Media: book, essay
Who: Tanizaki Junichiro
When: 1933
What: A humerous essay considering Japanese culture, values and aesthetics in a period of modernization and hypermilitarism. Tanizaki essentializes and freezes the East-West binary, although not without a sense of facetiousness.
Links: biography

Media: book
Who: Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben
When: 1995
What: In this text Agamben explores two figures of contradictory exemption: the sovereign who has the power to wield the law, but can be excluded and "homo sacer" who is excluded from law, but is present in legal definition. Agamben then uses these figures to analyze the nature of modern state governance and the "homo sacers" of our time with careful consideration given to the Holocaust.
Quotes:
"... to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoe... Today politics knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until the contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascism... will remain stubbornly with us."
"... the camp is the new, hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order - or rather, the sign of the system's inability to function without being transformed into a lethal machine."
Links: Generation Online, wiki