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This chapter, the most philosophical of the book, sketches the relation of biopower to fear and violence through a reading of mythic violence as it emerges in Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.” Reading Adorno as well as Benjamin against himself, the chapter seeks to find in generosity and gratitude a response to biopower’s dependence on and use of fatedness. In place of the negative, tragic biopolitics that characterizes neoliberalism, a more affirmative perspective is proposed that forgoes mastery and holding in favor of non-possession and generosity.

The second chapter is an attempt to read the cinematic apparatus as offering an affirmative response to biopower and mythic violence through the interplay of the visible and invisible. Beginning with a number of classic readings of the cinematic apparatus from Bazin, Heath, and Mulvey, among others, the possibility is explored that the cinematic apparatus can on occasion create generous forms of life that are able to give without requiring the mastery of what appears on screen. A techne of giving is found in the practice of generous attention, or what is referred to creative spectatorship.

The main theme of this chapter is an understanding of culture not as a text to be interpreted through root symbols falling on the axes of nature and culture, nor simply as shared values, but instead as providing the ability to both forge a belonging and finding resources within one’s culture to contest it and find one’s voice in its singularity within it. The chapter explores the concept of counterculture and finds its alignments with skepticism that takes us in a direction that asks not how do we know that the external world exists but how do I know that I exist, that I can trust myself in relation to others? Skepticism is engaged in this chapter as lining the everyday—using the idea of lining not to suggest a border but to allude to the way a coat and its lining, the exterior and the interior, are joined to each other. Hence skepticism is not the kind of doubt that can be extinguished once for all. The idea of forms of life is introduced in its horizontal dimension as “form” and its vertical dimension as “life” showing how forms of life are both, particular to a milieu and as drawing from our common background as humans.

Jean-Paul Sartre abandoned the idea of the state’s withering away on its own accord as being only a “pious myth.” What was left of his view and his method? The dénouement answers: First, Sartre (like Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program) was not primarily concerned with distributive justice but instead with power, who has it, what sustains it, what kind of moral psychology underpins it, what kinds of social movements might change it, and fundamentally on whether there is any kind of logic to the exercise of power and the change of power. Second, Sartre shifted from his mention in Being and Nothingness about an ethics of deliverance and salvation instead to a language of the sacred. History was interpreted philosophically in terms of the unconditional commitments—the experiences of the “sacred”—of a form of life. Instead of the phenomenological Lebenswelt (lifeworld), Sartre focused more on the logic within a form of life, a Lebensform (form of life). The “lifeworld” of capitalism is that of alienation, exploitation, and commodification, but it rests on a certain form of agency possessing a self-undermining logic unto itself.

This chapter revolves around the key question - how does one aspire to a genuine form of life as an anthropologist? In seeking to address this question Veena Das says that it is a mode of knowing that privileges intimacy, simultaneously acknowledging one’s separateness from one’s respondents and a sense of being in the midst of their everyday world. This is spelled out in a series of conversations with the chapters in the book as Das discusses what it means for a younger generation of scholars to comment on her work, articulated as much in difference as in agreement, revealing unexpected dimensions to ideas that have stayed with her for much of her intellectual life. The chapter ends with a discussion of her engagement with advocacy research, first with the survivors of the Delhi riots and those of the industrial disaster in Bhopal in 1984 and later in low income neighbourhoods in Delhi.

Peter Winch is typically taken to endorse relativism based on Wittgenstein's notion of a form of life. This chapter contests such readings of Winch and argues that "form of life" should not be understood as a hermeneutical bubble of sorts. Instead, Winch like Wittgenstein before him has a highly dynamic conception of language as a form of life and one that is open to translation and judgment across cultures.

This chapter studies a number of ancient travelers to present a clear picture of how usual expectations on travel updated Paul's self-construction. It also tries to study how ancient literatures organized traveling figures. Some of the wanderers that are studied in this chapter are Dionysus, Polyneices, Socrates, and Odysseus. The chapter ends with a section that focuses on the clues from Paul's initial letters that shows the exact role that travel played in his apostolic form of life.

This concluding chapter reviews the main points made in this book about Paul the Apostle, starting with his belief that he was required to show his ability to resolve the differences with his communities and cooperate with envoys that belonged to another network. It presents Paul's trip to Rome as a focal point in his evangelical career, his representation as the Wandering Signifier, and the concept of apostolic proclamation. The chapter ends with a brief look at an analysis of the logic of Paul's rhetoric, the juxtaposition of travel and death, and the influence his wandering form of life can give more resources for theological and interventionist thought.

