Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well. Agamben's intuition and meditation are fascinating, and not least when he turns his critical eye to the mysteries and contradictions of early religion. The "Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore" is a book of three richly detailed treatments of the myth of Kore. Kore, also called Persephone and referred to poetically by the Greeks as "the unspeakable girl," was the daughter of Demeter and Zeus who was abducted by Hades and made queen of the netherworld. Kore and her story gave rise to a mysterious cult at Eleusis, the site of the well where Demeter mourned her lost daughter. This book opens with an innovative and insightful essay that focuses on the mysterious indeterminacy of the figure of Kore/Persephone - at once a woman and a girl, a virgin and a mother - as well as the attendant divisions of speech and silence, the sacred and the profane, the animal and the human, and the mortal and the divine. Tracing these dichotomies, Agamben is in top form, able to articulate paradoxes that in another writer's hands might be ineffable. In the second and third parts of the book the reader is treated to a series of beautiful paintings by acclaimed artist Monica Ferrando, as well as her translation of crucial Greek and Latin source materials. As a whole, "The Unspeakable Girl" will not only be welcomed by Agamben's many readers across the disciplines, but also by enthusiasts of classical mythology in general.

What 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.

The end of human history is an event that has been foreseen or announced by both messianics and dialecticians. But who is the protagonist of that history that is coming--or has come--to a close? What is man? How did he come on the scene? And how has he maintained his privileged place as the master of, or first among, the animals? In "The Open," contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers the ways in which the "human" has been thought of as either a distinct and superior type of animal, or a kind of being that is essentially different from animal altogether. In an argument that ranges from ancient Greek, Christian, and Jewish texts to twentieth-century thinkers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, and Kojeve, Agamben examines the ways in which the distinction between man and animal has been manufactured by the logical presuppositions of Western thought, and he investigates the profound implications that the man/animal distinction has had for disciplines as seemingly disparate as philosophy, law, anthropology, medicine, and politics.

This 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. The author presents "literature" as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the "Commedia" Virgil is Dante's guide. The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise. Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provencal poets, Mallarme, and Holderlin, among others).

Agamben ha raccolto in questo libro tutti i suoi interventi sull’emergenza sanitaria che stiamo attraversando. Al di là di denunce e descrizioni puntuali, i testi propongono in varia forma una riflessione sulla Grande Trasformazione in corso nelle democrazie occidentali. In nome della biosicurezza e della salute, il modello delle democrazie borghesi coi loro diritti, i loro parlamenti e le loro costituzioni sta ovunque cedendo il posto a un nuovo dispotismo in cui i cittadini sembrano accettare limitazioni delle libertà senza precedenti. Di qui l’urgenza della domanda che dà il titolo alla raccolta: a che punto siamo? Fino a quando saremo disposti a vivere in uno stato di eccezione che viene continuamente prolungato e di cui non si riesce a intravedere la fine?

Giorgio Agamben tackles our crisis-ridden world in a series of powerful philosophical essays.
“Which house is burning?” asks Giorgio Agamben. “The country where you live, or Europe, or the whole world? Perhaps the houses, the cities have already burnt down—who knows how long ago?—in a single immense blaze that we pretended not to see.” In this collection of four luminous, lyrical essays, Agamben brings his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity and poetic intensity to bear on a world in crisis. Whether surveying the burning house of our culture in the title essay, the architecture of pure exteriority in “Door and Threshold,” the language of prophecy in “Lessons in the Darkness,” or the word of the witness in “Testimony and Truth,” Agamben’s insights throw a revealing light on questions both timeless and topical. Written in dark times over the past year, and rich with the urgency of our moment, the essays in this volume also seek to show how what appears to be an impasse can, with care and attention, become the door leading to a way out.

Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer was one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. It was also the beginning of a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope, investigating the deepest foundations of Western politics and thought.
The Use of Bodies represents the ninth and final volume in this twenty-year undertaking, breaking considerable new ground while clarifying the stakes and implications of the project as a whole. It comprises three major sections. The first uses Aristotle's discussion of slavery as a starting point for radically rethinking notions of selfhood; the second calls for a complete reworking of Western ontology; and the third explores the enigmatic concept of "form-of-life," which is in many ways the motivating force behind the entire Homo Sacer project. Interwoven between these major sections are shorter reflections on individual thinkers (Debord, Foucault, and Heidegger), while the epilogue pushes toward a new approach to political life that breaks with the destructive deadlocks of Western thought. The Use of Bodies represents a true masterwork by one of our greatest living philosophers.

