Just as speech can be acquired, so can it be lost. Speakers can forget words,phrases, even entire languages they once knew; over the course of time peoples, too, let go of thetongues that were once th
An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras discovered the secrets of harmony within aforge when he came across five men hammering with five hammers, producing a wondrous sound. Four ofthe five hammers
In Dark Tongues, Daniel Heller-Roazen offers a sustainedexploration of a perplexing fact that has never received the attention it deserves. Wherever humanbeings share a language, they also strive to m
An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into the sense of being sentient—what it means to feel that one is alive—that draws on philosophical, literary, psychological,
One of the most influential literary works of the Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun contains a number of philosophical discussions viewed by many critics as a
In this notebook, philosopher and writer Daniel Heller-Roazen poses the question, “Might language guard something of its own, hidden in everything that is said?” With his mastery of language and its c
An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into the sense of being sentient—what it means to feel that one is alive—that draws on philosophical, literary, psychological,
The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. As Cicero famously remarked, there are certain enemies with whom one may negotiate and with whom, circumstances permitting, one may establish a truce. B
Homer recounts how, trapped inside a monster's cave with nothing but his wits, Ulysses once saved himself by twisting his name. Odysseus called himself Outis: "no one," "
This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertakingnothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic l
This book, by one of Italy’s most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking—nothing less than an attempt to rethink the natu
This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author’s interests, appear in English for the first time.The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (such as Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel) and twentieth-century thought (most notably Walter Benjamin, but also Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, the historian Aby Warburg, and the linguist J.-C. Milner). They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality.In the first part of the book, Agamben
The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy’s most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians
