Series: The Italian List

A beautifully crafted novel set in the late 1960s and 1970s Italy, a tempestuous period that shaped the lives of generations to come in many countries. What was it really like to be a teenager growing up in Italy in the 1970s, during a time it has become all too easy to file away under “years of lead,” as the...

A vivid and unforgettable novelistic portrait of rural Italy, exploring the nature of reality and the human condition. A small-time farmer living in central Italy in the 1960s is the keeper of a great truth: that people are machines built by other beings who are machines themselves. Our true destiny is to build ever-better machines so that society can become...

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes a close look at why the sense of taste has not historically been appreciated as a means to know and experience pleasure, or why it has always been considered inferior to actual theoretical knowledge. Taste, Agamben argues, is a category that has much to reveal to the contemporary world. Taking a step into the history...

An inquiry into the origins of language and articulation, exploring how the transformation of the human voice shaped history, politics, and thought. What does it mean to have a voice—and how does it shape what it means to be human? In The Human Voice, Giorgio Agamben embarks on a profound exploration of how the human voice transforms from mere sound...

Reveals a dark chapter in the Italian government's colonial history that has been largely hidden from view. Between the end of the nineteenth century and over the first half of the twentieth, Italy invaded and occupied the Horn of Africa, Libya, and several other territories. Yet recognition of this history of colonial destruction, racist violence, and genocidal aerial and chemical...

Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and Nymphs will engage not only the author's devoted fans in philosophy, legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism but also his growing audience among art theorists and historians as well. In 1900, art historians André Jolles and Aby Warburg constructed an experimental dialogue in...

A rare autobiographical glimpse into the life and influences of one of Europe's greatest living philosophers. 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,...

On December 29, 1918, the Spartakus League, a Marxist revolutionary movement, rose up in Germany calling for an end to class rule by the bourgeoisie. Massive demonstrations followed, and more than 500,000 Berliners took to the streets in January—only to be crushed by police and anticommunist paramilitary troops. Several leaders of the League were killed, and the revolt was quashed....

A brief study of select Western art from Italy's foremost philosopher. In Renaissance palaces, the studiolo was a small room to which the prince withdrew to meditate or read, surrounded by paintings he particularly loved. This book is a kind of studiolo for its author, Giorgio Agamben, as he turns his philosophical lens on the world of Western art. Studiolo...

A philosophical exploration of what capitalistic societies truly mean for the individual. A short vade mecum for unrepentant materialism, The Idea of World collects three essays by Italian philosopher Paolo Virno that are intricately wrapped around one another. The first essay, “Mundanity,” attempts to clarify what the term “world,” as referred to as the perceptual and historical context of our...

In a tour-de-force reinterpretation of the Christian tradition, Agamben shows that the Garden of Eden has always served as a symbol for humanity's true nature. What happened to paradise after Adam and Eve were expelled? The question may sound like a theological quibble, or even a joke, but in The Kingdom and the Garden, Giorgio Agamben uses it as a...

A patient, genealogical investigation of the dichotomies that are foundational to the Western philosophical tradition. We are so used to distinguishing between the possible and the real, between essence and existence, that we do not realise these distinctions, which seem so obvious to us, are the result of a long and laborious process that has led to the splitting of...

One of Europe’s greatest living philosophers, Giorgio Agamben, analyses the life and work of one of Europe’s greatest poets, Friedrich Hölderlin. What does it mean to inhabit a place or a self? What is a habit? And, for human beings, doesn’t living mean—first and foremost—inhabiting? Pairing a detailed chronology of German poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s years of purported madness with a...

A seminar, a sixteenth-century heretical text, and the art of slow reading—this is historical research as you've never seen it before. Patience Games: A Seminar on the 'Benefit of Christ' invites readers into the unpredictable world of scholarly discovery, where interpretation is not a straight path but a labyrinth of dialogue revision. At the heart of this book is a...

A thought-provoking exploration of the fragility of bourgeois identity. Vienna, 1825. News of a sickly, listless boy is making the rounds. In broad daylight, he falls into deep sleep and his personality changes dramatically. While sleeping, he reads, writes, plays cards, challenges his doctors with amusement, and accomplishes the most astonishing of exercises with his eyes closed. A new subject...

A classic work of political theory by a major twentieth-century figure of the Italian Left. Italian political thinker Mario Tronti is most famous for being the author of Workers and Capital, which became the central theoretical formulation of Italian operaismo or workerism, a current of political thought emerging in the 1960s that revolutionised the institutional and extra-parliamentary Left in Italy...

A vital addition to Seagull's growing Italian List that focuses on leftist Italian thought, bringing famous as well as little-known yet crucial voices into the English language. As speaking animals, we continuously make use of an unassuming grammatical particle, without suspecting that what is at work in its inconspicuousness is a powerful apparatus, which orchestrates language, signification, and the world...

Originally published in Italian in 1965, A Test of Powers was immediately seen as one of the central texts of Italian intellectual life. By the time of the 1968 student revolts, it was clear that Franco Fortini had anticipated many of the themes and concerns of the New Left. This is no surprise, given that Fortini had spent more than...

An erudite exploration of transgressive language from the Renaissance by one of Europe's greatest living philosophers. The Body of Language 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...

In 1936, Walter Benjamin defined the revolutionary class as being in opposition to a dense and dangerous crowd, prone to fear of the foreign, and under the spell of anti-Semitic madness. Today, in formations great or small, that sad figure returns—the hatred of minorities is rekindled and the pied-pipers of the crowd stand triumphant. Class, by Andrea Cavalletti, is a...

An incisive and urgent book that explores the hidden roots of our contemporary powerlessness. Contemporary life is marked by a paradoxical form of impotence. Whether in love, labour, or political struggle, we often find ourselves locked in a state of frenetic paralysis — unable to act as we wish or to endure what confronts us. This impotence is not born...

Drawing on twenty years of research, this is the definitive biography of Primo Levi. Over the last seventy years, Primo Levi (1919–87) has been recognised as the foremost literary witness of the extermination of the European Jews. In Primo Levi: An Identikit, a product of twenty years of research, Marco Belpoliti explores Levi’s tormented life, his trajectory as a writer...