L'avventura

by Giorgio Agamben

本书是著名哲学家吉奥乔·阿甘本一部精彩的生命哲思著作，在其中，古典学、诗学和哲学的变奏被他巧妙地织为一体。本书共分五章：魔神（Demone）、奇遇（Aventure）、爱欲（Eros）、事件（Evento）、希望（Elpis）。阿甘本从古典诗文和现代哲学中采撷材料，条分缕析地揭示了五者之间的关系。尤为精彩的是，阿甘本将其还原为代蒙（魔神）、堤喀（时运之神）、厄洛斯（爱神）、阿南刻（定数之神）、厄尔庇斯（希望之神）这五位神灵，并对它们进行了生命哲学意义上的知识考古分析。而这一研究，生动又深切地观照了生命的运动形态，特别是爱的历险。本书以阿甘本擅长的散文短章写就，兼具学术性和可读性。

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Italian Literature, 21st Century

77 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2018

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

[Guilherme Smee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eu tinha encomendado este livro na Amazon, mas a demora em entregar e a falta de uma previsão de chegada me fez cancelar a compra e buscar um PDF na Internet. Encontrei este, em espanhol. Trata-se de um livro curto e rápido de ler, por volta de cem páginas. Nele Giorgio Agamben discorre sobre o significado da aventura. Primeiro ele começa traçando uma etimologia da palavra e demonstra, talvez sem querer, o quanto ela se relaciona com o monomito de Campbell, já que a palavra remonta a advento, que é achegada de um herói ou de um messias. Agambem traz quatro acepções da aventura através de quatro divindades emprestadas de um poema de Macróbio. Nessa toada, ele define que a aventura é um evento extraordinário, fora da normalidade da vida humana e que, na maioria das vezes, é algo fechado em si mesmo. Como na grande maioria de seus livros, Agamben desfila a sua erudição, que nem sempre faz sentido para todos os leitores, mas sempre há algo ali que se relaciona com parte da nossa aventura existencial.

[V. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book purports to be about the development of the idea of "adventure" in Western culture since medieval times. A potentially fascinating subject, but not one that it actually addresses. Instead, this book is about the (entirely unremarkable) ETYMOLOGY of the WORD "adventure". The closest it comes to a thesis is the facile observation that the word "adventure" can refer both to an event and to a verbal recounting of that event, a fact which Agamben imbues with overblown significance, bringing out reams of gobbledygook from Heidegger, Deleuze and others to hammer home its supposed metaphysical import. How that meaningless bit of linguistic trivia could possibly tell us anything about Being or Will or the Soul is beyond me, as is the connection (if any) between these word games and any concrete properties of actual adventures.

Some of the literary anecdotes sprinkled in here were interesting, but not worth the (low) price of admission (the book is extremely short - it fits in your pocket, and runs to less than 100 pages, with large print and wide margins. Really more of an essay).

It probably isn't a fair taste of Agamben, but color me unimpressed. I just can't make heads or tails of this kind of "philosophy".

[Cichli · Rating 4 out of 5]

First book I've read by Agamben and wooooowww, henny. It's dense but compact. Feels precise but also stimulating. I legitimately loved the glut of languages contained on seemingly every page, as well as Agamben's command of medieval and eclectic sources.

The cohesion between chapters isn't immediately clear but the velocity picks up, especially toward the end of the book. Thankfully, it's a quick read, so I expect to revisit it soon and often.

[Betina Barrios Ayala · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este ensayo es una de los textos más maravillosos que he leído.
Altamente recomendable para todos aquellos que persiguen la belleza, el amor, el viaje: la aventura.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

A comparatively breezy essay (not really a book) that, while interesting, doesn't really forward an original argument. Nothing close to Agamben's major works or even the slimmer, provocative ones like _The Open_. Enjoyed it nonetheless...

[Ben McFarland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was surprised by how cheap this book was, much cheaper than most philosophy hardbacks, so I actually ordered it rather than got it through the library like usual. Then I found out why it was so cheap: it's the size of a box of Pocky! I'm glad I do own it, because I started marking it up with my green pen instead of using my traditional Post-its for "stuff to remember." By the end of the book almost everything was green and I could write in marginalia like a medieval monk. I would eat this book (slowly) if I could.


