Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Giorgio Agamben is one of Italy’s foremost contemporary thinkers. Seagull Books’s Italian List includes several of Agamben’s recent works. Kevin Attell teaches at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and is the author of Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction.
<p>“Agamben’s writing lies at the intersection of poetry and philology. In <i>Self-Portrait in the Studio</i>, he calls philology—the close study of classical texts and languages—'one of my most enduring temptations…which I have never been able to separate from philosophy.'. . . Any thinker who aims at the redemption of our fallen world will inevitably pass over from politics and philosophy to religion and literature, because only the latter speak of the good and the beautiful, while the former are confined to the true. Whether that limitation is a blessing or a curse depends on what we turn to a thinker for. In Agamben’s case, it seems wise to take him at his word in <i>Self-Portrait in the Studio</i>: 'I became a philosopher in order to deal with a poetic aporia that I could not get to the bottom of. In this sense, I am perhaps not a philosopher but a poet.'”</p>
New York Review of Books
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.
<p>“Agamben’s writing lies at the intersection of poetry and philology. In <i>Self-Portrait in the Studio</i>, he calls philology—the close study of classical texts and languages—'one of my most enduring temptations…which I have never been able to separate from philosophy.'. . . Any thinker who aims at the redemption of our fallen world will inevitably pass over from politics and philosophy to religion and literature, because only the latter speak of the good and the beautiful, while the former are confined to the true. Whether that limitation is a blessing or a curse depends on what we turn to a thinker for. In Agamben’s case, it seems wise to take him at his word in <i>Self-Portrait in the Studio</i>: 'I became a philosopher in order to deal with a poetic aporia that I could not get to the bottom of. In this sense, I am perhaps not a philosopher but a poet.'”</p>
New York Review of Books
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.