Sound and sense can never be separated but nor can they coincide with precision. "The game - the play - between them constitutes the poetic moment of language, which the philologist and philosopher must, each in their own way, preserve." Giorgio Agamben draws up a kind of blueprint of the great pillars of Italian literary culture: tragedy/comedy; dead language/living language; biography/fable; paean/elegy; dialect/language. As perhaps in none other of his books, it is possible to glimpse here the two extremes between which Agamben's thinking never ceases to move: philosophy and philology, genealogical survey and history, a passion for detail and a panoramic vision.