"The fundamental ontological-political problem today is not work but inoperativity, not the frantic and unceasing study of new operativity but the exhibition of the ceaseless void that the machine of Western culture guards at its center.”

This seminar will be a close reading of Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies. Published in 2014, this book is the culminating work of a 20-year philosophical effort to develop what we can term with the late Michel Foucault, “a critical ontology of the present.” This critique of the present, i.e., the being of today, takes the form of an archeological investigation into the historical origins of the conceptual operations governing political life and the core ontological and political structures that make relations of domination possible. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, as well as Guy Debord, Agamben’s The Use of Bodies is one the most consequential philosophical interventions of the 21st century.