Cultural interaction
Contents
Matías Leandro Saidel, ‘Form(s)-of-life. Agamben's reading of Wittgenstein and the potential uses of
a notion’ ; https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0101-
31732014000100009&lang=en or Trans/Form/Ação vol.37 no.1 Jan./Apr. 2014;
https://doi.org/10.1590/S0101-31732014000100009...........................................................................3
Paul Gilroy ‘Nationalism, History and Ethnic Absolutism,’ History Workshop Journal, 30:1, 1 October
1990, pp. 114–120, https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2443/stable/4289014......................5
Gurminder K. Bhambra & Victoria Magree, ‘Identity Politics and the Need for a ‘Tomorrow’,’
Economic & Political Weekly, 2010 15:15, pp. 50-66
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/43120461..........................................................................7
Bruno Latour ‘On some of the affects of capitalism,’ pp. 1-13. Open access: http://www.bruno-
latour.fr/sites/default/files/136-AFFECTS-OF-K-COPENHAGUE.pdf.....................................................10
Duschinsky, Robbie, and Emma Wilson. 2015. “Flat Affect, Joyful Politics and Enthralled Attachments:
Engaging with the Work of Lauren Berlant.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28,
no. 3: 179-190 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10767-014-9189-4...................................15
Shantz, Douglas. 2009. “The Place of Religion in a Secular Age: Charles Taylor’s Explanation of the
Rise and Significance of Secularism in the West.” Lecture, The University of Calgary, March 16, 2009.
1-40. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267998948.............................................................18
Marc De Kesel ‘Selfless love: Pur Amour in Fénelon and Malebranche,’ International Journal of
Philosophy and Theology, 78:1-2, 2017, pp. 75-90. DOI:10.1080/21692327.2016.1264308...............22
Context.............................................................................................................................................22
Fenelon’s pur amour........................................................................................................................23
Loving as willing................................................................................................................................24
Willing as loving................................................................................................................................24
Malebranche’s pur amour................................................................................................................25
Self....................................................................................................................................................25
Devorah Kalekin-Fishman & Lauren Langman, ‘Alienation’, Sociopedia.isa, 2013. DOI:
10.1177/2056846013111
https://eysmposium.isaportal.org/resources/resource/alienation/download/...................................27
Alienation: a brief history.................................................................................................................27
Alienation in sociological theory.......................................................................................................27
Classical theories..........................................................................................................................27
Conceptualizing alienation in critical sociology............................................................................28
Additional conceptualizations of alienation..................................................................................28
Alienation research...........................................................................................................................28
The way forward...............................................................................................................................29
1
,bell hooks ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance’
https://de.ryerson.ca/DE_courses/uploadedFiles/6052_Arts/CSOC202/Modules/Module_00/eating
%20the%20other.pdf............................................................................................................................31
Geert Hofstede ‘Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context,’ Online Readings in
Psychology and Culture: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol12/iss2/8 pp. 3 – 26; Open access:
http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=orpc................................34
Sophie Kasonde-Ng’andu ‘Bio-Medical Versus Indigenous Approaches to Disability’ Disability in
Different Cultures: Reflections on Local Concepts. Ed. by Holzer, Brigitte / Vreede, Arthur / Weigt,
Gabriele. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 114-121.
https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/books/9783839400401/9783839400401-
007/9783839400401-007.pdf...............................................................................................................40
Biomedical approach to disability.....................................................................................................40
Contributions of the Behavioural Sciences.......................................................................................40
Indigenous perspective on disability................................................................................................40
Indigenisation of the biomedical approach to disability...................................................................41
Conclusion........................................................................................................................................41
Helena Feder – Frans de Waal ‘‘What we talk about when we talk about culture’: Frans de Waal on
science, morality and the primatology of the human animal’ Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism
12:2, 2017; DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2016.1250225.............................................................................42
Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky ‘The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence’ In: Cambridge Handbook of
Artificial Intelligence, edited by Keith Frankish and William Ramsey. New York: Cambridge University
Press. Online: https://intelligence.org/files/EthicsofAI.pdf..................................................................55
Ethics in machine learning and other domain-specific AI algorithms...............................................55
Artificial general intelligence............................................................................................................55
Machines with moral status.............................................................................................................56
Minds with exotic properties............................................................................................................57
Superintelligence..............................................................................................................................58
Conclusion........................................................................................................................................60
2
,Matías Leandro Saidel, ‘Form(s)-of-life. Agamben's
reading of Wittgenstein and the potential uses of a
notion’ ; https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?
script=sci_arttext&pid=S0101-
31732014000100009&lang=en or Trans/Form/Ação
vol.37 no.1 Jan./Apr. 2014;
https://doi.org/10.1590/S0101-31732014000100009
Giorgio Agamben and Ludwig Wittgenstein seem to have very little in common as the former is
concerned with traditional ontological issues while the latter was interested in logics and ordinary
language, avoiding metaphysical issues as something we cannot speak about.
