This book's title, Self-Portrait in the Studio--a familiar iconographic subject in the history of painting--is intended to be taken literally: the book is a self-portrait, but one that comes into view for the reader only by way of patient scrutiny of the images, photographs, objects, and paintings present in the studios where the writer has worked and still works. That is to say, Giorgio Agamben's wager is to speak of himself solely and uniquely by speaking of others: the poets, philosophers, painters, musicians, friends, passions--in short, the meetings and encounters that have shaped his life, thought, and writing, from Martin Heidegger to Elsa Morante, from Herman Melville to Walter Benjamin, from Giorgio Caproni to Giovanni Urbani. For this reason, images are an integral part of the book, images that--like those in a rebus that together form another, larger image--ultimately combine with the written text in one of the most unusual self-portraits that any writer has left of himself: not an autobiography, but a faithful and timeless auto-heterography.

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 Homo Sacer, 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.

In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a consequence, commenting on survivors' testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it.

Listening to something absent did not prove fruitless work for this author. Above all, it made it necessary to clear away almost all the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, have been advanced in the name of ethics. For my own part, I will consider myself content with my work if, in attempting to locate the place and theme of testimony, I have erected some signposts allowing future cartographers of the new ethical territory to orient themselves. Indeed, I will be satisfied if Remnants of Auschwitz succeeds only in correcting some of the terms with which we register the decisive lesson of the century and if this book makes it possible for certain words to be left behind and others to be understood in a different sense. This is also a way -- perhaps the only way -- to listen to what is unsaid.-- Giorgio Agamben

We are so used to distinguishing between the possible and the real, between essence and existence that we do not realize that these distinctions, which seem so obvious to us, are the result of a long and laborious process that has led to the splitting of being--the matter of thought--into two fragments that are both conflicting and intimately intertwined.

This book argues that the ontological-political machine of the West is based on the splitting of this matter, without which neither science nor politics would be possible. Without the partition of reality into essence and existence and into possibility and actuality, neither scientific knowledge nor the ability to control human action--which characterizes the historical power of the West--would have been possible.

If we could not suspend the exclusive concentration of our attention on what immediately exists (as animals seem to do), to think and define its essence, Western science and technology would not have experienced the advances that characterize them. And if the dimension of possibility disappeared entirely, neither plans nor projects would be thinkable, and human actions could be neither directed nor controlled. The incomparable power of the West has one of its essential presuppositions in this ontological machine.

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.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has always been an original reader of texts, understanding their many rich and multiple historical, aesthetic, and political meanings and effects. In Profanations, Agamben has assembled for the first time some of his most pivotal essays on photography, the novel, and film. A meditation on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains, Profanations proves yet again that Agamben is one of the most provocative writers of our times.

In ten essays, Agamben rethinks approaches to a series of literary and philosophical problems: the relation between genius, ego, and theories of subjectivity; the problem of messianic time as explicated in both images and lived experience; parody as a literary paradigm; the potential of magic to provide an ethical canon.

The range of topics and themes addressed here attest to the very creativity of Agamben's singular mode of thought and his persistent pursuit to grasp the act of witnessing, sometimes futile, sometimes earth-shattering -- the talking cricket in Pinocchio; helpers in Kafka's novels; pictorial representations of the Last Judgment, of anonymous female faces, and of Orson Wells's infamous object of obsession Rosebud. In Praise of Profanity, the central essay of this small but dense book, confronts the question of profanity as the crucial political task of the moment.

An act of resistance to every form of separation, the concept of profanation -- as both the return to common usage and sacrifice -- reorients perceptions of how power, consumption, and use interweave to produce an urgent political modality and desire: to profane the unprofanable. In short, Agamben provides not only a new and potent theoretical model but also a writerly style that itself forges inescapable links between literature, politics, and philosophy.

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.

What can the senses of an attentive philosopher see, hear, and learn that can, in turn, teach us about living better lives? Perhaps it's less a matter of asking what and more a matter of asking how. These latest reflections from Italy's foremost philosopher form a sort of travelogue that chronicles Giorgio Agamben's profound interior journey. Here, with unprecedented immediacy, Agamben shares his final remarks, late-life observations, and reflections about his life that flashed before his eyes. What did he see in that brief flash? What did he stay faithful to? What remains of all those places, friends, and teachers?

Taste, Agamben argues, is a category that has much to reveal to the contemporary world. Taking a step into the history of philosophy and reaching to the very origins of aesthetics, Agamben critically recovers the roots of one of Western culture's cardinal concepts. Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and with Taste he turns his critical eye to the realm of Western art and aesthetic practice. This volume will not only engage the author's devoted fans in philosophy, sociology, and literary criticism but also his growing audience among art theorists and historians.

What is at stake in that form of inquiry that the western philosophical tradition has called first philosophy or metaphysics? Is it an abstract, now outmoded branch of philosophy, or does it address a problem that is still of great interest - namely the unity of western knowledge?

In fact, metaphysics is first only in relation to the other two sciences that Aristotle called theoretical the study of nature (phusikē) and mathematics. It is the strategic sense of this primacy that needs to be examined, because what is at issue here is nothing less than the relationship - of domination or subservience, conflict or harmony - between philosophy and science. The hypothesis of this book is that philosophy's attempt to use metaphysics as a way of securing primacy among the sciences has resulted instead in its subservience: philosophy, once handmaiden to theology (ancilla theologiae), has now become more or less consciously handmaiden to the sciences (ancilla scientiarum). So it is all the more urgent to explore the nature and limits of this primacy and subservience, which is what the present book does through an archaeological investigation of metaphysics.

