Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights

John Lechte is Emeritus Professor in Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is best know for his writing on French philosophers, Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille and for his best selling Key Contemporary Thinkers (Routledge, 2006). He is co-editor of Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights: Statelessness, Images, Violence (EUP, 2015) and The Kristeva Critical Reader (EUP, 2003). His most recent book is The Human (Bloomsbury, 2020). Saul Newman is Professor in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research is in continental and poststructuralist political and social theory, and contemporary radical politics. He is the author of: From Bakunin to Lacan (2001); Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought (2005); Unstable Universalities (2007); Politics Most Unusual (2008); The Politics of Postanarchism (2010); and Max Stirner (2011).

• Preface; 1. Human Rights and Statelessness Today; 2. Human Rights in History; 3. Agamben and the Rise of ‘Bare Life’; 4. Language, the Human and Bare Life: from Ungroundedness to Inoperativity; 5. Nihilism or Politics? An Interrogation of Agamben; 6. Politics, Power and Violence in Agamben; 7. Agamben, the Image and the Human; 8. Living Human Rights; Bibliography.

Lechte and Newman do what has terrified many of us: they speak of transcendence and life together. Moving brilliantly across the contemporary terrain of human rights and biopolitics, the authors explore how language, gesture, and image allow us to approach life without the zoē/bios distinction holding sway. This is a courageous book that opens up new perspectives not only on Agamben but also on forms of current and future life.