Taste

Giorgio Agamben

Translated by Cooper Francis

 

5.5 x 7.75 inches, 96 pp. December 2017

ISBN : 9780857424365

Rs  499.00 (HB)
$20.00 (HB)
£14.99 (HB)

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It is commonplace to consider taste as the organ through which we know beauty and enjoy beautiful things. Looking beyond this peaceable façade, the newest translation of Italian philospher Giorgo Agamben's work lays bare the far-from-comforting character of a fault line that irremediably divides the human subject. At the crossroads of truth and beauty, cognition and pleasure, taste appears as a knowledge that is not known and a pleasure that is not enjoyed. From this new vantage point, aesthetics and economics, Homo aestheticus and Homo economicus reveal their secret and uncanny complicity. 

 

With Taste, Agamben takes a step into the history of philosophy, reaching to the very origins of aesthetics, to critically recover the roots of a cardinal concept for Western culture. Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and with Taste he turns his critical eye to the realm of Western art and aesthetics. Originally written in 1979, this essay illuminates a key category in his most recent writings, promising to engage not only the author's readers in philosophy, sociology and literary criticism but also his growing audience among art theorists and historians as well. 

Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and Nymphs will engage not only the author’s devoted fans in philosophy, legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism, but his growing audience among art theorists and historians as well.

 

Cooper Francis is a writer, translator, and software developer whose work focuses on the relation between the philosophy of history, technology, and art.

Literary Criticism