The Language That Remains

Omtale

Time, language, and history: in this book Giorgio Agamben examines how, in Western culture, these three fundamental concepts have become tangled up in a knot that we can no longer unravel.From this perspective, the book considers the critical importance of chronology, which is not a neutral convention but the breach through which theology penetrates into history; the nexus between history and eschatology in the doctrine of the Antichrist and the dizzying recapitulation of the dying as they see their entire lives parade before their eyes; the mundus, which in Roman cities was the name of the threshold that connected the past and the present, the world of the living and the one of the dead; and the difference between Chronos, time that devours its children, and kairos, the moment when an opportunity is seized. And, in Hannah Arendt s words, when everything seems to have lost its meaning, if what remains and what we bring with us is language, what is the language that remains?