Profanazioni

Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher best known for his Homo Sacer project, gathers here ten essays that revisit photography, the novel and film. Running through the collection are questions of memory and forgetting, and of what disappears from our lives while something else survives.

The essays take up a range of literary and philosophical problems. They examine how genius, the ego and theories of the subject relate to one another, how messianic time appears in both images and lived experience, and how parody works as a literary model. They also ask whether magic might offer a basis for ethics.

The central essay, "In Praise of Profanity," argues that profanation is the decisive political task of the present moment.