Paul Colilli

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.

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.