Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben was born in Rome in 1942. He studied law at the University of Rome and wrote his doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. In 1966 and 1968, he attended Martin Heidegger's seminars in Le Thor, an experience that had a fundamental impact on his philosophical thinking and methodology. Agamben subsequently pursued research in semiotics, aesthetics, and literary criticism, and for years served as the editor of Walter Benjamin's works in Italian; Benjamin, whose thought, along with that of Foucault and Heidegger, forms the third side of the triangle of influences on Agamben.

Agamben's global renown is largely the result of his massive, multi-volume project "Homo Sacer," which he began writing in the mid-1990s. In this project, by re-reading ancient Roman law and integrating it with Michel Foucault's theory of biopolitics and Carl Schmitt's concepts of sovereignty and the state of exception, he demonstrates how modern sovereign power is constituted by the inclusion of "bare life" (purely biological life deprived of political rights) within the legal order through the suspension of the law itself. In his view, the camp (such as forced labor camps) is not a transient exceptional situation, but the hidden matrix and fundamental paradigm of the political space of modernity.

In addition to political philosophy, Agamben has produced valuable works in the fields of political theology, aesthetics, linguistics, and the archaeology (genealogy) of philosophical concepts. Critiquing the structures of Western democracy, technology, and control societies, he emphasizes the necessity of rethinking concepts such as action, form-of-life, and liberation. Among his other important works are "State of Exception," "Remnants of Auschwitz," "The Coming Community," and "Language and Death."