Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher whose work spans political theory, ontology, aesthetics, and literature. He is best known for developing the concepts of the state of exception and homo sacer, which explore the relationship between sovereignty, legal authority, and what he calls 'bare life'. His writings draw on sources including Aristotle, Roman law, Christian theology, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, St. Augustine and Carl Schmitt among others, and engage critically with Michel Foucault’s account of biopolitics and biopower. Agamben’s multi-volume Homo Sacer project has been widely discussed within political philosophy, jurisprudence, anthropology, and the humanities, and he is considered one of the most influential writers in contemporary continental philosophy.
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 he has lectured widely in Europe and North America. His publications include Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception, The Kingdom and the Glory, and The Use of Bodies, alongside works on language, poetry, and the history of Western metaphysics. 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.
Biography
Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where in 1965 he wrote an unpublished laurea thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. Agamben participated in Martin Heidegger's Le Thor seminars in 1966 and 1968. In the 1970s, he worked primarily on linguistics, philology, poetics, and topics in medieval culture. During this period, Agamben began to elaborate his primary concerns, although their political bearings were not yet made explicit. In 1974–1975 he was a fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, due to the courtesy of Frances Yates, whom he met through Italo Calvino. During this fellowship, Agamben began to develop his second book, Stanzas.Agamben was close to the poets Giorgio Caproni and José Bergamín, as well as the Italian novelist Elsa Morante. He has been a friend and collaborator to such intellectuals as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, 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. Benjamin had left these manuscripts to Georges Bataille when he fled Paris shortly before his death. The most relevant of these to Agamben's own later work were Benjamin's manuscripts for his theses On the Concept of History. Agamben has engaged since the nineties in a debate with the political writings of the German jurist Carl Schmitt, most extensively in the study State of Exception. His recent writings also elaborate on the concepts of Michel Foucault, whom he calls "a scholar from whom I have learned a great deal in recent years".
Agamben's 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. In his later work, Agamben intervenes in the theoretical debates following the publication of Nancy's essay La communauté désoeuvrée, and Maurice Blanchot's response, La communauté inavouable. These texts analyzed the notion of community at a time when the European Community was under debate. Agamben proposed his own model of a community which would not presuppose categories of identity in The Coming Community. At this time, Agamben also analyzed the ontological condition and "political" attitude of Bartleby – a scrivener who "prefers not" to write.
Currently, Agamben teaches at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio and has taught at the Università IUAV di Venezia, the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, and the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland; he previously taught at the University of Macerata and at the University of Verona, both in Italy. He also has held visiting appointments at several American universities, from the University of California, Berkeley, to Northwestern University, and at 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.
Work
Much of Agamben's work since the 1980s can be viewed as leading up to the so-called Homo Sacer project, which properly begins with the book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. In this series of works, Agamben responds to Hannah Arendt's and Foucault's studies of totalitarianism and biopolitics. Since 1995 he has been best known for this ongoing project, the volumes of which have been published out of order, and which include:- Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
- State of Exception. Homo Sacer II, 1
- Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm. Homo Sacer II, 2
- The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath. Homo Sacer II, 3
- The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Homo Sacer II, 4
- Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty. Homo Sacer II, 5
- Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III.
- The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Forms-of-Life. Homo Sacer IV, 1
- The Use of Bodies. Homo Sacer IV, 2
In the final volume of the series, Agamben intends to address "the concepts of forms-of-life and lifestyles." "What I call a form-of-life," he explains, "is a life which can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to separate something like bare life. ere too the concept of privacy comes in to play."
The reduction of life to 'biopolitics' is one of the main threads in Agamben's work, in his critical conception of a homo sacer, reduced to 'bare life', and thus deprived of any rights. Agamben's concept of the homo sacer rests on a crucial distinction in Greek between "bare life" and "a particular mode of life" or "qualified life". In Part III, section 7 of Homo Sacer, "The Camp as the 'Nomos' of the Modern", he evokes the concentration camps of World War II. "The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule." Agamben says that "What happened in the camps so exceeds the juridical concept of crime that the specific juridico-political structure in which those events took place is often simply omitted from consideration." The conditions in the camps were "conditio inhumana," and the incarcerated somehow defined outside the boundaries of humanity, under the exception laws of Schutzhaft. Where law is based on vague, unspecific concepts such as "race" or "good morals," law and the personal subjectivity of the judicial agent are no longer distinct.
In the process of creating a state of exception these effects can compound. In a realized state of exception, one who has been accused of committing a crime, within the legal system, loses the ability to use his/her voice and represent themselves. The individual can not only be deprived of their citizenship, but also of any form of agency over their own life. "Agamben identifies the state of exception with the power of decision over life."
Within the state of exception, the distinction between bios and zoê is made by those with judicial power. For example, Agamben would argue that Guantánamo Bay exemplifies the concept of 'the state of exception' in the United States following 9/11. "The situation of the prisoners in Guantanamo is legally speaking really comparable with the Nazi camps. The Guantanamo detainees do not have the status of prisoners of war; they have no legal status at all. They are subject to mere factual domination, and have no legal existence".
Agamben mentions that basic universal human rights of Taliban individuals while captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo Bay in 2001 were negated by US laws. In reaction to the removal of their basic human rights, detainees of Guantánamo Bay prison went on hunger strikes. Within a state of exception, when a detainee is placed outside the law he or she is, according to Agamben, reduced to "bare life" in the eyes of the judicial powers. Here, one can see why such measures as hunger strikes can occur in such places as prisons. Within the framework of a system that has deprived the individual of power, and their individual basic human freedoms, the hunger strike can be seen as a weapon or form of resistance. "The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious." Within a state of exception the boundaries of power are precarious and threaten to destabilize not only the law, but one's humanity, as well as their choice of life or death. Forms of resistance to the extended use of power within the state of exception, as suggested in Guantánamo Bay prison, also operate outside the law. In the case of the hunger strike, the prisoners were threatened and endured force feeding not allowing them to die. During the hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay prison, accusations and founded claims of forced feedings began to surface in the autumn of 2005. In February 2006, The New York Times reported that prisoners were being force fed in Guantánamo Bay prison and in March 2006, more than 250 medical experts, as reported by the BBC, voiced their opinions of the forced feedings stating that this was a breach of the government's power and was against the rights of the prisoners.