This Chapter argues that the thought of Badiou and Agamben is much closer than most people, including themselves, recognise. Prozorov shows that there is a striking similarity between Badiou’s concept of the body of truth and Agamben’s notion of the form-of-life and that, despite their manifold differences, the two thinkers are united by the attempt to rethink politics on the basis of the brute facticity of being. The chapter concludes by arguing that, while Badiou has shown little interest in the problematic of biopolitics, his militant ‘politics of truth’ is nonetheless a version of the ‘affirmative biopolitics’ that Agamben has painstakingly developed.

This Chapter argues that one of the key concepts in Agamben’s account of the ‘coming politics’ – form-of-life – was initially developed through a critical engagement with three concepts central to the post-workerist strain of Italian Marxism: general intellect, multitude, and antagonism. Smith makes the argument through a close reading of the essay ‘Form-of-Life’, which appeared two years prior to the Italian publication of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. The chapter suggests that Agamben’s account of ‘form-of-life,’ which is a power irreducibly antagonistic to sovereignty and the social, is a contribution to the revolutionary communist tradition. However, Smith raises concerns that Agamben’s account of antagonism does not adequately account for the fact that certain forms of social identity – namely the categories of worker and woman – are themselves constituted through forms of antagonism that traverse the social.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy for Giorgio Agamben’s thinking. It is not simply that the Italian philosopher turns at various points in his work to texts and themes from early and later Heidegger, as important as this obviously is. As well as abiding interests in problems of ontology, finitude, facticity and authenticity, Agamben inherits from Heidegger a philosophical programme. That programme is the critique of Western metaphysics: the tradition founded on the neglect, forgetting and oblivion of being, and which – for Agamben as for Heidegger – has reached a point of crisis in modernity after a long historical genesis. Understanding Agamben’s debt to the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics is important for grasping the basic problematic of the Homo Sacer project, for comprehending its grounds and ultimate stakes, and for getting a clearer sense of the positive political philosophy to which he gestures at crucial moments in the series.

This chapter, and the one following, focus on Agamben’s recent work on form-of-life and the Franciscan practice of poverty. DeCaroli argues that form-of-life should be understood as a particular form of life that is aware of the contingency of the rules that govern our existence, and does not attempt to replace them, but to patiently expose the machinery of their operation. Franciscanism was an incomplete attempt to develop such a form-of-life through a community of non-appropriative use that claimed no social or juridical foundation. The name for this way of living was poverty – which does not mean poverty in material things (although the Friars did live modestly) – but rather poverty in those less tangible things, such as possession and privilege, that profoundly shape our social reality, but whose operation we are often only faintly aware of.

Søren Kierkegaard’s existentialist writings inform Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy, and specifically his figure of form-of-life. Agamben’s work is driven by a desire to explore a politics exemplified by the figure of form-of-life, a figure of the coming politics which seeks to deactivate those modes of power that create and sustain bare life. Form-of-life is an existentialist figure, and Kierkegaard’s own writings can shed light on this elusive concept. Through living a life of contemplative use, form-of-life deactivates the appropriative biopolitics that constantly divides and separates life. It is a new interpretation of Kierkegaard’s claim that the human being is a synthesis through which its existence is defined. In an existentialist reading of form-of-life, I illustrate how form-of-life is subject to a continual process of repetition, an existential process that is always already happening.

This chapter asks why Aristotle insists that happiness takes time, as he does when he likens it to spring (EN I 7, 1098a16–20). Rejecting an interpretation relying on Aristotle’s distinction between activity (energeia) and process (kinesis), the chapter argues that virtuous action is something habitual: only as a form of life can it amount to happiness. Furthermore, even if the parties might want to become friends more quickly, developing the knowledge of the other’s goodness in the habitual, stable sense that characterizes virtue friendship is something that takes time. Similarly, knowing one’s own stable and good qualities also takes time, and without such self-knowledge as an integral aspect of one’s activity, one is not fully eudaimôn.

Much as a terrain acquires the significance of being an environment with opportunities for and hazards to survival with the emergence of animals through the processes of biological evolution, so an environment acquires the significance of being (a part of) the world, the locus of truth, with the emergence of rational animals through processes of social and cultural evolution. This chapter provides an account of essential features of these processes and of the nature and role of natural language in them. With the acquisition of language and culture, it is argued, one is provided a view of things, the eyes to see things as they are. From having a merely animal form of life, one becomes a rational animal, a fundamentally different sort of being answerable to the norm of truth.