The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has always been an original reader of texts, understanding their many rich and multiple historical, aesthetic, and political meanings and effects. In Profanations, Agamben has assembled for the first time some of his most pivotal essays on photography, the novel, and film. A meditation on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains, Profanations proves yet again that Agamben is one of the most provocative writers of our time. In ten essays, Agamben ponders a series of literary and philosophical problems: the relation among genius, ego, and theories of subjectivity; the problem of messianic time as explicated in both images and lived experience; parody as a literary paradigm; and the potential of magic to provide an ethical canon. The range of topics and themes addressed here attest to the creativity of Agamben's singular mode of thought and his persistent concern with the act of witnessing, sometimes futile, sometimes earth-shattering: the talking cricket in Pinocchio; "helpers" in Kafka's novels; pictorial representations of the Last Judgment, of anonymous female faces, and of "Rosebud," the infamous object of obsession in Citizen Kane. "In Praise of Profanity," the central essay of this small but dense book, confronts the question of profanity as the crucial political task of the moment. An act of resistance to every form of separation, the concept of profanation reorients perceptions of how power, consumption, and use interweave to produce an urgent political modality and desire: to profane the unprofanable. Agamben not only provides a new and potent theoretical model but describes it with a writerly style that itself forges inescapable links among literature, politics, and philosophy.Giorgio Agamben is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Venice. His many publications include Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (Zone Books), The Coming Community, and State of Exception.

吉奧喬·阿甘本博士(1942- )是歐洲研究生院（EGS）巴魯赫·德·斯賓諾莎教授，意大利維羅拉大學美學教授，並於巴黎國際哲學學院教授哲學。在攻讀博士後階段，阿甘本參與瞭弗萊堡由馬丁·海德格爾主持的研討會，並主持瞭瓦爾特·本雅明意大利譯本的翻譯工作。阿甘本獨特的對文學理論，歐陸哲學，政治思想，宗教研究以及文學和藝術的融會貫通，使他成為我們時代最具挑戰性的思想傢之一。他也是巴黎一些大學的客座教授，同時於美國數所大學，如UC伯剋利，洛杉磯，埃爾文，聖剋魯斯和西北大學等學校任教。