Book Review The Signature of All Things

Giorgio Agamben is one of the many ‘philosopher rock stars’of postmodern think-ing, mainly since his book Homo Sacer. One of the reasons for that is his interest in key questions of contemporary political philosophy, most notably the intercon-nections of identity politics, power and language. Sometimes presented as a coun-terpoint to other pomo favourites like Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin, Agamben has been working since the 1990s on the possibilities opened up by their thinking, sometimes correcting some of their assumptions, at other times continuing them. The Signature of All Things presents some afterthoughts about three methodological problems through which Agamben offers an engaging theoretical conversation mainly with the work of Foucault on the paradigm, the signature and the origin (from Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge). Trying to think in methodological terms about his own practice, Agamben develops these concepts in relationship with archaeological work. With a chapter dedicated to each of them, these reflections are not only useful for understanding the work of the Italian philosopher, but also in opening new epistemological and ontological problems about archaeological work and its relationship to the present. In 2008 he was interviewed on a French radio station where he declared, ‘I understand archaeology as the access road to the present, because precisely, present is what is difficult to attain ’ (Agamben, 2008b). In the way Agamben addresses the pre-sent in this book, it appears to be di⁄cult to attain because it’s always a question asked of the past. This book proposes ways in which one can ask this question, and in so doing follows many winding historical and philosophical paths ^ some-times too many of them ^ that give one a glimpse of what the present is comprised of and how it is so. In his seminal work on the community without identity, Agamben already started his reflections about the concept of the example. For him, the example is not something that is neither particular nor general: ‘it holds for all cases of the same type, and, at the same time, is included in these. It is one singularity among others, which, however, stands for each of them and serves for all