Form and Event: Principles for an Interpretation of the Greek World (Commonalities) - Softcover

Diano, Carlo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823287920 ISBN 13: 9780823287925

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2020

Synopsis

Carlo Diano’s Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy. Already available in Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek, it appears here in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction by Jacques Lezra that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy.

Form and Event reads the two classical categories of its title phenomenologically across Aristotle, the Stoics, and especially Homer. By aligning Achilles with form and Odysseus with event, Diano links event to embodied and situated subjective experience that simultaneously finds its expression in a form that objectifies that experience. Form and event do not exist other than as abstractions for Diano but they do come together in an intermingling that Diano refers to as the “eventic form.” On Diano’s reading, eventic forms interweave subjectively situated and embodied experiences, observable in all domains of human and nonhuman life.

A stunning interpretation of Greek antiquity that continues to resonate since its publication in 1952, Form and Event anticipates the work of such French and Italian post-war thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben.

About this title

About the Authors

Carlo Diano (1902– 1974) was one of the most important Hellenists and philologists of the twentieth century. In addition to his numerous translations, he is also the author of Linee per una fenomenologia dell’arte.

Timothy C. Campbell is professor of Italian at Cornell University. In addition to his translations of Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy and Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, he is most recently the author of The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life (2017) from Fordham University Press.

Lia Turtas recently received her PhD in Romance studies at Cornell University. Her current research centers on reading the figure of automatism across key moments of Italian cinema by drawing upon posthumanism, film theory, and Italian thought.

Jacques Lezra is Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent publications are República salvaje (2019), On the Nature of Marx’s Things (2018), Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought (2017), and Contra todos los fueros de la muerte
(2016).

From the Back Cover

“In this brilliant, brief book, written ten years before Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and thirty years before Badiou’s Being and the Event, Carlo Diano develops a theory of the event that constitutes one of the decisive moments in twentieth-century European philosophy.”―Giorgio Agamben

Carlo Diano’s Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy. Already available in Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek, it appears here in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction by Jacques Lezra that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy.

Form and Event reads the two classical categories of its title phenomenologically across Aristotle, the Stoics, and especially Homer. By aligning Achilles with form and Odysseus with event, Diano links event to embodied and situated subjective experience that simultaneously finds its expression in a form that objectifies that experience. Form and event do not exist other than as abstractions for Diano but they do come together in an intermingling that Diano refers to as the “eventic form.” On Diano’s reading, eventic forms interweave subjectively situated and embodied experiences, observable in all domains of human and nonhuman life.

A stunning interpretation of Greek antiquity that continues to resonate since its publication in 1952, Form and Event anticipates the work of such French and Italian post-war thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben.

Carlo Diano (1902-1974) was Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Padua.

Timothy C. Campbell is Professor of Italian at Cornell University.

Lia Turtas is a PhD Candidate in Romance Studies at Cornell University.

Jacques Lezra is Chair of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0823287920
• ISBN 13: 9780823287925
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144