Profanations

About this book

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 Agambens 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 Kafkas novels; pictorial representations of the Last Judgment of anonymous female faces and of Orson Wellss 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.