nudities

Can’t wait to read Agamben’s new book. This excerpt is taken from the translator’s own blog.

“The nudity of the human body is its image; that is, the trembling that makes this body knowable, though it remains, in itself, ungraspable. Hence the unique fascination that images exercise over the human mind. Precisely because the image is not the thing, but the thing’s knowability (its nudity), it neither expresses nor signifies the thing. Nevertheless, inasmuch as it is nothing other than the giving of the thing over to knowledge, nothing other than the stripping off of the clothes that cover it, nudity is not separate from the thing: it is the thing itself.”

[An excerpt from Giorgio Agamben’s Nudities, forthcoming in Stanford University Press.]