Abstract

abstract:

What does it mean to initiate life? According to Giorgio Agamben, the question of initiating life concerns how we conceive and experiment with the "how" of a form of life. In short, it involves ways of envisaging an absolutely immanent life on the threshold of its political and ethical intensification. To follow Agamben's paradigmatic problematization, an initiated life is a life made inextricable from its manner or form—a form-of-life. It is within this practical and ethopoietical horizon of thought that I envisage Agamben's work here, on the lookout for what I call "signs of passion." Signs of passion are what an initiated life is composed of; they are inherently precarious and participate in a political use of intimacy in which a form-of-life nurtures and preserves its sense of nonknowledge and the generative limits of its own (absence of) mystery.

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