Books by Giorgio Agamben

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Book SynopsisThis book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking-nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante.Table of ContentsContents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

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Book SynopsisThis book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking-nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante.Table of ContentsContents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

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Book SynopsisOne of Italy's most original philosophers aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding.Trade Review"Agamben's intuition, chronicle and meditation are fascinating."—The Review of Politics"The story of homo sacer is certainly worth reading because of its suggestiveness and provocations."—Modernism/ModernityTable of ContentsIntroduction Part I. The Logic of Sovereignty: 1. The paradox of sovereignty 2. 'Nomos Basileus' 3. Potentiality and law 4. Form of law Threshold Part II. Homo Sacer: 1. Homo sacer 2. The ambivalence of the sacred 3. Sacred life 4. 'Vitae Necisque Potestas' 5. Sovereign body and sacred body 6. The ban and the wolf Threshold Part III. The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern: 1. The politicization of life 2. Biopolitics and the rights of man 3. Life that does not deserve to live 4. 'Politics, or giving form to the life of a people' 5. VP 6. Politicizing death 7. The camp as the 'Nomos' of the modern Threshold Bibliography Index of names.

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Book SynopsisThe essays in this volume consider figures in the history of philosophy such as Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel; and 20th-century thought, most notably Walter Benjamin, but also Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, the historian Aby Warburg, and the linguist J.-C. Milner.Trade Review"Agamben has been attracting attention recently in the English-speaking world, thanks to the increasing availability of his work in translation. This volume is indicative of Agamben's broad range of interests. . . . Despite this range of interests, however, a sustained commitment to certain theoretical issues—particularly language and history—lends the volume a coherence. . . . Daniel Heller-Roazen's introduction does a nice job of outlining the philosophical program that motivates these essays, and his translation in general is to be commended for its elegance. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers."—ChoiceTable of ContentsEditor's note Editor's introduction Part I. Language: 1. The thing itself 2. The idea of language 3. Language and history: linguistic and historical categories in Benjamin's thought 4. Philosophy and linguistics 5. Kommerell, or on gesture Part II. History: 6. Aby Warburg and the nameless science 7. Tradition of the immemorial 8. *Se: Hegel's absolute and Heidegger's Ereignis 9. Walter Benjamin and the demonic: happiness and historical redemption 10. The messiah and the sovereign: the problem of law in Walter Benjamin Part III. Potentiality: 11. On potentiality 12. The passion of facticity 13. Pardes: the writing of potentiality 14. Absolute immanence Part IV. Contingency: 15. Bartleby, or on contingency Notes Index of names.

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Book SynopsisArguing that Western power is both "government" and "glory," this book reveals the "theological-economic" paradigm at the origin of several of the most important components of modern politics and illuminates the function of consent and the media in today's democracies.Trade Review"Agamben's argument is complex, multifaceted, and comprehensive, and, indeed, it offers a useful model His method is a philosophical archaeology that joins philosophy and philology in seeking those moments in history in which concepts are formulated or significantly altered and then order subsequent modes of discourse and thought with long term ramifications for human society."—Kelly C. MacPhail, Topia

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Book SynopsisIn this book, Agamben investigates the roots of the modern moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy.Trade Review"Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty is a bold and engaging book, opening up much fertile ground for future work. I find it to be both insightful and admirable, and a masterly success."—Analysis & Metaphysics

