In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that his work is “related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it.” For a thinker so decisive to critical literary, cultural, political, and aesthetic writings over the past half-century, Benjamin’s relationship to theological matters has been less observed than it should, even despite a variety of attempts over the last four decades to illuminate the theological elements latent within his eclectic and occasional writings. Such attempts, though undeniably crucial to comprehending his thought, remain in need of deepened systematic analysis. In bringing together some of the most renowned experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Benjamin and Theology seeks to establish a new site from which to address both the issue of Benjamin’s relationship with theology and all the crucial aspects that Benjamin himself grappled with when addressing the field and operations of theological inquiry.

Senza la partizione della realtà in essenza e esistenza e in possibilità (dynamis) e attualità (energeia), né la conoscenza scientifica né la capacità di controllare e dirigere durevolmente le azioni umane che caratterizzano la potenza storica dell’Occidente sarebbero state possibili. Se non potessimo sospendere la concentrazione esclusiva della nostra attenzione su ciò che esiste immediatamente (come sembrano fare gli animali), per pensarne e definirne l’essenza (il «che cosa»), la scienza e la tecnologia occidentali non avrebbero certamente conosciuto lo sviluppo che le caratterizza. E se la dimensione della possibilità scomparisse interamente, né piani né progetti sarebbero pensabili e le azioni umane non potrebbero essere né dirette né controllate. La potenza incomparabile dell’Occidente ha in questa macchina ontologica uno dei suoi essenziali presupposti. Attraverso una paziente indagine genealogica, il libro ricostruisce la nascita di questa scissione fondativa della cosa del pensiero e il processo delle sue successive articolazioni nella filosofia e nella politica dell’Occidente.

Spanning from the late 19th century to the present with images produced for scientific and artistic contexts, Picture Industry includes the work of more than 70 artists and practitioners. An essential anthology of historical and theoretical texts, it reflects upon transformations in the production and distribution of photographic images as realized through its varied constructions of the corporeal, from its origin as a scientific tool and a means of cultural investigation to its phenomenological effects on the viewer. It complexifies traditional accounts of the medium, drawing on its application within science and the humanities to contemporary art. Rather than attempting a definitive history, the publication posits an alternative approach to the myriad questions and debates associated with representation, presenting its technological history as inextricable from the social history of media.
Picture Industry brings together essays by, among others, Giorgio Agamben, Cory Arcangel, Ariella Azoulay, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Ericka Beckman, Walter Benjamin, Georges Didi-Huberman, Harun Farocki, Morgan Fisher, Vilém Flusser, Coco Fusco, Tristan Garcia, Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, Mark Godfrey, Dan Graham, Friedrich A. Kittler, Boris Mikhailov, Craig Owens, Erwin Panofsky, Seth Price, Siegfried Kracauer, Rosalind Krauss, Etienne-Jules Marey, Martha Rosler, Hito Steyerl, William Henry Fox Talbot, Gilles de la Tourette and Alan Turing.
Published with LUMA and CCS Bard on the occasion of the exhibition Picture Industry, LUMA, Arles, October 12, 2018–January 6, 2019.

What 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.

Jose Twombly (Cy Twombly) has been hailed as the New York times "one of the greatest contemporary artists in the 20th century", as a set of abstract expressionism, in a minimalist and pop art, and rewrite the history of the American post-war art master "eccentric", Twombly directly affected include Jean Michel gods (jean-michel Basquiat), Anselm Kiefer (Ms. Anselm Kiefer), large quantities of contemporary artist, his writing is thinking, narrative, the combination of history, myth, and formalism. He not only raised abstract expressionism to a higher level, but also changed the history of art to some extent.

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy’s most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.
In
, Agamben 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. Taking his cue from Foucault’s fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle’s notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over “life” is implicit.
The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign’s status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective “naked life” of all individuals.

The acclaimed Italian philosopher interrogates the concept of creation in art, religion, and economics in this collection of five essays.

Creation 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.

A richly illustrated analysis from one of Europe’s greatest living philosophers.
In Pinocchio, Giorgio Agamben turns his keen philosopher’s eye to the famous nineteenth-century novel by Carlo Collodi. To Agamben, Pinocchio’s adventures are a kind of initiation into life itself. Like us, the mischievous puppet is caught between two worlds. He is faced with the alternatives of submitting to authority or of carrying on, stubbornly indulging his way of being. From Agamben’s virtuoso interpretation of this classic story, we learn that we can harbor the mystery of existence only if we are not aware of it, only if we manage to cohabit with an area of non-knowledge, immemorial and very near. Richly illustrated with images from three early editions of Collodi’s novel, this new volume will delight enthusiasts of both literature and philosophy.

