Profanaciones

What is genius? How does the mechanism of parody work? What place does the act of profanation hold today, in a society we believe to be entirely stripped of ritual? These are some of the questions Agamben addresses in the ten short prose pieces that make up this book—a showcase, in its most refined form, of the intellectual energy and stylistic clarity that have made him the most important, widely read, and respected philosopher in contemporary Europe. In a genre that blends the high metaphysical tradition with subtle literary analysis and the acuity of the finest modern essayists—particularly Walter Benjamin, whose complete works in Italian Agamben edited and whose legacy he primarily carries forward—*Profanations* astonishes with the lucidity and depth it manages to unfold within such brief texts. Cinema, desire, the relationship between magic and happiness, and Foucault’s approach to the famous "death of the author" theory are among the many subjects explored in this undoubtedly indispensable book by one of the most brilliant contemporary thinkers. Agamben stands out simultaneously as the last representative of a formidable erudition—capable of bringing the Aristotelian tradition into dialogue with a rare medieval French poem of an eschatological nature and highly obscene language—and as an attentive interpreter of contemporary phenomena, ranging from Kafka’s novels to the shifting conventions of pornographic cinema. "Profanations" is a display of an intellect operating at an unsurpassed level of intensity.