根本的に未完成なものとしての書斎。人々との出会い、書物との出会いの数々を明かしつつ、異なる時間と場所を宿すユートピアとしての書斎に託して、写真とともに綴られる、初めての自伝的エッセイ。【シリーズ〈哲学への扉〉第5回配本】

もしもふるまいや言葉において、生と規則が区別できないとしたら。そして物の使用が所有と無関係で、
法の外にある生活が可能だとしたら、どうだろう。
神的なものと人間的なものが織りなす修道院の規則は、教義や掟ではなく、
生の次元に位置する体験であった。それは西洋の政治と倫理に影響を与えつづけてきたが、
現代はその遺産を考察さえできないでいる。
砂漠の聖者アントニオス。東西教会の代表的教父・バシレイオスとアウグスティヌス。
アッシジのフランチェスコと後継の理論家たち。神秘家オリヴィ。イエスの〈貧しさ〉に従う修道者たちは、
異端の疑いと背中合わせの中で、清貧の思想を鍛えぬいてきた。
とりわけフランシスコ会の兄弟たちは、所有権を拒否するだけでなく、「いかなる権利ももたない権利」を掲げて、
法の外で生きようとした。アガンベンは彼らの言論に、大量消費社会を超える可能性を見る。
生きることがたんなる事実ではなく、生の可能性であるような生。国家という形態をとらない
政治の可能性を考えるべく、アガンベンがかねて予告していた〈生のかたち〉、すなわち
分離できないほど形式と固く結びつき、「生政治」に回収されない生を構築する探求が、
ここに手がけられた。「ホモ・サケル」シリーズの一冊。

Azione e colpa sono concetti-soglia, a tal punto fondativi del pensiero giuridico, morale e politico dell'Occidente da rimanere oscurati dalla loro stessa costitutività. Il carattere liminare di entrambi viene però in luce non appena si rifletta sulla corrispondenza stringente tra il latino "crimen", che designa l'azione umana in quanto imputabile e sanzionata, ossia chiamata in causa nell'ordine della responsabilità e del diritto, e il sanscrito "karman", che contrassegna l'agire generatore di conseguenze. Con mossa disvelatrice, Giorgio Agamben individua nel "karman/crimen" la chiave di volta indoeuropea senza la quale crollerebbero sia l'edificio dell'etica e della politica occidentali sia il soggetto libero e responsabile che ne è il presupposto e l'effetto. Questa archeologia pragmatica, più che gnoseologica, della soggettività, rende evidente quanto la presa dell'azione sanzionata sull'agente si rinsaldi sempre più proprio nel momento in cui - con la patristica - la nozione di libero arbitrio intende assicurare la sovranità della volontà, spodestando il primato aristotelico della potenza. Secondo Agamben, non si riuscirà a inceppare il dispositivo volontà-azione-imputazione se non si uscirà dal paradigma della finalità: contro la signoria dei fini va ripensata una politica di mezzi puri, che già Benjamin affidava al gesto inoperoso, capace di disattivare le opere umane e destinarle "a un nuovo, possibile uso".

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well. In March 2009, Agamben was invited to speak in Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral in the presence of the bishop of Paris and a number of other high-ranking church officials. His resulting speech, a stunningly lucid and provocative look at the history and state of the church and its role in society, is presented here. "The Church and its Reign" is at once a pointed attack on the institutional structure of the Catholic Church and a theoretical excursus on the concepts of messianic time and economy. Presenting an exegesis of certain key passages in the New Testament, Agamben examines the philology and philosophy at the root of the church and of its earthly reign. With its examinations of the foundational texts of the church, which are also the foundational texts of our modern idea of economy, "The Church and its Reign" reveals significant connections and parallel ideologies which are imperative to understanding the current global situation. This edition of Agamben's text is accompanied by photographs by artist Alice Attie. Made from folded and twisted reproductions of paintings culled from Christian iconography, these works of art evoke the restless challenge that characterizes Agamben's four decades of philosophy and critique. This book will be welcomed by Agamben's many readers across the disciplines.