Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben (born in Rome in 1942) is an Italian philosopher whose work has reached an international audience and belongs to the continental tradition. He writes across political theory, ontology, aesthetics and literature, guided by one central question: how did we arrive at the present situation, and what can be done about it? His work is among the most debated in contemporary thought.

He graduated from the University of Rome in 1965 with a thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. In the mid-1960s he attended Martin Heidegger's seminars on Heraclitus and Hegel, and through the 1970s he worked mainly on linguistics, philology and medieval culture. A fellowship at the Warburg Institute in London led to his book Stanze (1977). He also edited the Italian edition of Walter Benjamin's collected works, and Benjamin remained a decisive influence on his thinking.

He is best known for the Homo Sacer project, which began with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). His central argument is that the Western legal tradition, from archaic Roman law to modern declarations of rights, rests on an original bond between sovereign power and human life exposed to death. Building on Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics and Carl Schmitt's idea of the state of exception, he distinguishes in Greek between zoe, bare life, and bios, qualified life. Bare life, which humans share with other living beings, is where power can act without limit. The concentration camps serve him as the extreme case of an exception that turns into the rule.

His method is deconstructive. He examines the categories of Western metaphysics to uncover their internal logic rather than to assign blame. This goes with what he calls a messianic attitude, in which fulfilment requires revoking the origin, and he returns steadily to Paul of Tarsus and Jewish tradition. Later volumes in the series include The Kingdom and the Glory, on the theological genealogy of economy and government, and The Use of Bodies.

His influence reaches political theory, philosophy of law, anthropology and literary studies. His views on public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have been sharply contested, both by public health specialists and by fellow philosophers, who argue that he applied concepts from his earlier work to an emergency they do not fit.