various critical responses to the book. Rendering absolute the duty of law would have been introduced by Pufendorf more than Hobbes (and this process concludes with Jean Dormat). Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Giorgio.Agamben.A.Critical.Introduction.pdf. The two books under review are Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben and Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben:A Critical Introduction. Mills' book is much shorter and Durantaye's weighs in at 453 pages. Them in essence, but scatters them in existence. A Critical Introduction presents the complexity and continuity of Agamben's philosophy—and does so for two separate and distinct audiences. Stanford University Press, 2009. [i] Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 248. Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. €Giorgio Agamben, 1993: 18-19. From now on, the history of metaphysics, stripped of critical archeology, shows a smooth continuity and reveals a sort of perverse anxiousness (according to Agamben) to play with and explore the operative principle of ethics and the concept of virtue as obligation and duty that medieval theology had granted it in heredity. [2] Leland de la Durantaye, “Preface: The Law of the Good Neighbor,” in Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009).