However, both share a crucial notion for their philosophical projects: form of life.
In this paper, I try to show that, despite their different approaches and goals, form of life is for both a
crucial notion for thinking ethics and life in-common.
Addressing human existence in its constitutive relation to language, this notion deconstructs
traditional dichotomies like bios and zoë, the cultural and the biological, enabling both authors to
think of a life which cannot be separated from its forms, recognizing the commonality of logos as the
specific trait of human existence.
Through an analogical reading between both theoretical frameworks, I suggest that the notion of
form-of-life, elaborated by Wittgenstein to address human production of meaning, becomes the key
notion in Agamben's affirmative thinking since it enables us to consider the common ontologically in
its relation to Human potentialities and to foresee a new, common use of the world and ourselves.
Keywords
o Agamben
o Wittgenstein
o Form-of-Life
o Potentialities
o Language
o Community
I tried to give an account of the ambiguities of the notion of form of life through a brief genealogical
reconstruction that enables both a naturalistic and a cultural reading of it.
I suggested that Wittgenstein and Agamben help us overcome that dichotomy putting at stake the
specificity of the human 'form of life' without denying the plurality of forms within it.
In so doing, they illuminate what we have in common as humans: our linguistic acquired "nature",
our ability to think, and the fact that we need to be in common in order to think and speak.
For both, our form-of-life, our historical existence, takes place within language.
However, we have to enter its realm. Hence, infancy becomes crucial for both authors, since it
expresses the openness of our potentialities, the fact that language, our "nature", must be acquired.
In this sense, the greatness of human's own potentiality is measured by the abyss of impotentiality.
Indeed, we saw that, according to Agamben, human beings are those animals that are capable of
their own impotentiality.
Far from any biological determinism, the human animal, who has language as its specific trait, can
also be politically reduced to merely biological life, as in the concentration camps, revealing the
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, human as an indestructible remnant that can be infinitely destroyed.
The concentration camp is the space where the human, rendered speechless, touches its own
inhumanity, and the witness must give account of the unspeakable to subjectify himself ethically.
For Agamben, "the key difference is between biological life, which lives only to maintain itself, and
human poetic life, which lives in order to create forms.
Humans, therefore, should be regarded those beings who may or may not give themselves a world".
Also Wittgenstein shows that language and therefore any commonality becomes impossible when
only commands are expressed.
At the same time, he shows that our relation to language implies thinking our specific form of life
beyond any biological or cultural determinism.
He speaks of natural history because the specificity of the human regarding the rest of living beings is
the capacity to use language, and our capacity to hope or to deceive and know to be hoping or
deceiving, a certainty that is embedded in our form of life as "something animal".
For Wittgenstein, human beings can only become such in relation with others, learning a language
and communicating through it, sharing a form of life.
In this sense, while Agamben is interested in the possibility to appropriate and expose our own
linguistic-being, Wittgenstein thinks the conditions of possibility for a language to work and be
meaningful for intersubjective communication.
These conditions are immanent to that same language and our uses, to our form of life.
Last but not least, both authors link our form of life to forms of use.
While Wittgenstein is concerned with the way we use language-games with their rules and the way
we learn how to «play» with them, Agamben's positive project focuses on profanations or free use of
what was sacred and unattainable, foreseeing a moment in which we will play with the Law like kids
with old objects, rendering the Law inoperative and inventing new uses.
In this sense, the notion of form-of-life allows both authors to think the common beyond traditional
dichotomies such as universalism/particularism, necessity/accident, bios/zoë, physis/nomos.
A form of life related to new uses, habits and institutions.
At first glance, form-of-life cannot be translated easily into politics, because it is a key notion for a
community that realizes itself through inoperativeness (Agamben) and in the use and transmission of
language, in the reproduction of our 'complicated form of life' (Wittgenstein).
However, Agamben writes in the post-face of the 2001 Italian version of The coming community that
inoperativeness and de-creation are the paradigm of the coming politics.
Inoperativeness means katargein, an operation in which the how substitutes the what, in which life
without form and forms without life coincide in a form-of-life.
Then, as we can see, whereas Wittgenstein's main scope was limited to describe and analyse the way
we use language, which is embedded in a form of life, Agamben's notion of form-of-life is a
normative one.
It calls for the interruption of operativeness, an interruption of power dispositifs such as the
anthropological and governmental machines, through a new use of the world and the self in order to
enable a life in common in which happiness can become once again a political possibility.
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