This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking--nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante. The author presents "literature" as a set of formal or linguistic genres that discuss or develop theological issues at a certain distance from the discourse of theology. This distance begins to appear in Virgil and Ovid, but it becomes decisive in Dante and in his decision to write in the vernacular. His vernacular Italian reaches back through classical allusion to the Latin that was in his day the language of theology, but it does so with a difference. It is no accident that in the "Commedia" Virgil is Dante's guide. The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise. Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provencal poets, Mallarme, and Holderlin, among others).

吉奧喬·阿甘本博士(1942- )是歐洲研究生院（EGS）巴魯赫·德·斯賓諾莎教授，意大利維羅拉大學美學教授，並於巴黎國際哲學學院教授哲學。在攻讀博士後階段，阿甘本參與瞭弗萊堡由馬丁·海德格爾主持的研討會，並主持瞭瓦爾特·本雅明意大利譯本的翻譯工作。阿甘本獨特的對文學理論，歐陸哲學，政治思想，宗教研究以及文學和藝術的融會貫通，使他成為我們時代最具挑戰性的思想傢之一。他也是巴黎一些大學的客座教授，同時於美國數所大學，如UC伯剋利，洛杉磯，埃爾文，聖剋魯斯和西北大學等學校任教。