This important rereading of the western philosophical tradition by a leading thinker will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy, critical theory and the humanities more generally, and to anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and European thought.

In 1900, art historians André Jolles and Aby Warburg constructed an experimental dialogue in which Jolles supposed he had fallen in love with the figure of a young woman in a painting: A fantastic figure--shall I call her a servant girl, or rather a classical nymph?...what is the meaning of it all?...Who is the nymph? Where does she come from? Warburg's response: in essence she is an elemental spirit, a pagan goddess in exile, serves as the touchstone for this wide-ranging and theoretical exploration of female representation in iconography.
In Nymphs, the newest translation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's work, the author notes that academic research has lingered on the pagan goddess, while the concept of elemental spirit, ignored by scholars, is vital to the history of iconography. Tracing the genealogy of this idea, Agamben goes on to examine subjects as diverse as the aesthetic theories of choreographer Domineco da Piacenza, Friedrich Theodor Vischer's essay on the symbol, Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectic image, and the bizarre discoveries of photographer Nathan Lerner in 1972. From these investigations, there emerges a startlingly original exploration of the ideas of time and the image.

In 2013, Benedict XVI became only the second pope in the history of the Catholic Church to resign from office. In this brief but illuminating study, Giorgio Agamben argues that Benedict's gesture, far from being solely a matter of internal ecclesiastical politics, is exemplary in an age when the question of legitimacy has been virtually left aside in favor of a narrow focus on legality. This reflection on the recent history of the Church opens out into an analysis of one of the earliest documents of Christianity: the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, which stages a dramatic confrontation between the man of lawlessness and the enigmatic katechon, the power that holds back the end of days. In Agamben's hands, this infamously obscure passage reveals the theological dynamics of history that continue to inform Western culture to this day.

Agamben's profound and radical exploration of language, infancy, and everyday life traces concepts of experience through Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Benveniste. In doing so he elaborates a theory of infancy that throws new light on a number of major themes in contemporary thought: the anthropological opposition between nature and culture; the linguistic opposition between speech and language; the birth of the subject and the appearance of the unconscious. Agamben goes on to consider time and history; the Marxist notion of base and superstructure (via a careful reading of the famous Adorno-Benjamin correspondence on Baudelaire's Paris); and the difference between rituals and games.

Beautifully written, erudite and provocative, these essays will be of great interest to students of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology and politics.

In The Time That Remains, Agamben seeks to separate the Pauline texts from the history of the Church that canonized them, thus revealing them to be the fundamental messianic texts of the West. He argues that Paul's letters are concerned not with the foundation of a new religion but rather with the messianic abolition of Jewish law. Situating Paul's texts in the context of early Jewish messianism, this book is part of a growing set of recent critiques devoted to the period when Judaism and Christianity were not yet fully distinct, placing Paul in the context of what has been called Judaeo-Christianity.

Agamben's philosophical exploration of the problem of messianism leads to the other major figure discussed in this book, Walter Benjamin. Advancing a claim without precedent in the vast literature on Benjamin, Agamben argues that Benjamin's philosophy of history constitutes a repetition and appropriation of Paul's concept of remaining time. Through a close reading and comparison of Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History and the Pauline Epistles, Agamben discerns a number of striking and unrecognized parallels between the two works.

The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt.

In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.

In this book, one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He takes seriously Hegel's claim that art has exhausted its spiritual vocation, that it is no longer through art that Spirit principally comes to knowledge of itself. He argues, however, that Hegel by no means proclaimed the death of art (as many still imagine) but proclaimed rather the indefinite continuation of art in what Hegel called a self-annulling mode.

With astonishing breadth and originality, the author probes the meaning, aesthetics, and historical consequences of that self-annulment. In essence, he argues that the birth of modern aesthetics is the result of a series of schisms--between artist and spectator, genius and taste, and form and matter, for example--that are manifestations of the deeper, self-negating yet self-perpetuating movement of irony.

Through this concept of self-annulment, the author offers an imaginative reinterpretation of the history of aesthetic theory from Kant to Heidegger, and he opens up original perspectives on such phenomena as the rise of the modern museum, the link between art and terror, the natural affinity between good taste and its perversion, and kitsch as the inevitable destiny of art in the modern era. The final chapter offers a dazzling interpretation of Dürer's Melancholia in the terms that the book has articulated as its own.

The Man Without Content will naturally interest those who already prize Agamben's work, but it will also make his name relevant to a whole new audience--those involved with art, art history, the history of aesthetics, and popular culture.

Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer is one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. A twenty-year undertaking, this project is a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope investigating the deepest foundations of every major Western institution and discourse.

This single book brings together for the first time all nine volumes that make up this groundbreaking project. Each volume takes a seemingly obscure and outdated issue as its starting point--an enigmatic figure in Roman law, or medieval debates about God's management of creation, or theories about the origin of the oath--but is always guided by questions with urgent contemporary relevance.

The Omnibus Homo Sacer includes:

1.Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

2.1.State of Exception

2.2.Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm

2.3.The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath

2.4.The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Glory

2.5.Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty

3.Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive

4.1.The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life

4.2.The Use of Bodies

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.