If only by the discontinuous or elliptical character of its prose, Giorgio Agamben's Idea of Prose revives the question of the relationship between philosophy and poetry. Is the constellation of ideas that it forms the product of a poetic vocation or of a thought that seeks to liberate truth from its linguistic reification? This question, the question of the relationship between philosophy and poetry, between meaning and melos, between a prose whose implicit philosophical determination regulates the effects of its signifying function and a poetry whose purely sonorous and rhythmic dimension seems to resist any translation – this question is also explicitly raised in the fragment or aphorism that bears the same title as the book itself, ‘Idea of Prose’.

Agamben does not want to keep meaning apart from poetic sound and rhythm. Rather, for him, the question of the relationship between philosophy and poetry becomes the question of a language or a prose that no longer lets itself be determined by the difference inscribed in this relationship: ‘Neither poetry nor prose but – il loro medio.’ How are we to translate ‘medio’, the word with which the aphorism or fragment entitled ‘Idea of Prose’ closes? If there is an idea of language or an idea of prose that leads beyond the opposition between signifi- cation and sonorous rhythm, between content and form, between the syntactical and the metrical, then these terms are all divided by what they share: ‘il loro medio’.