About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherStanford University Press

ISBN-100804732787

ISBN-139780804732789

eBay Product ID (ePID)1161140

Product Key Features

Number of Pages328 Pages

Publication NamePotentialities : Collected Essays in Philosophy

LanguageEnglish

SubjectHistoriography, Language, Movements / General, General, Aesthetics, History & Surveys / Modern

Publication Year2000

TypeTextbook

Subject AreaLiterary Criticism, Philosophy, History

AuthorGiorgio Agamben

SeriesMeridian: Crossing Aesthetics Ser.

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.7 in

Item Weight16.3 Oz

Item Length9 in

Item Width6 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

LCCN99-039449

Dewey Edition21

Reviews"Agamben has been attracting attention recently in the English-speaking world, thanks to the increasing availability of his work in translation. This volume is indicative of Agamben's broad range of interests. . . . Despite this range of interests, however, a sustained commitment to certain theoretical issues-particularly language and history-lends the volume a coherence. . . . Daniel Heller-Roazen's introduction does a nice job of outlining the philosophical program that motivates these essays, and his translation in general is to be commended for its elegance. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers."- Choice, "Agamben has been attracting attention recently in the English-speaking world, thanks to the increasing availability of his work in translation. This volume is indicative of Agamben's broad range of interests. . . . Despite this range of interests, however, a sustained commitment to certain theoretical issues-particularly language and history-lends the volume a coherence. . . . Daniel Heller-Roazen's introduction does a nice job of outlining the philosophical program that motivates these essays, and his translation in general is to be commended for its elegance. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers."-Choice, "Agamben has been attracting attention recently in the English-speaking world, thanks to the increasing availability of his work in translation. This volume is indicative of Agamben's broad range of interests. . . . Despite this range of interests, however, a sustained commitment to certain theoretical issues—particularly language and history—lends the volume a coherence. . . . Daniel Heller-Roazen's introduction does a nice job of outlining the philosophical program that motivates these essays, and his translation in general is to be commended for its elegance. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers."— Choice, "Agamben has been attracting attention recently in the English-speaking world, thanks to the increasing availability of his work in translation. This volume is indicative of Agamben's broad range of interests. . . . Despite this range of interests, however, a sustained commitment to certain theoretical issues--particularly language and history--lends the volume a coherence. . . . Daniel Heller-Roazen's introduction does a nice job of outlining the philosophical program that motivates these essays, and his translation in general is to be commended for its elegance. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers."-- Choice

IllustratedYes

Dewey Decimal195

SynopsisThis 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., This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. The essays consider several figures in the history of philosophy; the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics.

LC Classification NumberBH201