Giorgio Agamben is the author of more than fifteen books on topics ranging from aesthetics to poetics, ontology to political philosophy. He is best known for his Homo Sacer series. In 2012, Seagull Books has published Agamben’s The Church and the Kingdom and The Unspeakable Girl. Kevin McLaughlin is the Nicholas Brown Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres and professor of English, comparative literature, and German studies at Brown University, Providence, RI. He is the author of two books: Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in 19th-Century Literature and Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age. He is also cotranslator of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Amanda Minervini teaches Italian Studies at Brown University, Providence, RI.
"""Agamben's core argument is concise, although his discussion ranges far and wide over authors and disciplines, from a discussion of a work by the video artist Bill Viola to comments on an essay on the poetics of dance by Domenico da Piaccnza (mid-fifteenth century) and discussions of Aby Warburg and his seminal notion of Pathosformel; from discussions of a vast, 'bizarre' unpublished manuscript by an otherwise unknown Chicago recluse, via comments on Walter Benjamin (of whom Agamben is an important interpreter) and his notion of dialectic at a standstill, to discussions of Theodore Adorno, Giovanni Boccaccio (who says: 'It is quite true that they [nymphs] are all female, but they don't piss'), Giordano Bruno and more. Agamben's scope will make your head spin.""-- ""Classical Journal"""