GIORGIO AGAMBEN

This work considers the status of art in the modern era. It takes seriously Hegel's claim that art has exhausted its spiritual vocation, that it is no longer through art that Spirit principally comes to knowledge of itself.

In "The Open," contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben examines the ways in which, throughout the history of Western culture, man has been distinguished from animal, and in his inquiry discovers that the human arises not from the "conjunction" of a natural, living body and a divine or rational element, but rather through the workings of...