Name and Image

Now available in India. Forthcoming in the rest of the world in July 2025.

An insightful study of Walter Benjamin, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, by the Italian philosopher Gianni Carchia.

Name and Image crystallizes Gianni Carchia’s lifelong inquiry into the nexus of philosophy, language and aesthetics in an exploration of one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers: Walter Benjamin. This profoundly original study moves across the philosophy of language, historiography, aesthetics, temporality and transcendental philosophy, tracing the philosophical itinerary that defined Carchia’s work.

‘It was the singular fate of this book to be both the first and the final work of Gianni Carchia. In the spring of 1999, shortly before the worsening of the illness that would lead to his death, Carchia reprised and transformed his doctoral thesis, defended in 1971 at the University of Turin under the title “Truth and Language in the Young Benjamin”. At age twenty-four, the young scholar already demonstrated, in a style at once agitated and apodictic, the unmistakable traits of the master. In revising it under the title Name and Image, Carchia turned this book into something like his will and testament. In keeping with an authentically philosophical gesture, beginning and end here truly seem to coincide, as if, by a stunning inversion, the themes of Carchia’s late thought—the conception of philosophy as event and testimony, the critique of method, the messianic elaboration of the end—for the first time met their echo in the youthful thesis. In this physiognomy of Benjamin, a portrait of the author emerges as one of the most just voices in twentieth-century Italian philosophy.’—Giorgio Agamben