Giorgio Agamben

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Lore & Background

Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where in 1965 he wrote an unpublished laurea thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. He participated in Martin Heidegger's Le Thor seminars (on Heraclitus and Hegel) in 1966 and 1968. In the 1970s, he worked primarily on linguistics, philology, poetics, and topics in medieval culture. During a 1974–1975 fellowship at the Warburg Institute, University of London, due to the courtesy of Frances Yates (whom he met through Italo Calvino), he began developing his second book, Stanzas (1977). He was close to the poets Giorgio Caproni and José Bergamín, as well as the Italian novelist Elsa Morante. He collaborated with intellectuals such as Pier Paolo Pasolini (in whose The Gospel According to St. Matthew he played the part of Philip), Italo Calvino (with whom he briefly collaborated as advisor to the publishing house Einaudi), Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, and Jean-François Lyotard. His strongest influences include Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault. Agamben edited Benjamin's collected works in Italian translation until 1996, and called Benjamin's thought 'the antidote that allowed me to survive Heidegger'. In 1981, Agamben discovered several important lost manuscripts by Benjamin in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, including Benjamin's manuscripts for his thesis On the Concept of History. His political thought was founded on his readings of Aristotle's Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, and treatise On the Soul, as well as the exegetical traditions concerning these texts in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. He proposed his own model of a community which would not presuppose categories of identity in The Coming Community (1990). At this time, Agamben also analyzed the ontological condition and 'political' attitude of Bartleby (from Herman Melville's short story) – a scrivener who 'prefers not' to write. Much of Agamben's work since the 1980s can be viewed as leading up to the Homo Sacer project, which properly begins with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). This series responds to Hannah Arendt's and Foucault's studies of totalitarianism and biopolitics. The project includes volumes such as State of Exception (2003), The Kingdom and the Glory (2007), and The Use of Bodies (2014). In 2017, these works were collected and published as The Omnibus Homo Sacer. Agamben's concept of homo sacer rests on a crucial distinction in Greek between 'bare life' (zoê) and 'a particular mode of life' or 'qualified life' (bios). He evokes the concentration camps of World War II, stating 'The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.'

Reader's Guide

Giorgio Agamben is considered one of the most influential writers in contemporary continental philosophy. His multi-volume Homo Sacer project has been widely discussed within political philosophy, jurisprudence, anthropology, and the humanities. His ideas have generated substantial scholarly debate and have influenced fields ranging from political theory to literary studies. Agamben's theoretical concerns have intersected with contemporary political controversies. In 2004, he refused to travel to the United States after new visa regulations required biometric fingerprinting, which he likened to practices of bodily registration used in twentieth century totalitarian regimes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he criticised the Italian government’s lockdowns, mask requirements, and vaccination passes as examples of an expanded state of exception that, in his view, reduced political life to biological management. These interventions attracted significant criticism from public health experts and fellow philosophers, many of whom argued that Agamben misapplied his earlier work to a public-health emergency, though others supported his analysis. Agamben has held teaching and research positions at institutions including the University of Verona, the University of Macerata, the University of Palermo, and the Università Iuav di Venezia, and has lectured widely in Europe and North America. He currently teaches at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio (Università della Svizzera Italiana) and has taught at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris and the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He also held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, Northwestern University, and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Agamben received the Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon in 2006. In 2013 he was awarded the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize by the University of Tübingen for his work titled Leviathans Rätsel.

Did You Know?

• Agamben played the part of Philip in Pier Paolo Pasolini's film The Gospel According to St. Matthew.
• In 1981, Agamben discovered several lost manuscripts by Walter Benjamin in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, including Benjamin's thesis On the Concept of History.
• Agamben refused to travel to the United States in 2004 after new visa regulations required biometric fingerprinting, which he likened to practices of twentieth century totalitarian regimes.
• He edited Benjamin's collected works in Italian translation until 1996 and called Benjamin's thought 'the antidote that allowed me to survive Heidegger'.
• Agamben wrote an unpublished laurea thesis in 1965 on the political thought of Simone Weil.