One of Europe’s greatest living philosophers, Giorgio Agamben, analyzes the life and work of one of Europe’s greatest poets, Friedrich Hölderlin.
What does it mean to inhabit a place or a self? What is a habit? And, for human beings, doesn’t living mean—first and foremost—inhabiting? Pairing a detailed chronology of German poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s years of purported madness with a new examination of texts often considered unreadable, Giorgio Agamben’s new book aims to describe and comprehend a life that the poet himself called habitual and inhabited.
Hölderlin’s life was split neatly in two: his first 36 years, from 1770 to 1806; and the 36 years from 1807 to 1843, which he spent as a madman holed up in the home of Ernst Zimmer, a carpenter. The poet lived the first half of his existence out and about in the broader world, relatively engaged with current events, only to then spend the second half entirely cut off from the outside world. Despite occasional visitors, it was as if a wall separated him from all external events and relationships. For reasons that may well eventually become clear, Hölderlin chose to expunge all character—historical, social, or otherwise—from the actions and gestures of his daily life. According to his earliest biographer, he often stubbornly repeated, ‘nothing happens to me’. Such a life can only be the subject of a chronology—not a biography, much less a clinical or psychological analysis. Nevertheless, this book suggests that this is precisely how Hölderlin offers humanity an entirely other notion of what it means to live. Although we have yet to grasp the political significance of his unprecedented way of life, it now clearly speaks directly to our own.

L'état d'exception, que nous avons coutume d'envisager comme une mesure toute provisoire et extraordinaire, est en train de devenir sous nos yeux un paradigme normal de gouvernement, qui détermine toujours davantage la politique des états modernes. Cet essai se propose de reconstruire l'histoire du paradigme, et d'analyser le sens et les raisons de son évolution actuelle - de Hitler à Guantanamo. Il faut bien voir en effet que, lorsque l'état d'exception devient la règle, les équilibres fragiles qui définissent les constitutions démocratiques ne peuvent plus fonctionner, la différence même entre démocratie et absolutisme tend à s'estomper. Démontant une par une les théorisations juridiques de l'état d'exception, Giorgio Agamben défriche le terrain vague entre politique et droit, et jette une nouvelle lumière sur la relation occulte qui lie la violence au droit.

“Publicado na Itália, em 1996, Meios sem fim é, segundo o próprio Agamben, um conjunto de textos (escritos entre 1990 e 1995) que se referem, cada um a seu modo, a um canteiro de obras cujo primeiro fruto tinha sido a publicação do primeiro volume de Homo Sacer (O poder soberano e a vida nua, Einaudi, 1995). Embora não se constituam propriamente como um dos volumes da série Homo Sacer, os breves ensaios de Meios sem fim antecipam os seus núcleos originais e apresentam alguns de seus ‘estilhaços e fragmentos’: a vida nua, a biopolítica; o estado de exceção; o campo de concentração; o refugiado; as sociedades democrático-espetaculares; a política como a esfera dos meios puros ou dos gestos. Mas Meios sem fim é também o exercício de confronto visceral entre um filósofo vivo e os mais urgentes acontecimentos de seu tempo (o que se passou nos territórios da antiga Iugoslávia; a situação de um Estado sem povo, como o Kuwait, ou de povos sem Estado, como os curdos, os armênios, os palestinos e os judeus da diáspora; os eventos de Timisoara, na Romênia, que levaram à queda do ditador Nicolae Ceau?escu; os protestos na China, na praça da Paz Celestial; a Guerra do Golfo). Todos esses eventos pedem um novo pensamento que lhes dê inteligibilidade. E é esse novo pensamento que o leitor tem diante dos olhos nestes ensaios. Uma nova filosofia, como toda filosofia, surge somente no embate com o mundo que a cerca e que está aí para nos dar lições. Os filósofos são aqueles que sabem aprendê-las.”

A brief study of select Western art from Italy's foremost philosopher.
In Renaissance palaces, the studiolo was a small room to which the prince withdrew to meditate or read, surrounded by paintings he particularly loved. This book is a kind of studiolo for its author, Giorgio Agamben, as he turns his philosophical lens on the world of Western art.
Studiolo is a fascinating take on a selection of artworks created over millennia; some are easily identifiable, others rarer. Though they were produced over an arc of time stretching from 5000 BCE to the present, only now have they achieved their true legibility. Agamben contends that we must understand that the images bequeathed by the past are really addressed to us, here and now; otherwise, our historical awareness is broken. Notwithstanding the attention to details and the critical precautions that characterize the author's method-they provoke us with a force, even a violence, that we cannot escape. When we understand why Dostoevsky feared losing his faith before Holbein's Body of the Dead Christ, when Chardin's Still Life with Hare is suddenly revealed to our gaze as a crucifixion or Twombly's sculpture shows that beauty must ultimately fall, the artwork is torn from its museological context and restored to its almost prehistoric emergence. These artworks are beautifully reproduced in color throughout Agamben's short but significant addition to his scholarly oeuvre in English translation.

Questo libro non assomiglia a nessuno dei libri che l'autore ha finora pubblicato. Si tratta di parole ultime o penultime, vergate in fretta, come da chi prende appunti per il suo testamento, ma si accorge alla fine di non avere eredi. La sua vita è passata in un lampo e lo squarcio di luce ha lasciato vedere ben poco. Che cosa ha visto in quel lampo, a che cosa è rimasto fedele, che cosa resta dei luoghi, degli incontri, degli amici, dei maestri? «Come la colomba, siamo stati mandati fuori dall'arca per vedere se c'era sulla terra qualcosa di vivo, anche soltanto un ramoscello di ulivo da prendere nel becco - ma non abbiamo trovato nulla. E, tuttavia, nell'arca non abbiamo voluto tornare».