ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is threefold. Firstly, we intend to emphasise the systematic nature of Agamben’s project from his early work to his most recent publications, a project that insistently proposes a supposedly new, but in the end quite traditional, definition of philosophy. Secondly, we mean to show how such an endeavour is first and foremost ontological, not political, and explicitly inscribes itself within the legacy of twentieth-century philosophy’s (especially Heidegger’s) attempt to overcome metaphysics. Thirdly, we seek to problematise the proximity, all too often taken for granted, between Agamben’s ontological politicisation of philosophy and Badiou’s and Žižek’s re-launching of a “communist hypothesis” that is inextricable from a positive re-evaluation of materialism and dialectics. In a few words, our claim is that Agamben is a sui generis vitalist thinker and his recuperation of dialectics (what he prefers to call “the bipolar machine”) 1 can only be understood in this framework, that is, outside, if not against, any return to Marx.
