This book collects fifteen major philosophical essays written over a
period of more than twenty years by acclaimed Italian philosopher
Giorgio Agamben. The volume opens with an introduction in which the
editor situates Agamben's work with respect to both the history of
philosophy and contemporary European thought. The essays that follow
articulate a series of theoretical confrontations with privileged
figures in the history of philosophy, politics, and criticism, from
Plato to Spinoza, Aristotle to Deleuze, Carl Schmitt to Benjamin, Hegel
to Aby Warburg, and Heidegger to Derrida. Three fundamental concepts
organize the collection as a whole: language, in the sense not of
particular statements but rather the very taking place of speech, the
pure fact of language's existence; history, as it appears from a
perspective in which tradition, transmission, and memory reach their
messianic fulfillment; and potentiality, understood as a fundamental
problem of metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of language. All
these topics converge in the final part of the book, in which Agamben
offers an extensive reading of Melville's short story "Bartleby the
Scrivener" as a work that puts potentiality and actuality, possibility
and reality, in an altogether new light.