By Tess Lewis

In three books of oblique self-reflection Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben explores and exposes the artistic and intellectual thresholds that have been central to his life and to the life of his mind.

A negligible percentage of the books published in the United State each year are literary translations, and a vanishingly small percentage of these are reviewed in print or online. This neglect is unfortunate for a number of reasons, principally because translation remains our best antidote to cultural parochialism. It expands our worlds, giving us access not only to countries and eras we’re unable to visit, but also to the inner lives of their citizens, real and imagined. This bimonthly column will shine a spotlight on recently published translations of literary works that deserve more attention and readers.

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Giorgio Agamben

What I saw, heard, learned…  (2022 orig., 2023 tr. Alta Price, Seagull Books, $19)

Self-Portrait in the Studio (2017, 2024 tr. Kevin Attell, Seagull Books, $25)

Studiolo, (2019, 2022 tr. Alberto Toscano, Seagull Books, $21)

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has spent decades thinking about the relationship of the individual to power and the self to the sacred, all the while immersing himself in literature and the visual arts. Of the lessons drawn from what he has seen, heard and learned, two have captured his attention insistently over the past decade and serve as springboards for three recent books. These conclusions are that competing truths are not necessarily mutually exclusive or even in opposition and that the gaps and interstices in our thoughts, our perception, and our sense of self are thresholds that open onto mystery. Indeed, the idea of the threshold, as a site of passage, a portal to mystery, and one of the few numinous places that remain in our secular world, is paramount for Agamben. In three books of oblique self-reflection, he explores and exposes the artistic and intellectual thresholds that have been central to his life and to the life of his mind.

In the prose miniatures that make up What I saw, heard, learned…, translated by Alta Price into lithe and lucid English, Agamben pays homage to the writers, painters, art works, places, and elements of nature that have shaped his sense of self as much as his thinking. He is not content to learn for learning’s sake — for him thinking is not a disembodied activity. He applies what he has learned to his life and stress tests it against his own experience. Gazing on the Buddha’s face in the Ajanta caves, for example, he perceives “golden light emanating from the stone” and viscerally understands that contemplation does not just mean the stilling of the mind, “but, along with it, the body. During the instant of contemplation — an eternal instant — you can no longer distinguish between mind and body, and that’s what beatitude is.” Pierre Bonnard’s canvases brought him the realization that ecstasy is not merely emotion and intelligence is not bound to words and reason, in fact, intelligence includes and transcends them.

In Paris, in Bonnard’s canvases, I saw that colour—which is the form of ecstasy—is also intelligence and constructive reason: contrary to what people usually think, ‘line is sensation, colour is reasoning’. Intelligence is not solely a cognitive principle: it is, deep down, something that bestows blessings—or, to give it the same name Dante did, Beatrice—a Beatrix.

In Shakespeare’s Tempest, Agamben sees that just as Prospero must take leave of Ariel and his magic, the poet must leave behind his inspiration. When this happens, “the silent angel that takes Ariel’s place is called Justice.” And from this he concludes that “philosophy is a poet’s attempt at making inspiration coincide with justice—a task so arduous almost no one succeeds.”

Agamben is clear-eyed in his analyses of the trade-offs some of his contemporaries have made in their search for their place in the modern world. From Elsa Morante, a central figure in his intellectual and social life, he

also learned that innocence is possible solely as parody, and that this is also the only possible reparation for our wounded childhood. And that if you make fiction your sole reality, you will find certainty, but you lose all hope.

Despite the ruthless clarity with which he analyzes the spiritual anemia of our era, he has learned to live in a state of hopeful disillusion. He concludes this collection by celebrating the failure that is our fate “in every art and every study and above all in the chaste art of living well. And yet precisely that — if we manage to comprehend it — is the absolute best that we can do.”

What I saw… is a portrait in vignettes that are intimate yet oddly distanced. They reveal what has been important to Agamben as a person, but a sense of who he is remains elusive. In his feline Self-Portrait in the Studio he also portrays himself indirectly. This time through the vantage of the paintings, photographs, memorabilia, and books he has lived and worked among for his adult life. The voice in this book, rendered into English with nuance and energy by Kevin Attell, is warmer, more personal, and less cerebral than that of What I saw… Deflection seems to lower Agamben’s guard. His descriptions of the intellectual, aesthetic, and personal memorabilia that have accompanied him from one studio to another give rise to reminiscences of “decisive meetings” with teachers, colleagues, friends, and artists and writers both living and dead who have shaped his life. The impressive array includes Martin Heidegger, Elsa Morante, René Char, José Bergamín, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Pasquali, Avigdor Arikha, Isabel Quintanilla, and Francisco López, but also Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Robert Walser, among others.

In this book, Agamben admits to failure upfront. Any artist’s or writer’s studio is a space of incompletion and constant change, a reflection at once of what its occupant was, is, might have been, and might still be. How could one hope to capture all these dimensions in words?

