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This thesis develops an account of Agamben’s philosophical archaeology through an analysis of the notions of signatures, paradigms and the archē, and through an examination of Agamben’s critique of both Western metaphysics and deconstruction. It claims that Agamben’s philosophical archaeology and his analysis of the differentiating logic of Western metaphysics constitute the necessary framework from which the Homo Sacer project should be examined. In this sense this project rearticulates Agamben’s works on signification, language and ontology with his archaeology of power. Indeed, my thesis reconstructs Agamben’s critique of metaphysis in order to bring together the two parts of the Homo Sacer project through an analysis of the production of bare life: the archaeology of the signature of Sovereignty and the archaeology of governmentality. It argues that throughout the work of Agamben there is no rupture in terms of his treatment of power but rather that there are different emphases that are combined in his analysis of the governmental machine. Finally, this thesis uses the theoretical and methodological frameworks that it develops to address the relation between biopolitics, the governmental machine, Agamben’s account of ontology, and bare life. To conclude, this thesis offers an examination of Agamben’s notion of resistance, that is, the politics of inoperativity through an analysis of the central categories that constitute his attempt at rendering inoperative the signatures of Life and Power: Destituent Power, form-­‐of-­‐life, and Use.

Principally this thesis will deal with defining, accounting for, and examining, the relationship between the theological and the political in Dante's use of prophecy. It will be demonstrated that it is an over-riding feature of Dante’s thought in both the Monarchia and the Commedia that the only remedy against cupidity, and the damage it does to the world, is ecclesiastical poverty combined with imperial power. This thesis will show that much of the urgency and passion with which Dante communicates his political and social message in the Commedia, which seems to advocate both ecclesiastical poverty and imperial power as prerequisites for the ideal human society, is through his use of prophecy and of prophetic language. I demonstrate the way in which contemporary responses to the Old Testament prophets and the book of Revelation seem to have influenced Dante’s prophetic manner, but also seeks to highlight the unique nature of Dante’s response to the currents of thought he encountered, in particular the adoption of religious prophecy as the means by which some of the most innovative aspects of his political thought are articulated.

After centuries when those who were engaged with the preservation and the transmission of knowledge were only partially devoted to intellectual activities, fifteenth-century Italy saw the rebirth of the philosopher. This thesis traces the changes that shaped the role of the philosopher during the fifteenth-century in Florence, a city whose arts, literature and philosophical heritage have been the focus of scholarly attention for many years. A feature of Quattrocento Florence that has been neglected, however, is comic literature. This thesis discusses a distinctive aspect of this literature: fifteenth century satirical comic literature progressively assumed the form of a tradition the aim of which was to mock intellectual aspirations. Through the evolution of this tradition we can follow the development of the intellectual Florentine milieu. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first deals with the development of the satire of philosophy and is made up of five Chapters, each dedicated to one or more poets who represent a different stage. In his poem Lo Studio d’Atene Stefano Finiguerri mocked the scholars of the Florentine University. Finiguerri was followed by Burchiello and his imitators, who developed a more refined style of comic poetry. Matteo Franco and Alessandro Braccesi addressed philosophers more directly, while Lorenzo de’ Medici parodied the philosophy of Marsilio Ficino. The second part of the thesis deals with the representation of the intellectual understood as the fully formed figure of the philosopher. The two most significant authors here are Marsilio Ficino and his antagonist, the poet Luigi Pulci.

Having presented as a Marxist atheist for the previous thirty years, in the 1990s the postmodern philosopher Gianni Vattimo returned to religion. This dissertation analyses and evaluates the kind of religion to which Vattimo has returned, looking in particular at how it relates to his wider philosophical style of ‘weak thought,’ the interpretation of our current situation as one of hermeneutical nihilism in which there are no longer any ‘strong foundations’ such as metaphysics, value-free facts and metanarratives. In particular I look at whether Vattimo has constructed a ‘supersessionist’ religious history in which Christianity is ‘better’ than Judaism, a claim which—if true—would not only be politically incorrect, but also inconsistent with weak thought in that it puts forward a metanarrative of progress away from ‘strong’ biblical literalism associated with Judaism towards the ‘spiritual’ interpretation of Scripture found in postmodernity today, via the ‘liberating’ messages of kenosis and caritas found in Christianity. I argue Vattimo has constructed a ‘weak Hegelian’ narrative and one which, due to his increasing reliance on the work of Thomas Kuhn, can be tempered by an appeal to the ‘incommensurablity’ of paradigms, whereby difference in content is acknowledged although one paradigm (such as Judaism) cannot be regarded as better than another (such as Christianity). To support this interpretation of Vattimo’s ‘return’ to religion I appeal to changes in his view of Christianity since the Millennium in which the ‘unilinear’ history is downplayed in favour of a Gadamerian focus on the importance of the Bible as the source of textual tradition. Nevertheless, I go on to show that while there are resources within his return to religion to counter its critics, the kind of ontology he takes on board with his appeal to Kuhn highlights the larger problem within his philosophy of an increasingly selective reading of his main influence, Heidegger. The selectivity in his reading of Heidegger pertains in the main to his central concept of Being as event, and I show how this has implications for his return to religion in relation to the ideas of transcendence and caritas. Having done this, I construct my own reimagining of Vattimo’s return to religion to keep the spirit of what he has done without the conceptual problems generated from his reading of Heidegger, using Vattimo’s idea of the defining message of the New Testament as God’s newfound announcement of universal ‘friendship’ for all peoples to construct the idea that Philosophy and Theology have inexorably weakened one another through the missionary aspect of ‘friendship’ leading the Apostles to seek out Greeks (philosophers) as well as fellow Jews.