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Book SynopsisIn this book, Agamben investigates monasticism from its beginnings up through the Franciscan movement in an attempt to find a new form-of-life that escapes from the logic of Western politics as put forth in his Homo Sacer series.Trade Review"The range of primary sources Agamben relies on to make his argument . . . is impressively vast. As his readers have come to expect, Agamben demonstrates an uncanny ability to discover enduring significance in obscure corners of the Western tradition while doing justice to their proper historicity." -- Brian Hamilton * Modern Theology *"The Highest Poverty is Agamben's attempt to define what he calls a 'form-of-life,' a mode of living where life and law enter into a zone of indistinction so that one is not able to discern between living according to the law and applying the law to a pre-existing life . . . The first thing that became quite clear in reading this book is the depth of knowledge and understanding Agamben has of monastic history as well as medieval philosophy and theology. He knows the literature, the languages, and the nuances needed for any depth of understanding . . . This book was not written for the spiritual or theological nourishment of monastics and friars. It was written as a piece of political philosophy concerned about the current all-consuming nature of law and what that does to life. Nevertheless, there is a great deal that monastics and friars can learn from the work of Agamben. He shows us a picture of ourselves from a vantage point that we seldom see. There is more to our form-of-life than immediately meets the eye." -- Eugene Hensell * American Benedictine Review *"At a time when current anthropological debate has turned toward ontology, this book challenges us to return anew to questions of habits and habitus. The Highest Poverty offers a productive . . . lens through which to examine modernity, its antecedents, and its reimagined futures in the global South. Especially salient for anthropologists is the book's attention to theories of practice and a common life not wholly defined by the logics of capital and formal institutions." -- Kerry Chance * Anthropology Southern Africa *"[I]t deepens the insights of Agamben's earlier work and extends them into the theological realm. . . . Recommended." -- A. W. Klink * Choice *"Agamben's work remains a thought-provoking and tightly written tract, and a number of trenchant observations can be found therein. For scholars of monasticism, The Highest Poverty will present old texts in productive new lights, and for scholars of philosophy and other disciplines, it will suggest new methods and tools that can be transposed into different fields of study." -- Joshua Campbell * Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies *"Like much of Agamben's writing, The Highest Poverty mixes historical, philosophical, and philological discourse with impressive skill. Agamben's book provokes insight through juxtaposition, analogy, and acts of theoretical imagination." -- Brian Britt * Journal of Religion *

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Book SynopsisThe final volume in Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben's wide-ranging investigation of the foundations of Western politics and culture.Trade Review"Among the most important features of Agamben's work, evident in this volume as much as in the whole series, is his attention to theological categories, and his realization that secular political philosophy roots its concepts in them...This is an important book. It can be read by itself, with profit, as a version of the arguments Agamben has been offering for more than three decades."—Paul J. Griffiths , Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology"In The Use of Bodies, Agamben...takes up again the topic of life, giving us perhaps the most complete genealogy of the philosophical concept of life ever to appear. In particular, Agamben wants to think a conception of life that cannot be separated from its form, a life that cannot be rendered bare. Herein, we are finally treated with Agamben's full conception of the form-of-life, long awaited in his work."—A.J. Smith, Anglican Theological Review"The Use of Bodies completes its task as set out—Agamben draws together lines of inquiry [and] sets the stage for destituent potential as an inspiration for the coming politics....This work is an essential read for any followers of Agamben's work, as well as one of the more accessible works in his Homo Sacer project."—Michael P.A. Murphy, Reading Religion

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Book SynopsisA probing investigation of the trial of Jesus by noted Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

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Book SynopsisWhat is at stake in literature? Can we identify the fire that our stories have lost, but that they strive, at all costs, to rediscover? And what is the philosopher''s stone that writers, with the passion of alchemists, struggle to forge in their word furnaces? For Giorgio Agamben, who suggests that the parable is the secret model of all narrative, every act of creation tenaciously resists creation, thereby giving each work its strength and grace. The ten essays brought together here cover works by figures ranging from Aristotle to Paul Klee and illustrate what urgently drives Agamben''s current research. As is often the case with his writings, their especial focus is the mystery of literature, of reading and writing, and of language as a laboratory for conceiving an ethico-political perspective that places us beyond sovereign power.

