Paul Colilli, Agamben and the Signature of Astrology. Spheres of Potentiality (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015), i-xx, 214 pp. hard cover, $85.00 (US) ISBN: 978-1-4985-0595-6
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his latest book, Paul Colilli provides an Agambenian archeological study of astrology in Western culture.With great erudition, the author offers a commentary on classical Greco-Roman works (e.g., by Aristotle and Ptolemy), discusses some of the defining moments of Christianity (iconology, Patristics, Aquinas) and authors from the Renaissance (Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno).Colilli demonstrates exceptional expertise in Agamben's oeuvre as well as the latter's own references, including Benjamin, Foucault, and Aby Warburg.The thought-provoking journey Colilli offers to his readers sheds light on the tumultuous history of astrology.The book reminds us how, for the most part, the traditional role of astrology is forgotten in today's disenchanted world, where popular horoscopy presents only a pale version of what astrology used to be with regard to helping comprehend our distant origin and relationship with the cosmos.Astrology, writes the author, has been relegated to "cultural debris;" it has become a "specter."Colilli follows the method and certain paths initiated by Agamben in order to make sense of the vestiges of astrology and reveal its specific signature.The book is interested in both explicit astrological aspects and the implicit astrological traces present in Agamben's work.It matches these pieces like a puzzle and brings other authors and topics into the discussion in order to provide consistency to the historical complexity of astrology.Colilli pioneers a systematic and comprehensive study of the importance of astrology in Agamben's work, and by doing so he contributes to the revealing of a lesser-known aspect of Agamben's intellectual endeavor.The book is additionally valuable in that Colilli, a professor of Italian studies, comments on some of Agamben's untranslated texts, including recent books and older interviews, which have remained unknown for most of the English readers.Agamben and the Signature of Astrology is divided into five chapters which explore astrology from a historico-conceptual, archeological, hermeneutical, and ontological perspective respectively, followed by the account of a new way of experiencing astrology.Chapter one, "Constellation of Unwritten Life," discusses some of Agamben's core concepts, which are unfolded further in the book, namely the notions of potentiality, signature, archeology, biopolitics, and bare life.Following Agamben's transhistorical notion of biopolitics, astrology is originally linked to an attempt at producing biopolitical bodies, which involves a certain degree of violence as it asks human life to
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".