The Language That Remains

Time, language, and history: in this book Giorgio Agamben examines how, in Western culture, these three fundamental concepts have become tangled up in a knot that we can no longer unravel. From this perspective, the book considers the critical importance of chronology, which is not a neutral convention but the breach through which theology penetrates into history; the nexus between history and eschatology in the doctrine of the Antichrist and the dizzying recapitulation of the dying as they see their entire lives parade before their eyes; the mundus, which in Roman cities was the name of the threshold that connected the past and the present, the world of the living and the one of the dead; and the difference between Chronos, time that devours its children, and kairos, the moment when an opportunity is seized. And, in Hannah Arendt’s words, when everything seems to have lost its meaning, if what remains and what we bring with us is language, what is the language that remains?