Friedrich Schiller, Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795), Letter XV, quoted by Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy,” New Left Review no. 14 (March–April 2002): 133.
Jacques Rancière, “Problems and Transformations of Critical Art,” in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Polity, 2009), 60.
Nitzan Lebovic, The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (Palgrave Macmillian, 2013).
Johan Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden (Contact, 2007). The (problematic) first English translation added “art” as a separate entity, which is arguably redundant, since Huizinga claims that it is only with the Renaissance that art and life begin to diverse. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study in the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Penguin, 1924).
Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, 77. Translation by the author.
Stefan Helmreich and Sofia Roosth, “Life Forms: A Keyword Entry,” in Stefan Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016), 24.
Helmreich and Roosth, “Life Forms: A Keyword Entry,” 20, 24.
W. Fred, Modernes Kunstgewerbe (Heitz, 1901), 5–6. Translation by the author.
“Der Staat als Kunstwerk” is the first section of Burckhardt’s 1860 Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien.
W. Fred, Lebensformen. Anmerkungen über die Technik des Gesellschaftlichen Lebens (Georg Müller, 1911).
Fred, Lebensformen, 18.
Fred, Lebensformen, 22. Translation by the author.
Fred, Lebensformen, 47.
See also the documentation of Stephan Dillemuth’s sprawling project on Lebensreform ca. 1900 →.
Fred, Lebensformen, 509.
György Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Columbia University Press, 2010), 23.
Lukács, Soul and Form, 26.
Lukács, Soul and Form, 56.
Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (MIT Press, 1971, 72.
György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (MIT Press, 1971), 302, 319.
Otto Neurath, Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf (Laubsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1928).
Spranger’s Lebensformen (1921), with its anti-Freudian typology of human characters, did generate some interesting responses. Spranger did not regard the technical as being a distinct Lebenform, an autonomous Wertgebiet with a specific character type, since technology is purely instrumental and has no values of its own. In their 1931 book Befreiung der Technik, Friedrich Dessauer and Karl August Meissinger go against Spranger by positing a “technischer mensch” as a counterpart to Spranger’s theoretischer Mensch, and as distinct from all the other types. Dessauer and Meissnger, Befreitung der Technik (Cotta: 1931).
Jesús Padilla Gálvez and Margit Gaffal, “Forms of Life and Language Games: An Introduction,” and Norberto Abreu e Silva Neto, “The Uses of ‘Forms of Life’ and the Meaning of Life,” in Forms of Life and Language Games, eds. Padilla Gálvez and Gaffal (Ontos, 2011). Possible additional sources include the more specialist and obscure volume Lebensform und Lebensfunktionen der Rede by Hermann Amann. Padilla Gálvez and Gaffal, “Forms of Life and Language Games: An Introduction,” 13.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, from the Philosophical Investigations, quoted by Jesús Padilla Gálvez, “Language as a Form of Life,” in Forms of Life and Language Games, 37.
Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Semiotext(e), 2004), 97.
Agamben’s collaboration was, however, limited to the first (of six) issues, La natura umana (2004); see →.
Agamben references Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages in The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford University Press, 1999), 34, 121, 123. Schmitt’s review of Der Staat als Lebensform was published in Wirtschaftsdienst, no. 10 (1924).
Lorenzo Chiesa and Frank Ruda, “The Event of Language as a Force of Life: Agamben’s Linguistic Vitalism,” Angelaki 16, no. 3 (September 2011): 169.
Giorgio Agamben, “Form-of-Life” (1993), in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 4–5.
Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford University Press, 2013), xi; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1998), 51–52, 55.
Giorgio Agamben, “What is a Destituent Power?,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no.1 (2014).
Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 86–108. Here we see that Agamben, typically, favors a discussion of the premodern history of a concept over addressing his more immediate theoretical predecessors of peers.
Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 13.
Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 57.
Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: Wimmer Lecture, 1948 (Archabbey Press, 1951); French edition: Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique, précedé de L’Abbé Suger de Saint-Denis, trans. Pierre Bourdieu (Minuit, 1967).
Pierre Bourdieu, “Postface,” in Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pensée scholastique, 147; Panofsky, Gothic Architecture, 20. It should be noted that Panofsky himself does not use the term “habitus”; it is Robert Marichal, in a Panofsky-inspired article extensively used by Bourdieu, who does. See Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 104–7.
Panofsky, Gothic Architecture, 20–21.
Bourdieu, “Postface,” 135–38. On the negative turn in Bourdieu’s appraisal of Panofsky, see 112–13.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Harvard University Press, 1984), 170.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977), 78.
Andrea Fraser, “It’s Art When I Say It’s Art, or…” (1995), in Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, ed. Alexander Alberro (MIT Press, 2005), 41.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT Press, 2016), 11, 8.
Rahel Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Harvard University Press, 2018), ix, 74.
Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 97.
Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 38.
Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 338 (note 50).
Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 191.
Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 153.
Andrea Fraser, “‘To Quote,’ Say the Kabyles, ‘Is to Bring Back to Life’” (2002), in Museum Highlights, 84.
In the late 1960s, a young generation of critical theorists associated with the student movement “remarxified” the Frankfurt School, although the Habermasian vein would remain dominant.
In Dutch academia, the manufacturing of consent proceeds not primarily by criminalizing opposition to settler-colonial genocide or by outlawing “gender” and other “woke projects,” but through a mismanaged society of control that appears designed to drain everyone and reduce the academic form of life to a state of survival. Even so: in the “liberal” Netherlands, far-right anti-LBGTQ+ activism within academia is on the rise, coming from organizations within the student population that seem well-networked with right-wing media and political parties.
It should be noted that some of the most principled defenders of the university as a space for criticality and contestation in Germany have been precisely exponents of critical theory such as Rahel Jaeggi and Robin Celikates (the latter being one of the organizers of the event, discussed below, with Francesca Albanese and Eyal Weizman at the Freie Universität on February 19, along with colleagues including Refqa Abu-Remaileh, Schirin Amir-Moazami, and Uli Beisel). See →.
Daniel Loick, Die Überlegenheit der Unterlegenen (Suhrkamp, 2024), 16–20.
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019), 128.
Mbembe, Necropolitics, 82.
See James Gordon Finlayson, “‘Bare Life’ and Politics in Agamben’s Reading of Aristotle,” Review of Politics 72, no. 1 (Winter 2010).
“We use here the term ‘genocide’ within the meaning developed by Raphael Lemkin, whose thinking behind this term was instrumental for the definition formulated in Article II of the Genocide Convention. Genocide, according to Lemkin, signifies a coordinated plan of actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, Samaneh Moafi, Nour Abuzaid, Shourideh C. Molavi, Omar Ferwati, and Peter Polack, “A Spatial Analysis of the Israeli Military’s Conduct in Gaza since October 2023” →.
The title evokes Article IIc of the Genocide Convention, which defines “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” as a genocidal act.