By Giorgio Agamben
Il fuoco e il racconto, Rome: Nottetempo, 2014.
trans.
the hearth and the story, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa, Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2017, ARG. (English)
Read or Download The Fire and the Tale PDF
Similar literary theory books
Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force
Language is our key to imagining the area, others, and ourselves. but occasionally our methods of speaking dehumanize others and trivialize human event. In struggle folks are imagined as enemies to be killed. The language of race objectifies these it touches, and propaganda disables democracy. ads reduces us to shoppers, and clichés wreck the lifetime of the mind's eye.
The American Thriller: Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s (Crime Files)
What's the American mystery? Has it built through the years? What was once it like some time past? it is a ebook approximately thrillers and getting to know what American thrillers have been like in a selected period—the Seventies. reading '70s texts approximately crime, police, detectives, corruption, paranoia and revenge, the yank mystery goals to open the talk on style in mild of viewers thought, literary historical past, and where of renowned fiction in the intervening time of its creation.
The publication deals readings of discourses approximately meals in quite a lot of sources, from canonical Victorian novels via authors equivalent to Dickens, Gaskell, and Hardy to parliamentary speeches, royal proclamations, and modification Acts. It considers the cultural politics and poetics of meals in terms of problems with race, type, gender, regionalism, urbanization, colonialism, and imperialism so that it will notice how nationwide identification and Otherness are developed and internalized.
Choice of Stephen Greenblatt's paintings
- Deconstruction and Criticism
- Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History
- Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings
- The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism
- Grammars of Creation
Additional resources for The Fire and the Tale
Sample text
In an important book, Simondon wrote that man is, as it were, a two-phase being, which results from the dialectic between a non-individuated part and an individual and personal part. The pre-individual is not a chronological past that, at a certain point, is realized and resolved in the individual: it coexists with it and remains irreducible to it. In this perspective, it is possible to think the act of creation as a complicated dialectic between an impersonal element that precedes and overcomes the individual subject and a personal element that obstinately resists it.
The potentiality-not-to is not another potentiality juxtaposed to the potentiality-to-: it is its inoperativity, what results from the deactivation of the schema potentiality/actuality. In other words, there is an essential link between the potentiality-not-to and inoperativity. Like Josephine, who, thanks to her inability to sing, exposes the whistle all mice are able to emit, which is, in this way, “set free from the fetters of daily life” and shown in its “true essence,” the potentiality-not-to, suspending the passage to the act, renders potentiality inoperative and exposes it as such.
Or [shall we say that] the carpenter and the tanner have a function and activity, and man [as such] has none? Is he born without a work [argos, “inoperative”]? In this context, ergon does not simply mean “work,” but rather defines the energeia, the activity or being- in-act specific to man. In the same sense, Plato already wondered about what the ergon, the specific activity, was—for instance, that of the horse. The question about the work or absence of work of man has therefore a decisive strategic value, since what depends on it is not only the possibility of assigning a specific nature or essence to man, but also, from Aristotle’s stance, that of defining his happiness and hence his politics.