The Adventure is not easy reading because Agamben's focus here is on medieval romantic literature (which I don't really know) and he connects it to writers like Heidegger and Goethe (whom I haven't really read), and then it's all translated from Italian so that there are some issues with specific words (I had to keep reminding myself that "demon" comes from "daemon" and is not necessarily a bad thing in classical lit!). Reading this book is like going on an adventure yourself. At first, you're bushwhacking through the trees and dodging wandering trolls, but then -- then you get to the mountains.


In the second half of the book, the questions are fascinating: Agamben asks why Dante never uses the term "adventure" in the Divine Comedy, and why in an early representation of the grail myth, the grail wasn't really important at all. That last point bowled me over because Agamben explained one of the central plot points of my favorite movie of all time (The Fisher King) in a way I had only grasped intuitively. That revelation was extremely meaningful to me.


Finally, at the top of the mountain is one of the Big Questions: What Does It Mean to Be Human? That's the exact question I'm asking right now and to find it at the end of this book was like opening a treasure chest (and, yes, finding it full).


This is one of the few books that I immediately flipped through and read my highlights again upon finishing, and that I have kept in my reading stack for reiteration and review. Word for word, it is one of the most efficiently mind-blowing books I've ever read.

[Chels Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

First off the table of contents is way off...

Besides that it is a very interesting book spanning great length in time and a wide range of concepts. It is however dense and the translation is less than clear, but it’s still an interesting read.

[AG]

Agamben is a master of the literature survey. He crafts a collage-artist’s philology which is not quite postmodern as it is “high modernist” under his pen (his opening here with an epigraph from Aby Warburg, famous catologuer of icons, attests to this). In this case, the survey takes the form of an etymo-geneology of the literary “adventure” — both a character, a theme and, in the interim in which these pass each other by, a signature — in the tradition of chivalric romance. Adventure is defined as the name of the “tychic” or “chancy” aspect of narrative voice, and the non-dialectical mediator of Ananke (Fate) and Eros (Love). On the other hand, it is the name for the already poetic — and non-apodictic — relation between word and world. But this might be simplifying things too much already. All of this should be understood in light of the Heideggerrian Event (or Ereignis). An ad-venture, most likely deriving from the Latin adventus (in which its messianic character is plain) or, less likely, eventus, is literally: a happening-towards. To put it very crudely, I understand Agamben as broadly attempting to feed the “adventure” into his broader project of relaying the ontological import of the grammatical “middle voice” which inhabits a gap between the classical active-passive or subject-object dyad.

I am beginning to see more and more in Agamben’s work what I identified in a previous review of Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure as a “stoic” approach to feminine jouissance. This seems especially true when in Agamben’s analysis of Georg Simmel’s essay of the same name as his own. In this essay, Simmel seems to argue for what seems like a sublimatory (in both the Freudian sense and not) concept of adventure. Simmel’s concept uses a double analogy which recalls Plato’s analogy of the divided line: if art stands in a relation to life as the paradoxical part which exemplifies the whole, we must conceive of the singular (or adventitious) life as the exemplary fragment of a “super-life”. Adventure would then be the overcoming of the seeming divide between art and life in the form of the ultimate romantic consummation.

But Agamben is not satisfied with this “overcoming” of the contradiction. His turn to the Stoic concept of lekton, the “incorporeal sayable”, speaks to an investment in idea of a “third thing” which comes before such dyads as being and thinking, or Ananke and Eros. I see this is a rejection of the small-c catholic ecumenism of Hegel (which you might catch a glimpse of in Simmel’s sociological neo-Kantianism). The commitment to a biopolitical model has Agamben place life before love, unbound bios before binding eros — “before” in the sense of a prior condition, or for Agamben, a potentiality. This is the masculine ecstasy of courtly love — which transmutes the “not-yet” into an “always-already” — which finds its alien partner in the feminine mysticism of St. Teresa.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

An accessible (for Agamben) and short essay on the changing understanding of adventure throughout literary history. Agamben mainly contrasts the medieval concept of adventure - derived from the poetic tradition of chivalric romance - to the modern conception of adventure, beginning with Luther and Hegel. Our world is dominated by the modern view, that adventure is something that takes us outside of the ordinary conditions of life. It is therefore eccentric, bizarre and beyond the norm. Even if it brings some greater meaning to life, adventure belongs outside of the life's ultimate purposes and actions. This befits the conditions of a capitalist society, in which "recreation", the moments in life where we are free to find joy, contentment and fulfillment, is something that occurs outside of our "work", which represents the ordinary and standard centre of our lives.