This dissertation discusses whether Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) can be considered a philosophical heir of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), as some scholars retain, despite the fact that there is no evidence that Leopardi read Vico’s New Science or other works until late (1828); too late to demonstrate a direct influence of the philosopher’s thought on the deepest nexuses of Leopardi’s reflection. This dissertation clarifies how Leopardi responded to Vico-related questions characterizing the culture of his time through an innovative methodology that looks at the diffraction of Vico’s ideas in Bourbon Restoration Italian culture. This work aims to paint a dynamic picture of Italian nineteenth-century polycentric culture through a geographical organization of the material; it in fact tackles the diffusion of Vico’s works and ideas from Naples to Venice (Chapter 1), to Milan (Chapter 2), to Leopardi’s hometown Recanati (Chapter 3), to Florence (Chapter 4), and again to Naples (Chapter 5). Not only does this work shed new light on the existence of a Vico-Leopardi philosophical lineage, but it also present an original study of perceptions of time and history and of the dichotomy ancient/modern in Post-Napoleonic Italian culture.

霍婉雯. / "二〇〇八年七月". / "2008 nian 7 yue". / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 171-175). / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Huo Wanwen. / 中文提要 --- p.I / 英文提要 --- p.II / 目錄 --- p.III / 引言 --- p.1 / Chapter 第一章´Ø --- 《孔子家語》槪述 --- p.2 / Chapter 第一節´Ø --- 《孔子家語》的流傳 --- p.2 / Chapter 第二節´Ø --- 《孔子家語》版本及硏究綜述 --- p.4 / Chapter 第三節´Ø --- 《孔子家語》版本問題 --- p.10 / Chapter 第四節´Ø --- 《孔子家語》〈序〉考 --- p.16 / Chapter 第五節´Ø --- 《孔子家語》與出土文獻的關係 --- p.24 / Chapter 第二章´Ø --- 《孔子家語》與傳世文獻比較 --- p.36 / Chapter 第一節´Ø --- 《家語》內容有所增益 --- p.36 / Chapter 第二節´Ø --- 《家語》內容有所删減 --- p.56 / Chapter 第三節´Ø --- 《孔子家語》內容有所改易 --- p.68 / Chapter 第四節´Ø --- 總結 --- p.81 / Chapter 第三章´Ø --- 《家語》編裁的目的 --- p.82 / Chapter 第一節´Ø --- 提升孔子形象 --- p.83 / Chapter 第二節´Ø --- 推尊儒家賢者 --- p.107 / Chapter 第三節´Ø --- 統一槪念用語´ؤ´ؤ以五儀爲例 --- p.116 / Chapter 第四節´Ø --- 闡述其經學思想´ؤ´ؤ以禮學爲例 --- p.142 / Chapter 第五節´Ø --- 符合篇章主旨 --- p.154 / Chapter 第六節´Ø --- 總結 --- p.159 / Chapter 第四章´Ø --- 王肅與《家語》的關係 --- p.160 / Chapter 第一節´Ø --- 論王肅《家語注》難鄭說 --- p.161 / Chapter 第二節´Ø --- 王肅《家語注》校勘《家語》考 --- p.163 / Chapter 第五章´Ø --- 總結 --- p.169 / 參考書目 --- p.171

In the forty years separating Stanzas and the recently published final instalment of the Homo Sacer series, The Use of Bodies, Agamben has regularly turned to topological figures in pursuing his critical analyses of the biopolitical horizon of modernity. Topologies of Abandon provides the first sustained analysis of the topological orientation of Agamben's work, developing an alternative spatial genealogy of a series of key concepts and figures in Agamben's thinking. The thesis considers a series of conceptual topoi explored by Agamben and argues that his theoretical project consists of a series of interrelated investigations into the configuration of place and localisation: the ontological space of the exception, the location of the subject within language, and the place of life in contemporary configurations of power. In my analysis of each of these topologies I argue against the common conception of Agamben's work as providing a pessimistic and negative diagnosis of contemporary forms of biopolitical governance from which there exists little hope of emancipation. Paradoxically, the potentiality that marks Agamben's utopic topos of life is found in the place of an abandonment, and it is by exploring the negative and privative topologies of abandon in Agamben's work that the thesis seeks to re-orient future readings of the largely misunderstood affirmative dimension of this philosophical project. The thesis provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of Agamben's use of topological figures throughout his body of work. Considering Agamben's methodological use of paradigms, signatures, and archaeology from a topological perspective, the thesis reconsiders the relationship between the biopolitical studies of Agamben and Foucault on this basis. The project situates Agamben's topological interest within the context of a wider critical-philosophical turn to the field in the twentieth-century, showing that Agamben's work is influenced by the topological current informing philosophies of the lifeworld and the metalogical inquiries of structuralism. The thesis also reconsiders Agamben's relationship with the thought of his former teacher Heidegger in terms of the two thinkers' shared interest in a ‘topology of being'. Following the topological thread running throughout Agamben's oeuvre, I demonstrate how from his earliest works Agamben seeks to map out an affirmative topos of life that perforates the surfaces and limits of its philosophical, juridical, and political determinations.