Potentialities

by Agamben, Giorgio

• ISBN13: 9780804732789
• ISBN10: 0804732787
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-01-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author's interests, appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (such as Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel) and twentieth-century thought (most notably Walter Benjamin, but also Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, the historian Aby Warburg, and the linguist J.-C. Milner). They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. In the first part of the book, Agamben brings philosophical texts of Plato and Benjamin, the literary criticism of Max Kommerell, and the linguistic studies of J.-C. Milner to bear upon a question that exposes each discipline to a limit at which the possibility of language itself is at stake. The essays in the second part concern a body of texts that deal with the structure of history and historical reflection, including the idea of the end of history in Jewish and Christian messianism, as well as in Hegel, Benjamin, and Aby Warburg. In the third part, the issues confronted in the first and second parts are shown to be best grasped as issues of potentiality. Agamben argues that language and history are structures of potentiality and can be most fully understood on the basis of the Aristotelian theory ofdynamisand its medieval elaborations. The fourth part is an extensive essay on Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener."

Author Biography

Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the University of Verona. This is the fourth of his books published by Stanford; previous titles are Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), The Man Without Content (1999), and The End of the Poem (1999).

Table of Contents

Editor's Note	p. ix
Editor's Introduction: "To Read What Was Never Written"	p. 1
Language
The Thing Itself	p. 27
The Idea of Language	p. 39
Language and History: Linguistic and Historical Categories in Benjamin's Thought	p. 48
Philosophy and Linguistics	p. 62
Kommerell, or On Gesture	p. 77
History
Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science	p. 89
Tradition of the Immemorial	p. 104
*Se: Hegel's Absolute and Heidegger's Ereignis	p. 116
Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption	p. 138
The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin	p. 160
Potentiality
On Potentiality	p. 177
The Passion of Facticity	p. 185
Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality	p. 205
Absolute Immanence	p. 220
Contingency
Bartleby, or On Contingency	p. 243
Notes	p. 275
Index of Names	p. 303
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