欧宝娱乐

Similar to his Idea of Prose, Profanations is a series of short writings spanning Agamben's various literary and philosophical concerns. The main essay, "In Praise of Profanation," seems to function as a bridge of sorts between earlier and later components of A.'s Homo Sacer series (from 1995's volume I to 2007's The Kingdom and the Glory, vol. II:2).

The reflections on W. Benjamin's "Capitalism as Religion" are astute, although A. still seems to assume that Roman legal code in all its nuances is the secret cypher of reality, which is a dubious assumption, no matter how philologically correct the readings are (!). Some familiar themes (the significance of gesture, pornography, etc.) resurface; his ruminations on theological concepts make a certain literary sense within his framework, but one wonders how seriously he really takes his own formulations (especially in light of the sense of play advocated, and profaning as creating new uses). I found the most intriguing and developed sections to be the "Parody" chapter and the conclusion of "Special Being," which elegantly redefines Debord's sense of "spectacle" in relation to medieval debates on the metaphysical status of images (! -- in that regard, complements his "Shekinah" chapter in The Coming Community, which reformulated Debord via a Rabbinic allegory; that short chapter is still probably the best and most succinct secondary writing on The Society of the Spectacle around, forgiving the book all its defects while restating its main impetus more elegantly than Debord himself probably ever could have).

So, it's in these shorter, more casual writings (as in Idea of Prose, Means Without End) where Agamben reveals some of the assumptions that often go unstated or passed over in his longer or more formally restricted books. A. states in "Judgment Day": "I know with absolute certainty that she ['a photograph -- a rather well-known one, in fact -- that shows the face of a young Brazilian girl, who seems to stare harshly at me'] is and will be my judge, today as on the final judgment day" (p. 26). One just wonders if he's as absolutely certain about all his playful/profaned claims about angels, demons, and the messiah (!).

It's strange to think that so much learning and erudition, which A. clearly possesses in abundance, in the end is willingly resigned to just play (rather than to knowledge, or to experience...) -- but what to A. is just playing around still results in an interesting book (& beautifully designed by the Zone Books crew).