Following the tradition of thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, and Emil Cioran, this book is about the failure of language and its re-presentation as failure-in-itself. On the one hand, language is laceration, the sign of the diabolic. The impossibility of the return of being to itself: the dark light of hell. On the other hand, language is the triumph of the simulacrum, its own purified image, the burning mark of integration: the symbolic, the red light of a cursed sun.
"Alessandro Sbordoni's The Shadow of Being hovers around language like a shadow itself, illuminating the limits of signification from within, while offering a counterpoint to the often presumptuous glorification of Being within Western philosophy."
-Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of This Planet
"If the diabol could speak, what would it say? When symbolic life fails-and, with it, failing the reality of being-the diabolic emerges in its shadow-the hidden reservoir of existence. Alessandro Sbordoni's poetictheoretical dialogue probes the edge-lands of language to give the diabolic form and potential, a hesitant dance between destruction and hope."
-D-M Withers, University of Reading
"Beautiful that this book is written. As shadows may move swifter than lightspeed, even though nothing can, The Shadow of Being's diptych-discourse falls like a butterfly in the void, fluttering in silence almost faster than thought, always a little further down the fissure of the word only to
land, not nowhere, but in the very fold between absence and presence that has already turned out to be everything-the fact itself."
-Nicola Masciandaro, City University of New York
"This book is a very interesting exploration into the entrails of absence that makes the symbolic possible. It is also a beautiful experiment in duality where, instead of a contrast between the poles like in an antinomy, there is a continuity, a coming-and-going, a ressassement. There is no interruption except that the saying itself changes polarity."
-Hilan Bensusan, University of Brasilia
"Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness loom over Alessandro Sbordoni's philosophy like two shadows... Above them, an iridescent cloud. Its name, mysticism."
-Alessandra Cislaghi, University of Trieste
