Potentialities : collected essays in philosophy / Giorgio Agamben ; edited and translated with an introduction by Daniel Heller-Roazen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Agamben, Giorgio, 1942-

Contributor:

Heller-Roazen, Daniel.

Series:

Meridian (Stanford, Calif.)

Meridian: crossing aesthetics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Aesthetics, Modern--20th century.

Aesthetics, Modern.

Language and languages--Philosophy.

Language and languages.

History--Philosophy.

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (324 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book collects fifteen major philosophical essays written over a period of more than twenty years by acclaimed Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The volume opens with an introduction in which the editor situates Agamben's work with respect to both the history of philosophy and contemporary European thought. The essays that follow articulate a series of theoretical confrontations with privileged figures in the history of philosophy, politics, and criticism, from Plato to Spinoza, Aristotle to Deleuze, Carl Schmitt to Benjamin, Hegel to Aby Warburg, and Heidegger to Derrida. Three fundamental concepts organize the collection as a whole: language, in the sense not of particular statements but rather the very taking place of speech, the pure fact of language's existence; history, as it appears from a perspective in which tradition, transmission, and memory reach their messianic fulfillment; and potentiality, understood as a fundamental problem of metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of language. All these topics converge in the final part of the book, in which Agamben offers an extensive reading of Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a work that puts potentiality and actuality, possibility and reality, in an altogether new light.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Introduction: “To Read What Was Never Written”

Part One. 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 Two. 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 Three. Potentiality

11. On Potentiality

12. The Passion of Facticity

13. Pardes : The Writing of Potentiality

14. Absolute Immanence

Part Four. Contingency

15. Bartleby, or On Contingency

Notes

Index of Names

Crossing Aesthetics

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-302) and index.

ISBN:

9780804764070

0804764077

OCLC:

50096860