Customer Reviews (1)

St Paul the philosopher
Agamben's book is not just the most interesting book I have read on St Paul, but it is at the same time Agamben's best book. As far as I can see, it can be considered as the "summary" of all Agamben's central ideas. Moreover, it happens to be well written - what cannot be said about all his other books. ... Read more

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A precursor to Arte Povera, Fluxus and Punk, the Situationist International has bequeathed a uniquely complex and conflicted legacy to contemporary art-making. Led by Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, it initially favored the production of art objects; by 1962, collective debate on the role of art had caused the expulsion of its fine-artist members, including Asger Jorn, other members of Cobra and the entire Munich-based Gruppe SPUR. The revolution envisaged by the Situationist International demanded creativity in everyday life, the constructing of situations or the "fashioning of a temporary micro-environment and series of events for a single moment in the life of several individuals."
The Situationist International (1957-1972) (the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at Centraal Museum, Utrecht, and Museum Tinguely, Basel) is the first publication to evaluate the creative contributions of the SI. It addresses three areas of Situationist practice: firstly, anonymous and communal artistic production (e.g Cobra, Asger Jorn's folk art research and the "Bauhaus Imaginiste"); secondly, "detournement," variously translated as "diversion" or "subversion," a key SI strategy in which extant works such as advertisements, comics, paintings or films are politically reconstituted by collage or other means; and thirdly, the practice of "derive"--"drift" or purposeless wandering in an urban milieu--which generated the now widely known phenomenon of "psychogeography" and led to radical reassessments of architectural practice. The Situationist International includes new unpublished SI documents and essays by Giorgio Agamben, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Peter Sloterdijk and Philippe Sollers. ... Read more

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How and why did experience and knowledge become separated? Is it possible to talk of an infancy of experience, a "dumb" experience? For Walter Benjamin, the "poverty of experience" was a characteristic of modernity, originating in the catastrophe of the First World War. For Giorgio Agamben, the Italian editor of Benjamin's complete works, the destruction of experience no longer needs catastrophes: daily life in any modern city will suffice. Agamben's profound and radical exploration of language, infancy, and everyday life traces concepts of experience through Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Benveniste. In doing so he elaborates a theory of infancy that throws new light on a number of major themes in contemporary thought: the anthropological opposition between nature and culture; the linguistic opposition between speech and language; the birth of the subject and the appearance of the unconscious. Agamben goes on to consider time and history; the Marxist notion of base and superstructure (via a careful reading of the famous Adorno-Benjamin correspondence on Baudelaire's Paris); and the difference between rituals and games.Beautifully written, erudite and provocative, these essays will be of great interest to students of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology and politics. ... Read more