Desnudez

As he did in Profanations, Agamben here gathers, in a series of short essays, some of the central themes of his thought: from the festival, seen in an unexpected relation to contemporary bulimia, to nudity, which harbors hidden theological implications; from the problem of the glorious body of the blessed, who have stomachs and sexual organs and yet neither eat nor make love, to that of the new figure of impersonal identity that biometric devices are imposing on humanity. The vanishing point toward which all these themes converge is inactivity, understood not as leisure or inertia but as the paradigm of human action and of a new politics. This same idle action defines the no-man's-land in which a writing moves that has burned its identity cards and that is, at once, thought and literature, digression and philological entry, treatise on metaphysics and article of manners.