Philosopher
Giorgio Agamben
born 1942
Italian philosopher whose Homo Sacer argues that sovereign power rests on excluded "bare life", and that the camp, where the exception is the rule, is the hidden pattern of modern politics.
Giorgio Agamben was born in Rome in 1942 and studied law and philosophy, writing his doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. As a young postdoctoral scholar he took part in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus, and he later edited the Italian edition of Walter Benjamin’s collected works, the thinker whose problems run through almost everything he has written. He has taught at Macerata and Verona, in Paris and in New York, and caused a controversy by refusing to submit to what he called the “biopolitical tattooing” that the United States required of visitors after the September 11 attacks.
His early books ask what it means that humans speak, and treat language, rather than consciousness, as the place where experience happens. He is best known for Homo Sacer and the series of books that followed it, which revise Foucault’s account of biopolitics. Where Foucault saw power over life as a modern break with sovereignty, Agamben argues that producing a political body out of bare life was sovereignty’s original act all along.
Key ideas
- Bare life
- Western politics has always been founded on an exclusion: mere biological life, set apart from the life of the citizen, is what the political order defines itself against. Modern states bring that hidden foundation into the open.
- Homo sacer
- He takes the figure of homo sacer from Roman law: someone who could be killed with impunity yet not offered as a sacrifice, abandoned by both human and divine law. Once the exception becomes normal, everyone is potentially in that position.
- The exception becomes the rule
- Against Carl Schmitt, for whom the sovereign is whoever decides on the exception, Agamben follows Walter Benjamin: the suspension of law has become the normal condition, leaving law in force but empty of meaning.
- The camp as hidden pattern
- The concentration camp is the exception in its purest form, a space where law and life can no longer be told apart. It is not an aberration but the concealed structure of modern politics, where democracy and totalitarianism draw together.
- Ethics of testimony
- From the gap in survivors’ accounts of Auschwitz he draws an ethics without law, one of bearing witness to what cannot itself testify, and he declines to rest it on notions such as dignity and respect.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- Italy
- Period
- Contemporary
- Themes
- How to govern
Influences
Influenced by
- Aristotle384–322 BCE
- G. W. F. Hegel1770–1831
- Martin Heidegger1889–1976teacher
- Hannah Arendt1906–1975
- Simone Weil1909–1943
- Michel Foucault1926–1984criticised
- Jean-Luc Nancy1940–2021
Giorgio Agambenborn 1942
Influenced by
- Aristotle384–322 BCE
- G. W. F. Hegel1770–1831
- Martin Heidegger1889–1976teacher
- Hannah Arendt1906–1975
- Simone Weil1909–1943
- Michel Foucault1926–1984criticised
- Jean-Luc Nancy1940–2021
Giorgio Agambenborn 1942
Where these links come from
- Giorgio Agamben drew on Aristotle. Source: Catherine Mills, Giorgio Agamben, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Giorgio Agamben drew on G. W. F. Hegel. Source: Catherine Mills, Giorgio Agamben, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Giorgio Agamben studied with and drew on Martin Heidegger. Source: Catherine Mills, Giorgio Agamben, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Giorgio Agamben drew on Hannah Arendt. Source: Catherine Mills, Giorgio Agamben, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Giorgio Agamben drew on Simone Weil. Source: Catherine Mills, Giorgio Agamben, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Giorgio Agamben drew on and argued against Michel Foucault. Source: Catherine Mills, Giorgio Agamben, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Giorgio Agamben drew on Jean-Luc Nancy. Source: Catherine Mills, Giorgio Agamben, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Infancy and History, 1978
- Language and Death, 1982
- The Coming Community, 1990
- Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
- Remnants of Auschwitz
Terms on this page
- homo sacer
- In Roman law, a person who could be killed without penalty but not sacrificed. Agamben uses the figure for life abandoned by the law, a condition he thinks modern politics extends to everyone.
Sources
- Catherine Mills, Giorgio Agamben, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy