Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Theory and History of Literature) [Hardcover]

Giorgio Agamben (Author), Karen E. Pinkus (Translator), Michael Hardt (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1991 | ISBN-10: 0816619360 | ISBN-13: 978-0816619368

A formidable and influential work, Language and Death sheds a highly original light on issues central to Continental philosophy, literary theory, deconstruction, hermeneutics, and speech-act theory. Focusing especially on the incompatible philosophical systems of Hegel and Heidegger within the space of negativity, Giorgio Agamben offers a rigorous reading of numerous philosophical and poetic works to examine how these issues have been traditionally explored. Agamben argues that the human being is not just “speaking” and “mortal” but irreducibly “social” and “ethical.” Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Means without End (2000), Stanzas (1993), and The Coming Community (1993), all published by the University of Minnesota Press. Karen E. Pinkus is professor of French and Italian at the University of Southern California. Michael Hardt is professor of literature and romance studies at Duke University.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press (August 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816619360
• ISBN-13: 978-0816619368
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,198,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Giorgio Agamben is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Venice. He is the author of Profanations (2007), Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002), both published by Zone Books, and other books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Voice" - the instance of discourse, June 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Theory and History of Literature) (Hardcover)

Agamben analyses the space of negativity in the thought of Hegel and Heidegger. Since Derrida,continential philosophies of language have critiqued traditional philosophy for privleging presence and treating signs as transparent conveyors of meaning. But Agamben, through exacting studies of Patristic and Medieval thought, demonstrates the tradition's awareness of the constitutive moment of absence in discourse. He contends that the deconstructionist critique of metaphysical thinking merely repeats an old problematic and fails to escape the difficulties it reveals. His corrective account of language and the place of negativity within it open a space for the human apart from reductive theories of the self as merely a social and linguistic construct.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Poverty of Speech, January 14, 2007

By 

Abyss (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Theory and History of Literature) (Paperback)

Giorgio Agamben's Language and Death goes beyond certain limits - in philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology - while concurrently speaking of the limit, that which is undefinable, lacking, absent. It is a significant work that questions not only self-presence, through discussions of the fractured 'Voice' of the human, but also, in leaving behind poststructuralism, draws out the possibility of a life that has, in some sense, 'abandoned' speech, and accepts something of a constitutive emptiness found in the awareness of death.
What Agamben proposes is thus a truly radical redefinition of the linguistic basis of the human, a linguistic basis, it must be added, which has explicitly political effects. Instead of enclosing humans ever more within the 'prison-house' of language, historically taking the form of the polis or political community, Agamben considers the importance of absence and lack in defining the proper dwelling place of the human. To live in poverty, without a proper home or 'mother tongue' is that which is most human. Emptiness must be taken as the starting-point of all definitions of the human.
The breadth of themes this book covers makes it an important work for any who seek to question the now hegemonic theories of language proffered by postmodernism, as well as those who seek to effect a radical opposition to those institutions and systems whose existence are premised on the fullness and consistency of their speech.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Negative grounding, November 20, 2007

By 

E. Blanes "law and politics student" (Puerto Rico) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Theory and History of Literature) (Paperback)

In this book, early, but not that much so, in Agamben's carreer and work, he explores what metaphysics has proposed as the grounds for being and language. As he notes through a close reading of Hegel's concept of the Absolute and Heiddeger's Ereignis, the place of the ground has been a negativity. It is this negativity what remains to be thought in western philosophy, and what relates language and death as ungrounded grounds of being. Divided in daily conferences, with intermitent excursus, a concise and very profound work on both metaphysics and continental philosophy of language. Recommended to anyone who is interested in such subjects.