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.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781942130567
Publisert
2021
Utgiver
Vendor
Zone Books
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter