Hi Paul, yep, Agamben seems like a good example to me as well (though I don’t know a lot about his life and career to be honest). It seems to me in any event that most reasonable critical theorists understand that their relationship to a public is a matter of historical and institutional conjunctures that are outside their control. I don’t really feel that there is any disrespect involved in pointing that out (though it also occurs to me that only a deeply hierarchical intellectual culture would tell us that we MUST respect famous theorists as such…).