Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher born in Rome in 1942, professor at the universities of Verona and Venice (IUAV), as well as at various European and American institutions. His work articulates historical-philological analysis, political philosophy, ontology, and theory of language around a genealogical project on the biopolitical paradigm of the West. He is one of the most translated and debated contemporary thinkers.

Key Concepts

  • Homo Sacer (Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1995): Revisiting a figure from archaic Roman law, Agamben describes the homo sacer as one who can be killed by anyone without it constituting homicide (occidi), but who cannot be sacrificed (immolari). This figure articulates bare life (nuda vita / zōē) — the mere biological fact of living — excluded from politically qualified life (bíos).

  • Bare Life (Zōē / Bíos): Agamben takes up and extends the Aristotelian distinction between zōē (the life common to all living beings) and bíos (the form or mode of life of an individual or group). Modern sovereign power operates by capturing bare life — excluding it from the polis while including it as an object of biopolitical administration. He develops and critiques Foucault on this point.

  • State of Exception (State of Exception, 2003): Drawing on Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, Agamben argues that the state of exception — the sovereign’s suspension of the legal order in a situation of emergency — is not an exception but has become the normal rule of government in contemporary democracies. The concentration camp is the nomos of modern political space — where the exception has become permanent.

  • Potentiality and Impotentiality: Developing Aristotle (Metaphysics IX), Agamben proposes that all potentiality is also the potentiality of not-being (impotentiality). Sovereignty operates by subtracting impotentiality; emancipation passes through recovering it. Explored in Bartleby, or On Contingency (1993) through the figure of Melville’s character.

  • Messianic Time (The Time That Remains, 2000): A philosophical reading of Paul of Tarsus’s Letters. Messianic time is neither the future nor the instant of the parousia, but the time that “remains” — the present contracted upon itself. Agamben engages with Benjamin (the Jetztzeit) and with Heidegger.

  • Apparatus (What Is an Apparatus?, 2006): Develops the Foucauldian concept of dispositif: anything that has the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, and secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, and discourses of living beings.

Influenced by

  • Heidegger — ontology of being, language, history of being
  • Foucault — biopolitics, disciplinary power (continued and critiqued)
  • Benjamin — messianic time, dialectics of the image, state of exception
  • Arendt — public/private life distinction, totalitarianism
  • Carl Schmitt — decisionism and theory of sovereignty (incorporated critically)
  • Aristotle — potency/act, zōē/bíos

Influenced

  • Studies of biopolitics and contemporary political theory
  • Critical legal theory
  • Philosophy of animality and political ecology
  • Roberto Esposito, Judith Revel, and other thinkers of “Italian Theory”

Works

Stanzas (1977); Infancy and History (1978); Language and Death (1982); Idea of Prose (1985); The Coming Community (1990); Bartleby (1993); Homo Sacer (1995); Remnants of Auschwitz (1998, Homo sacer series III); The Time That Remains (2000); State of Exception (2003, Homo sacer series II,1); Profanations (2005); What Is an Apparatus? (2006); The Open (2002); The Use of Bodies (2014, Homo sacer series IV,2).

See also

Twentieth-Century Philosophy

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