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The Signature of All Things

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Brief Description
Internationally renowned philosopher Giorgio Agamben's bold redefinition of methodological inquiry into the human sciences The Signature of All Things is Giorgio Agamben's sustained reflection on method. To reflect on method implies for Agamben an archeological vigilance: a persistent form of thinking whose path is to expose,... Read More
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Internationally renowned philosopher Giorgio Agamben's bold redefinition of methodological inquiry into the human sciences

The Signature of All Things is Giorgio Agamben's sustained reflection on method. To reflect on method implies for Agamben an archeological vigilance: a persistent form of thinking whose path is to expose, examine, and elaborate that which remains obscure, unthematised, even unsaid, in an author's thought. To be archeologically vigilant, then, is to return to, even invent, a method attuned to a 'world supported by a thick plot of resemblances and sympathies, analogies and correspondences.'

The range of authors and of topics Agamben collects in this slim but dense volume exemplifies this search to create a science of signatures that exceeds either a semiology or hermeneutics vainly attempting to determine the pure and unmarked signs that signify univocally, neutrally, and eternally.

Three conceptual figures organise this treatise and the advent of Agamben's own new method: the paradigm, the signature, and archeology. Each chapter is devoted to an investigation of one of these concepts whose genealogy Agamben carefully constructs transhistorically and from an interdisciplinary perspective. And at each moment of the text, Agamben pays tribute to Michel Foucault whose methods he rethinks and effectively uses to reformulate the logic of the concepts he isolates. The Signature of All Things reveals once again, how and why, Agamben is one of the most innovative thinkers writing today.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781945861000

Publisher: Zone Books

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 11 February 2025

Country: United States

Imprint: Zone Books

Contributors:

  • Translated by Kevin Attell
  • Translated by Luca di Santo

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 152.0mm

Height: 229.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 128

About the Author

Giorgio Agamben is professor of philosophy at the University of Venice. The author of many acclaimed works, his most recent in English include Profanations and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive.

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