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Book SynopsisWhat does it mean to be responsible for our actions? In this brief and elegant study, Giorgio Agamben traces our most profound moral intuitions back to their roots in the sphere of law and punishment. Moral accountability, human free agency, and even the very concept of cause and effect all find their origin in the language of the trial, which Western philosophy and theology both transform into the paradigm for all of human life. In his search for a way out of this destructive paradigm, Agamben not only draws on minority opinions within the Western tradition but engages at length with Buddhist texts and concepts for the first time. In sum, Karman deepens and rearticulates some of Agamben's core insights while breaking significant new ground.

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Book SynopsisIn attempting to answer the question posed by this book's title, Giorgio Agamben does not address the idea of philosophy itself. Rather, he turns to the apparently most insignificant of its components: the phonemes, letters, syllables, and words that come together to make up the phrases and ideas of philosophical discourse. A summa, of sorts, of Agamben's thought, the book consists of five essays on five emblematic topics: the Voice, the Sayable, the Demand, the Proem, and the Muse. In keeping with the author's trademark methodology, each essay weaves together archaeological and theoretical investigations: to a patient reconstruction of how the concept of language was invented there corresponds an attempt to restore thought to its place within the voice; to an unusual interpretation of the Platonic Idea corresponds a lucid analysis of the relationship between philosophy and science, and of the crisis that both are undergoing today. In the end, there is no universal answer to what is an impossible or inexhaustible question, and philosophical writing—a problem Agamben has never ceased to grapple with—assumes the form of a prelude to a work that must remain unwritten.

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Book SynopsisIn attempting to answer the question posed by this book's title, Giorgio Agamben does not address the idea of philosophy itself. Rather, he turns to the apparently most insignificant of its components: the phonemes, letters, syllables, and words that come together to make up the phrases and ideas of philosophical discourse. A summa, of sorts, of Agamben's thought, the book consists of five essays on five emblematic topics: the Voice, the Sayable, the Demand, the Proem, and the Muse. In keeping with the author's trademark methodology, each essay weaves together archaeological and theoretical investigations: to a patient reconstruction of how the concept of language was invented there corresponds an attempt to restore thought to its place within the voice; to an unusual interpretation of the Platonic Idea corresponds a lucid analysis of the relationship between philosophy and science, and of the crisis that both are undergoing today. In the end, there is no universal answer to what is an impossible or inexhaustible question, and philosophical writing—a problem Agamben has never ceased to grapple with—assumes the form of a prelude to a work that must remain unwritten.

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Book SynopsisEighty years ago, Ettore Majorana, a brilliant student of Enrico Fermi, disappeared under mysterious circumstances while going by ship from Palermo to Naples. How is it possible that the most talented physicist of his generation vanished without leaving a trace? It has long been speculated that Majorana decided to abandon physics, disappearing because he had precociously realized that nuclear fission would inevitably lead to the atomic bomb. This book advances a different hypothesis. Through a careful analysis of Majorana's article "The Value of Statistical Laws in Physics and Social Sciences," which shows how in quantum physics reality is dissolved into probability, and in dialogue with Simone Weil's considerations on the topic, Giorgio Agamben suggests that, by disappearing into thin air, Majorana turned his very person into an exemplary cipher of the status of the real in our probabilistic universe. In so doing, the physicist posed a question to science that is still awaiting an answer: What is Real?

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Book SynopsisCreation and the giving of orders are closely entwined in Western culture, where God commands the world into existence and later issues the injunctions known as the Ten Commandments. The arche, or origin, is always also a command, and a beginning is always the first principle that governs and decrees. This is as true for theology, where God not only creates the world but governs and continues to govern through continuous creation, as it is for the philosophical and political tradition according to which beginning and creation, command and will, together form a strategic apparatus without which our society would fall apart. The five essays collected here aim to deactivate this apparatus through a patient archaeological inquiry into the concepts of work, creation, and command. Giorgio Agamben explores every nuance of the arche in search of an an-archic exit strategy. By the book's final chapter, anarchy appears as the secret center of power, brought to light so as to make possible a philosophical thought that might overthrow both the principle and its command.Trade Review"Adam Kotsko's lucid translation has continued his service to the field in making Agamben's texts accessible to a wider readership."—Devin Singh, Reading Religion

