Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience

Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience

Agamben, Giorgio
Heron, Liz

Paperback

Series: Radical Thinkers, Book 14

Philosophy

ISBN10: 1844675718
ISBN13: 9781844675715
Publisher: Verso
Published: Jan 1 2007
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.43
Height: 0.54 Width: 5.14 Depth: 7.80
Language: English
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.

Also in

Philosophy

View All