A revolutionary history and theory of harmony from music to metaphysicsAn ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras invented harmony. It is said that one day, he wandered by a forge and, hearing a wondrous sound come from within, ventured in to investigate. He found five men hammering with five hammers. To his astonishment, he discovered that four of the five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, which, when combined, allowed him to reconstruct the laws of...

In seinem Notizbuch wirft der Philosoph und Schriftsteller Daniel Heller-Roazen die Frage auf, »ob […] die Sprache etwas ihr Eigenes, in allem Gesagten Verstecktes birgt«. Mit meisterhafter Beherrschung der Sprache und ihrer rätselhaft verschlüsselten Natur taucht er in fundamentale Fragen und das Mysterium des gesprochenen Wortes und des »Textes« selbst ein. Heller-Roazen bezieht sich auf den Denker Al-Ja?i? aus dem 9. Jahrhundert und dessen Überlegungen zur Vermeidung des Verrats von Geh...

An inquiry into the theories and practices of overhearingWhen words are not heard but overheard, when phrases are perceived in bits and pieces, and when speakers, failing to do as they intend, state things that they never meant to say, the saying, in its unsteady relation to understanding, becomes an event. That event has long been studied by a disparate company of interpreters: prophets, priests, and rabbis, poets and philosophers, linguists, psychiatrists and psy...

An intellectually adventurous account of the role of nonpersons that explores their depiction in literature and challenges how they are defined in philosophy, law, and anthropologyIn thirteen interlocking chapters, Absentees explores the role of the missing in human communities, asking an urgent question: How does a person become a nonperson, whether by disappearance, disenfranchisement, or civil, social, or biological death? Only somebody can become a “no...

This book collects fifteen major philosophical essays spanning more than twenty years by acclaimed Italian philosopher and author of State of Exception.Giorgio Agamben is one of contemporary philosophy's most influential thinkers on the subjects of language, power, society. This collection of essays opens with an enlightening introduction by the translator Daniel Heller-Roazen, who situates Agamben's work with respect to both the history of philosophy and c...

In this major work by the renowned Italian philosopher, an obscure figure in Roman law poses significant questions about the nature of power.The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, challenges modern conceptions of society and the individual's place within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a time w...

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.In Homo S...

Reading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy itself.Fear of the void, terror of heights: everyone knows what acrophobia is, and many suffer from it. Before Freud, the so-called “sciences of the mind” reserved a place of honor for vertigo in the domain of mental pathologies. The fear of falling—which is also the fear of g...