Paul Colilli

For Poliziano philology opens man to the experience of the uncanniness of tropes. In the Lamia he proposes a rethinking of philology's ontological status: philology as a science and encyclopedia of tropes. Such a critical frame-of-mind informs the major poetic writings. In the Stanze, Poliziano employs the trope of metalepsis as a means of both grounding a dialectic with the past, and reinventing a literary language. The Favola di Orfeo, whose aesthetic hub is nourished by the cognitive capacity of poetic utterance, is an allegory of metaphor's ability to lead to the disclosure of the originary locus.

This book opens a new chapter in Agamben studies by providing a critical account of how the ancient science of astrology emerges in contemporary thought through the work of Giorgio Agamben. Astrology becomes a means to visualize the significance of the central elements in Agamben’s thinking on issues such as potentiality, biopolitics, bare life and the signature. In the end, the astrological signature becomes an alternative mode to theology, politics and philosophy as a way of understanding history.

With the great merit of Aristotle's Poetics, poetic logic became a theoretical activity endowed with a philosophical nature allowing it to be more philosophical than the pure representation of existence. Today, however, the theoretical status of poetic logic has been greatly demoted. The Angel's Corpse restores to poetic logic (or lyric philosophy) the cognitive and epistemological significance attributed to it by Aristotle. The Angel's corpse (the central metaphor in this restoration) is a sign post beyond which there exists an uncharted terrain of human signification. This terrain is expressed in terms of lyric philosophy, and its universal trait is a shocking into reawakening, which is linked to the dissolution of the repetitive logic of history. With this book, Colilli aims to bring to life the traits that are close to the Angel and which amount to a new philosophy of culture and interpretation.

The emergence and cultivation of a programmatic research interest in what has been traditionally marginalized in Western intellectual practices (a marginalization based on race, gender, religion, class and socio-economic standing and so on) finds a textual correlative in paratextual theory. Simply put, paratextual investigation is concerned with the multitude of elements that surround the purportedly ontologically superior ‘main text.’ To be sure, one could draw an analogy between the notion of the ‘human’ placed at the center of the universe, as Pico della Mirandola tells us in the Oration on the Dignity of Man, and the traditional import given to the main text from which the pertinent signifying matters are to emerge. Paratextual research, as Gerard Genette conceives of it in works such as Palimpsests and Paratexts, contributes to the deconstruction of the hierarchy that privileges the body of the text over its prosthetic components. In essence, paratextual research deals with the pragmatics of transmission, in that in the category of the paratext we find elements such as the title, the subtitle, the preface, the book cover, the dedication, the table of contents, reproduced figures, images, engravings, along with foot- and endnotes, indices, and so on.