The Signature of All Things is Giorgio Agamben’s sustained reflection on method. To reflect on method implies for Agamben an archeological vigilance: a persistent form of thinking whose path is to expose, examine, and elaborate that which remains obscure, unthematized, even unsaid, in an author’s thought. To be archeologically vigilant, then, is to return to, even invent, a method attuned to a “world supported by a thick plot of resemblances and sympathies, analogies and correspondences.” The range of authors and of topics Agamben collects in this slim but dense volume exemplifies this search to create a science of signatures that exceeds either a semiology or hermeneutics vainly attempting to determine the pure and unmarked signs that signify univocally, neutrally, and eternally.

Three conceptual figures organize this treatise and the advent of Agamben’s own new method: the paradigm, the signature, and archeology. Each chapter is devoted to an investigation of one of these concepts whose genealogy Agamben carefully constructs transhistorically and from an interdisciplinary perspective. And at each moment of the text, Agamben pays tribute to Michel Foucault whose methods he rethinks and effectively uses to reformulate the logic of the concepts he isolates. The Signature of All Things reveals once again, how and why, Agamben is one of the most innovative thinkers writing today.

吉奥乔·阿甘本博士(1942- )是欧洲研究生院（EGS）巴鲁赫·德·斯宾诺莎教授，意大利维罗拉大学美学教授，并于巴黎国际哲学学院教授哲学。在攻读博士后阶段，阿甘本参与了弗莱堡由马丁·海德格尔主持的研讨会，并主持了瓦尔特·本雅明意大利译本的翻译工作。阿甘本独特的对文学理论，欧陆哲学，政治思想，宗教研究以及文学和艺术的融会贯通，使他成为我们时代最具挑战性的思想家之一。他也是巴黎一些大学的客座教授，同时于美国数所大学，如UC伯克利，洛杉矶，埃尔文，圣克鲁斯和西北大学等学校任教。