Results by title
4 books match the query 'Attell, Kevin'
Self-Portrait in the Studio
Giorgio Agamben
Seagull Books, 2024
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.
State of Exception
Giorgio Agamben
University of Chicago Press, 2004
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.
The Body of Language
esperruquancluzelubelouzerireluGiorgio Agamben
Seagull Books, 2025
An erudite exploration of transgressive language from the Renaissance by one of Europe’s greatest living philosophers.
This book explores how early modern authors broke linguistic boundaries, creating new words and languages that challenged traditional grammar and lexicon, providing historical insight into today’s debates on the politics of language. Through a scholarly analysis by Giorgio Agamben, the text delves into the boundary-shifting language of the Renaissance, exemplified by giants like Pantagruel and Gargantua, whose outsized bodies mirror the vastness of their speech. The macaronic language invented by Teofilo Folengo, blending Latin and vernacular, embodies a linguistic rebellion that transforms language into a tangible, unruly force. Featuring illustrations from the Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel and Folengo’s Baldo, this volume offers a vivid portrayal of language as a physical, dynamic entity that defies grammatical norms.
When the House Burns Down
From the Dialect of ThoughtGiorgio Agamben
Seagull Books, 2022
“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.