In the mess of papers and books, open or piled upon one another, in the disordered scene of brushes and paints, canvases leaning against the wall, the studio preserves the rough drafts of creation; it records the traces of the arduous process leading from potentiality to act, from the hand that writes to the written page, from the palette to the painting. The studio is the image of potentiality—of the writer’s potentiality to write, of the painter’s or sculptor’s potentiality to paint or sculpt. Attempting to describe one’s own studio thus means attempting to describe the modes and forms of one’s own potentiality—a task that is, at least on first glance, impossible.

Impossible in a certain sense, yes, but in taking account of what has accompanied and nourished him throughout his life, Agamben portrays a mind always responsive and always at work. Agamben is generous in acknowledging his intellectual and aesthetic influences. To the philologist Giorgio Pasquali, for instance, he owes his understanding of the political nature of philology in so far as it teaches us that we receive our language and our culture through a historical tradition, “but this tradition has always already been knowingly or unknowingly altered and corrupted.”  And in this self-portrait, he also turns to his aesthetic touchstone, Bonnard, whose sketch for one of his bathtub nudes hangs on his studio wall.

If, according to the meaning of the Hebrew term, the ‘Nabi’ painters are prophets, then Bonnard’s prophecy has to do with colour…. Intelligence—the intellect of love—that turns itself into chromaticism, the ecstasy of intelligence in colour: This is Bonnard—supreme knowledge. My idea of happiness is entirely saturated with his light.

Where Self-Portrait in the Studio unquestionably does succeed is in giving the reader a sense of the atmosphere in Italian intellectual circles in the mid-twentieth century and of Agamben’s immense intellectual appetite. It is also an invitation to discover or rediscover these formative figures in the light of his appreciation.

Appreciation is the animating force of Studiolo, which Agamben has modeled on the small rooms in Renaissance palaces where princes could withdraw to think or read in the company of beloved paintings. “What,” he asks, “are the images that each of us would always wish to have by our side if not a kind of paradise?” For this paradisical personal studiolo, he has chosen twenty-one paintings, predominantly in the realist tradition, ranging from a Bronze Age Nuragic stone figurine, through a fresco in Pompeii, works by Van Eyck, Titian, Gauguin, and Twombly, to a 2019 painting by Monica Ferrando, all of which appear in sumptuous reproductions.

Agamben provides each work with a text, which he is careful to label as commentary rather than criticism or art history. This is a fair warning since his approach to these works is naturally guided by his aesthetic preference—the selection does not extend beyond the figurative or realist modes—and by a relatively narrow range of concerns. In his commentaries on these works, he is highly attuned to what is hidden in and behind the surface of the visible. He sees Chardin’s Dead Hare with Power Horn and Gamebag as “a sacred painting, a crucifixion—perhaps the most moving crucifixion in eighteenth-century French painting” despite or rather because of the absent cross.

Although Agamben expects more from art than he thinks it can deliver, he believes art can transcend its own limits by acknowledging them. In Isabel Quintanilla’s 1995 painting of her studio, The Night, the painter’s focus on the instruments and tools of her art rather than on the view through the darkened window, leads Agamben to conclude that “painting can represent—or better, present—reality only if it can become the painting of painting.” A third concern is the way a detail in a painting can be more revelatory than any traditional iconography. In Jan Van Eyck’s painting of Saint Barbara, for example, Agamben finds that the folds of her dress express the presence of God more directly than the religious symbolism of the palm or tower. “And God here is not just one and triune but … seized by and involved in the uncountable implication of the world, in the sweet folds of being, whose infinite unfolding it represents.”

Studiolo is, in a sense, a self-portrait at one more remove than through his studio. It is a self-portrait as imaginary museum, a collection of art works that have served the author as thresholds between the earthly and the divine and into a world in which art and reality are one. The prose in this book, while elegantly translated by Alberto Toscano, is denser, more abstract than in the other two and his sentences can take some effort to unpack.

The paintings he has chosen are beautiful and intriguing. Disappointingly, however, his commentaries tell the reader little that is new or unusual about the paintings themselves, and rather more about Agamben’s sensibility. He concludes Studiolo with Paul Gauguin’s Self Portrait (Near Golgotha), a painting with which he opens Self-Portrait in the Studio, and asks “[if] every self-portrait somehow harbours a testimony about oneself, what does this painting bear witness to? … The self-portrait shows a man who has lost all hope. What is left for a painter who hopes no more?”

His answer is suggestive, but unsatisfying in its capitulation to the inexpressible. “There remains that which cannot be said. There remains that face. There remains painting.”

Despite their elusiveness and occasional evasions, these three books form a three-way mirror reflecting a voracious mind at work and at play. They are also an invitation to create studiolos of our own, to ask ourselves what have we seen, heard, learned…

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Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Walter Benjamin, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Montaigne. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, she won the 2017 PEN Award for Translation. She is an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and co-curator of the Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s only German language literature festival. www.tesslewis.org