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Book Synopsis1939, Europa es azotada por siniestros vientos de guerra. Mientras las divisiones acorazadas alemanas recorren las llanuras polacas y se preparan para la invasión de Francia, Carlo Levi, desde la playa de La Baule, donde decide refugiarse huyendo del régimen de Mussolini, trata de fijar su mirada de intelectual antifascista sobre una crisis ya próxima al apocalipsis. Lo que ve es la aterradora, fulgurante imagen de una civilización abogada a la autodestrucción, engullida por las tinieblas de sus propias contradicciones irreconciliables y nefastas.Con un estilo lírico, en ocasiones oracular, y una extraordinaria lucidez crítica, Levi analiza la religión (que transforma lo sagrado en sacrificio), el Estado (ídolo social por excelencia, del que la política occidental no logra liberarse), la guerra, la sangre, la masa, el amor y el arte como universales humanos de los que manaron esas contradicciones de la Europa prebélica, que todavía siguen en gran parte irresueltas.Miedo a la li

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Book SynopsisFilósofo, sacerdote católico y pensador radical de la cultura, a Iván Illich se lo conoce sobre todo por escritos polémicos como La sociedad desescolarizada, La convivencialidad o Némesis médica, en los que elabora una crítica de las instituciones contemporáneas en los ámbitos de la educación escolar, la medicina profesional, las relaciones laborales o el desarrollo socioeconómico. Este libro reúne textos pertenecientes a la primera etapa de su trayectoria biográfica e intelectual, rescatándolos de un olvido inmerecido.Los ensayos que componen La Iglesia sin poder son testimonio de la labor pastoral de Illich, que afronta problemas eminentemente prácticos a la luz de unos pocos conceptos genuinamente teológicos: la oración, la pobreza de espíritu y el Reino. Como señala Giorgio Agamben en su prólogo, estamos ante un pensamiento del Reino, de la especial presencia de este entre nosotros, ya cumplida y, sin embargo, todavía no.En el núcleo de la obra de Illich está la oposición a

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Book SynopsisQué está en juego en la literatura? Cuál es el fuego que el relato ha perdido y que busca recobrar a toda costa? Y qué es la piedra filosofal que los escritores, con el empecinamiento de los alquimistas, se esfuerzan en producir en el horno de las palabras? Qué resiste, en todo acto de creación, a la creación misma, y de esa forma confiere a la obra su fuerza y su gracia? Agamben recoge en diez ensayos los motivos más urgentes y actuales de su investigación. Y, como siempre en sus escritos, la obcecada interrogación sobre el misterio de la literatura, misterio inquirido hasta en sus aspectos más materiales (la transformación de la lectura en el pasaje del libro a la pantalla), se entrelaza con una meditación sobre el otro misterio de la modernidad, ético y político, esta vez.

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Book SynopsisEl valor de la contemporaneidad a través de la representación de lo cotidiano.Como ya hiciera en Profanaciones, Agamben recoge aquí, en una serie de ensayos breves, algunos de los temas centrales de su pensamiento: desde la fiesta, vista en inesperada relación con la bulimia contemporánea, a la desnudez, que alberga escondidas implicaciones teológicas; del problema del cuerpo glorioso de los beatos, que tienen estómago y órganos sexuales y sin embargo no comen ni hacen el amor, al de la nueva figura de la identidad impersonal que los dispositivos biométricos están imponiendo a la humanidad.El punto de fuga hacia el que convergen todos estos temas es la inactividad, entendida no como ocio o inercia sino como el paradigma de la acción humana y de una nueva política. Esa misma acción ociosa define la tierra de nadie en la que se mueve una escritura que ha quemado sus cartas de identidad y que es, a la vez, pensamiento y literatura, divagación y ficha filológica, tratado de metafísica y artículo de costumbres.

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