But in chivalric poetry, adventure is the very life which the knight seeks. The adventure becomes the knight's destiny, by seeking and achieving it, the knight discovers his own identity. (In many versions of the Holy Grail legend, Perceval does not know his own name until the end of the story). Adventure is the threshold by which the alive become the 'living'; through it, the knight encounters Being.

This further elucidates the importance of story and re-telling associated with adventure. For in adventure, the event and the subject to whom the event is occurring become one. Man fully embodies and manifests this experience of Being through language. Thus, for the medieval poet, the adventure is the narration itself; the object of the knight's desire is actually the very poem in which his adventure is being told. Agamben expands on these ideas with Heideggar's concept of the 'ereiginis' (meaning, in short, Being manifested).

Agamben seems to be calling us more towards this medieval understanding of adventure, that it is where we too will find our identity and being. And since we are all in the adventure, we must toy with the four gods of ancient Egyptian legend that rule over man's life on this earth - demon (better translated in this context as the more neutral 'deity'), chance, love and necessity. Agamben invokes these four gods throughout the essay. There are many other interesting ideas this book plays with, and sometimes it is difficult to trace a central thesis as the author jumps from topic to topic, but it is well worth the short-read for those interested.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A rather short yet acutely insightful book, "The Adventure" by esteemed Italian thinker Giogio Agamben begins with a citation from Macrobius's "Saturnalia," where one of the characters in that book states that four dieties preside over the birth of every human being: Daimon (demon), Tyche (chance), Eros (love), and Ananke (necessity). Agamben then proceeds to explore, in his inimitable manner, the role the demon played in Goethe's poetry; the role "adventure" plays in Chretien de Troyes's "Yvain," in both the telling of the tale and the story itself; how Troyes's contemporary, Marie de France, utilized the selfsame figure of adventure in her many "lais"; and finally, how modern thinkers such as Hegel and Oskary Becker (a student of Heidegger's) both down play the uncertain yet holistic concept of adventure and alter it in line of contemporary needs and ideas. (Becker's transformation of the chivalric Knight of medieval times into the "lightly-burdened," being centered artist of the twentieth century is particularly revealing/insightful.) Also, reflecting Agamben's previous geneological work on the oath ("The Sacrament of Language"), the book also reveals and explores how the utterances of the telling of the tale are an essential element of the adventure itself. This profound insight, common to literary critics past tieing of form with content, is completed in a particulary strong and resonant manner, adding to the power of the thought found in this wonderful tome. More approachable than most of his other work, "The Adventure" is like a brief dip into a cool spring: invigorating, beneficient, and life-giving. For, like the adventure it outlines, the book "The Adventure" leads to embracing of life in the "whole," making one more enriched for having participated.

[Michael Greer · Rating 5 out of 5]

If we glance at the table of contents we are surprised to see the following topics: demon/aventure/eros/event/elpis. At first, such a presentation is likely to be confusing. What's going on here under the title "The Adventure"? What adventure?

Oh, I see, we're returning to the ancient Egyptians for some insight into the what it means to be born a human being. We will come away understanding what ancient Egyptians thought of that great mystery, the mystery that so often preoccupies the high school student, "Why was I born?" The ancient Egyptians read the presence of the sun and moon in our lives as two reigning deities: Warm or spirit and light as well as the chance encounters which our bodies must endure to its peril. So both statements can be true: What a wonderful thing you, here, having been born under the sun and what a tragic predicament you are in, you born under the moon.

Kissing was practiced by the ancient Egyptians. Kissing was the expression of love, love in the sense of an attachment to others, while the knot, those knots we might have learned in scouting, was the signifier of necessity, that we are all in a bind, so to speak. How am I to find food, shelter and clothing. Well, it's a bind.

