Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: The Figure of This World
- 1 The Question of Political Ontology
- 2 The Poetic Experience of the World
- 3 The Myth of the Earth
- 4 The Unbearable
- 5 The Creature before the Law
- 6 The Animal for which Animality is an Issue
- 7 Understanding the Happy
- 8 The Picture and its Captives
- 9 The Passing of the Figure of This World
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - The Poetic Experience of the World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: The Figure of This World
- 1 The Question of Political Ontology
- 2 The Poetic Experience of the World
- 3 The Myth of the Earth
- 4 The Unbearable
- 5 The Creature before the Law
- 6 The Animal for which Animality is an Issue
- 7 Understanding the Happy
- 8 The Picture and its Captives
- 9 The Passing of the Figure of This World
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
From this the poems springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
In the preface to Infancy and History, Agamben writes that the question ‘which defines the motivum’ of his thought – the single problem he has pursued in all his works, both written and unwritten – is the following: ‘[W]hat is the meaning of “there is language”; what is the meaning of “I speak”?’ While the philosophy of language is a significant sub-field in contemporary philosophy, Agamben's way of posing his question shows how far his concerns are from those of most professional philosophers, including not only analytic but also many ‘continental’ thinkers. His question is not about the nature of meaning, or problems of truth and reference; nor is it necessarily about hermeneutics, semiotics, différance or discourse ethics. It is about the fact that language exists: the fact that one speaks and writes at all. If this strikes as a strange point of departure for an entire philosophy, it is probably because it seems relatively unremarkable – after all, we presuppose it as soon as we say ‘philosophy of language’, as soon as we say we are interested in language as a philosophical problem (indeed, we presuppose it as soon as we say anything). Surely the truly interesting philosophical questions have to do with how language works, with how meaning and communication are possible.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Figure of This WorldAgamben and the Question of Political Ontology, pp. 33 - 57Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014