Blog: David Kishik, Notes for the Coming Community

David Kishik, author of Wittgenstein's Form of Life (Continuum, 2008) and translator of two texts by Giorgio Agamben, Nudities (2010) and What is an Apparatus? (2009) makes his mark "on the interweb" in the blog, "Notes for the Coming Community".

Kishik offers some cogent and incisive extrapolations on Giorgio Agamben's texts, sources and excerpts from published material relevant to his own work, and comments on various current events. Spanning over a range of subjects, from examples of modern détournements to the concept of violence and nudity, generally framed within the theme of biopolitics, Kishik's thoughtfully formulated, if somewhat sporadic, posts provide interesting supplements to a variety of texts by Agamben and others. See, for example, a four-part comment "on the concept of form of life":

"It may be assumed that the power of life is merely a reaction against the growing power over life. But it is also possible to reverse the genealogy and claim that it is actually the various apparatuses of actualized power that are the ones reacting against the potential power embedded in the multifarious ways we live our lives. While it is usually assumed that 'life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its object,' I would like to turn Deleuze’s formulation on its head: power becomes resistance to life when life takes power as its object. If the power over life is what we usually call 'the powers that be,' the power of life is what we may call 'the powers that become,' or 'the coming power.'" (First Thesis on the Concept of Form of Life)

Also of particular interest is a post on "Foucault's Utopian Body", which provides a handful of evocative excerpts extracted from a translation of a radio lecture delivered by Foucault in 1966 and published in Sensorium (MIT, 2006):

"My body, in fact, is always elsewhere. It is tied to all the elsewheres of the world. And to tell the truth, it is elsewhere than in the world, because it is around it that things are arranged. It is in relation to it - and in relation to it as if in relation to a sovereign - that there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a forward and a backward, a near and a far. The body is the zero point of the world. There, where paths and spaces come to meet, the body is nowhere. It is at the heart of the world, this small utopian kernel from which I dream, I speak, I proceed, I imagine, I perceive things in their place, and I negate them also by the indefinite power of the utopias I imagine. My body is like the City of the Sun. It has no place, but it is from it that all possible places, real or utopian, emerge and radiate."