Sunday, February 5, 2012

Agamben & Corbin, again

I have, thanks to Hadi Fakhoury, some more accurate information on Corbin and Giorgio Agamben.

Agamben makes at least two explicit references to Corbin in his works. The first and perhaps earliest reference to Corbin is in his article, "*Se. L’Assoluto e l’‘Ereignis,’” published in the Italian journal Aut Aut, 187-88 (1982): pp. 39-58. This article appeared in English as "*Se: Hegel's Absolute and Heidegger's Ereignis" in the collection of essays Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (California: Stanford: 1999), pp. 116-137. Another reference to Corbin can be found in Agamben's essay "Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption," which can also be found in Potentialities, pp. 138-159. In both instances, the references to Corbin are rather incidental. One other explicit reference to Corbin is in the Introduction to a huge (2000+ pages) Italian volume on angels in the Abrahamic tradition, Angeli: Ebraismo, Cristianesimo, Islam (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2009), edited by G. Agamben and Emanuele Coccia. Sometimes Agamben draws on Corbin without quoting him, for instance when he makes reference to the notion of the Imam in his book Signatura Rerum. He clearly draws this from Corbin, yet makes no reference to the latter in this instance.
A bit more on Corbin can be found in Giorgio Agamben: a critical introduction by Leland De la Durantaye (searchable online here). The author points out that Agamben drew on both Lacan & Corbin for his discussion of the phenomenon of the mirror.

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