Finally, there is Hope. No one lives without hope that tomorrow will be as good as today. Or better. "Elpis." Hope. I had no idea that Goethe was a superstitious man, but then we Americans can't find out a lot about Germany given the persistent cultural barrier: German authors are rarely read here. Yet Goethe was a superstitious man. He belonged to the 'cult of the demon,' not the demon in the Exorcist, but the demon that guides us through the adventure.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the abstract: a quite brief but intensely stirring text by the author of Homo Sacer (which, as an aside, should be read by all living humans).

But roughly, in the concrete: a philological study of the word adventure from the middle ages to the modern. As a place where the events of a story and its telling converge, an adventure can ultimately be considered something like a metaphor for becoming human:

"Not only are the event and speech given together in the adventure -- but -- as we saw -- the latter always demands a subject to whom it happens (avviene) and by whom it must be told. Furthermore, the subject does not really preexist the adventure -- as if putting it into being depended on him. He instead derives from it. almost as if it were the adventure that subjectivized itself, since happening (avvenire) to somebody in a given place is a constitutive part of it."

. . . and. . .

"[T]he moment when -- thanks to a transformation whose modalities we cannot know -- the living being separates his life from his language only to rearticulate them, this mean that, by becoming human, he has devoted himself to an adventure that is still in progress and whose outcome is difficult to predict."

A great little book (tiny, not even twice the size of a cell phone), which reading is an adventure itself.

[Jaco Barnard-Naudé · Rating 4 out of 5]

Agamben’s most poetic little treatise on the adventure. A philology that takes us through the most significant moments in the history of the concept, all of it written in Agamben’s characteristically lucid style. I’m not convinced about the ending which involves Agamben’s reading of the Pandora myth, but is still the starting point of a much broader conversation to be had about the value of hope in our hopeless age.

[Keeley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will need to read this and see if I can appreciate it better at another time. On my first reading, I was just too irritated by the translation of Greek "daimon," personal spirit, as "demon" (all sorts of bad connotations). This appears to be the case in the Italian ("demone"), but I don't have a full picture of the connotations of the word in Italian. I'll have to spend some time with lexica or see if I can read past that issue.

[Symon Vegro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, that didn’t take long (as the actress said to the bishop). I don’t think I’m clever enough, or versed enough in the ancient texts, to understand and appreciate this fully.

The ‘Event’ chapter was my favourite. The quote from Marcus Aurelius, and the story of Bisclavret, and the important reminder that “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content”.

[Júlia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mais um caso de "li pra entender o que o professor falou mas não lembrava mais do que ele tinha falado mas gostei mesmo assim". Foi mais sobre aventura do que ninfas foi sobre ninfas. Gosto mais de quando ele fala sobre romances de cavalaria do que sobre filosofia alemã (apesar de que foi mais fácil ler sobre Heidegger do que Benjamin - estou andando muito com filósofos and it shows).

[Attasit Sittidumrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

ดีมาก ชอบมาก เล่มเล็กๆแต่ thought provoking มากๆ มีการเล่นกับคำข้ามภาษาต่างๆ และชี้ให้เห็นความหมายบางอย่างผ่านบทกวีต่างๆที่เลือกใช้ เป็นงานเล่มเล็กๆของอกัมเบนที่คุ้มในการอ่านมาก ใครที่ชอบเรื่องคำศัพท์ กวีและปรัชญา ต้องอ่าน ของเขาดีจริงๆ

[Pimpo Gregor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some aspects are interesting but by far not his best work.

[Yvonne]

Nice Agamben. I'd like to read one like this every week!

[dv · Rating 2 out of 5]

Passeggiata filosofica nel concetto di avventura, dall'antichità a oggi. Denso e colto, abbastanza algido.

[Isabela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gostei do papel da narrativa, do “narrativar-se”, na aventura. Me perdi um pouco com tantas referências e com a leitura tão fragmentada, acho que deveria ter anotado algumas coisas ao longo do livro

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sloterdijk contemporary rambles about similar German Lit topics. *chef’s kiss*