The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore

by Giorgio Agamben, Monica Ferrando, Leland de la Durantaye (Translator)

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well. Agamben’s intuition and meditation are fascinating, and not least when he turns his critical eye to the mysteries and contradictions of early religion.


The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore is a book of three richly detailed treatments of the myth of Kore. Kore, also called Persephone, and referred to poetically by the Greeks as “the unspeakable girl,” was the daughter of Demeter and Zeus who was abducted by Hades and made queen of the netherworld. Kore and her story gave rise to a mysterious cult at Eleusis, the site of the well where Demeter mourned her lost daughter. This book opens with an innovative and insightful essay that focuses on the mysterious indeterminacy of the figure of Kore/Persephone—at once a woman and a girl, a virgin and a mother—as well as the attendant divisions of speech and silence, the sacred and the profane, the animal and the human, and the mortal and the divine. Here, tracing these dichotomies, Agamben is in top form, able to articulate paradoxes that in another writer’s hands might be ineffable. In the second and third parts of the book the reader is treated to a series of beautiful paintings by acclaimed artist Monica Ferrando, as well as her translation of crucial Greek and Latin source materials. As a whole, The Unspeakable Girl will not only be welcomed by Agamben’s many readers across the disciplines, but also by enthusiasts of classical mythology in general.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Art, Italian Literature

104 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.

In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar.

He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.

Reviews

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kore, la muchacha indecible, está en el centro de los misterios de Eleusis, una especie de liturgia pagana de la Grecia Antigua. Este libro trata sobre Kore, su significado en el cruce de lo mitológico, lo filosófico, lo estético. Según Agamben y Ferrando se trata de una experiencia transformadora, la iniciación a una nueva vida. Lo más curioso es que tal experiencia excede el lenguaje. Es el ámbito de la mística. De ahí que Kore sea indecible, no narrable. Es a la vez un compendio semántico. Kore es madre, es hija, es inocente, es infernal, es raptada, es libre, junta flores y reparte fuego. Es desborde y vacío. La primera parte del libro es ensayística. La segunda es una selección de fragmentos de clásicos en los que se menciona a Kore. Se intercalan pinturas maravillosas de Ferrando, poderosas, sobre todo infernales. Opino que este libro se mueve dentro de ese sector del arte contra el que argumenta Douglas Hofstadter en su libro Gödel, Escher, Bach, un grácil y eterno bucle. Opino con Hofstadter que el deslizamiento hacia la magia es eficiente en Agamben, pero filosóficamente difícil de aceptar. No está mal que el punto de partida coincida con el de llegada. Eso pasa en todo buen libro de estética, es el método de la filosofía. Tampoco es negativo que esté tan bien escrito. La prosa de Agamben es extraordinaria. Levita. Tiene erudición y una sobria elegancia. El problema está en que incurre en histrionismos vulgares, como si fueran una provocación calculada o quizás compulsiva. La intensidad estética sube en cada página, pero se cae justo en el momento cumbre. Por ejemplo, después de decir que Kore es no narrable dice que la novela es la forma literaria que más se le aproxima. ¿Y la poesía, la música, la pintura? Tampoco refiere nada sobre los hongos alucinógenos que formaban parte del rito iniciático. Hoy sabemos que su efecto es similar al del ácido lisérgico que describe Aldous Huxley en su libro Las puertas de la percepción. Creo que no alcanza con indagar sobre Deméter y Perséfone para lograr una visión profunda de la experiencia Kore. Le falta ciencia a este libro. La erudición humanística y el recurso histriónico lo vuelven miope. En cualquier caso, es una lectura de pura fruición. En este libro hay que apagar el juicio crítico y leer, flotar junto con las palabras y perderse en las imágenes.

[Jenny Webb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoy Agamben; I found this particular book incredibly useful for thinking through the relationship between secrecy and life via the language of mystery. It's really a lovely little volume, and the richness added by the full-color reproductions of Monica Ferrando's works really enhanced and added to the text in my opinion. Reading Agamben's essay interspersed with Kore's body was very much the experience of listening to a conversation rather than simply illustration.

[Amari · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a particularly readable book. Agamben is very difficult, of course, but in reading him before I've been able to find a thread of meaning, even if what I end up doing is something slightly different from reading... The trouble with this small tome is that two-thirds of it are translated fragments without commentary from numerous writers. Maybe this is of academic interest to those with a deep connection to the Kore myth, but it doesn't quite hang together in my opinion. I did find Ferrante's short poetic essay on the last two pages inspiring.

Some of the artwork (also Ferrante's) is quite wonderful, though not all of it appeals to me (which is neither here nor there, of course).

In short, this is a book that one might look at/look over while ruminating in the train, but it's not something that I could sit down and read from cover to cover. I also was unprepared for the focus on rape, so I did skim and skip through certain sections as this subject was too unpleasant for me.

[Laroy Viviane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce petit livre particulièrement bien illustré a un charme fou. D'un côté, il se veut philosophique, poétique, esthétique et pourquoi pas, ésotérique. Les textes principaux sont courts et en fin de livre, vous trouverez les "sources anciennes". De quoi passer des heures, des jours, des mois à voguer.

[Jacob MacDonald · Rating 3 out of 5]

The inclusion of source material as a second half, as always, gives the single volume recursive-reading power, and the breaking-up by images is rather nice. To the uninformed (me), the argument, while persuasive, is not particularly backed up by the sources.

[Alysha · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't understand what I just read, but it had some nice pictures.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, poetic.