Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) is an Italian philosopher whose work synthesizes ancient Greek and Roman political-theological materials with Walter Benjamin’s messianic thought, Carl Schmitt’s analysis of sovereignty, and Michel Foucault’s analytics of power. His major project is the Homo Sacer series (1995-2015), a multi-volume analysis of the foundational structures of Western political thought — sovereignty, exception, bare life, oikonomia, glory, the form-of-life — culminating in The Use of Bodies (2014).

¶Core ideas

• Bare life (zoē) vs. qualified life (bios). The Greek distinction between life-as-such and life-with-political-form. Western politics, on Agamben’s reading, is constituted by the inclusion-exclusion of bare life: the polis includes bare life by excluding it from political form, producing the figure of homo sacer — life that may be killed but not sacrificed.
• The state of exception. Following Schmitt: the suspension of the legal order in the name of preserving it. Agamben argues that the modern state has normalized the exception — the camp, not the city, is the political paradigm of modernity.
• The camp as nomos of the modern. Wherever the exception becomes the rule and bare life is produced as the political object — refugee camps, Guantánamo, the contemporary border-management apparatus — the camp-structure operates. Not a contingent failure but the operative form.
• Profanation. The restoration to common use of what has been sequestered in the sphere of the sacred. Against the structural-political secularization that retains the apparatus of separation under different names, profanation undoes the separation itself. A category of resistance against contemporary apparatus-power.
• Form-of-life. The mode of life inseparable from its form — irreducible to either bare life (zoē) or qualified life (bios). The closing horizon of the Homo Sacer series; develops what a politics no longer organized through the inclusion-exclusion of bare life would look like.

¶Key works

• Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977)
• Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (1982)
• The Coming Community (1990)
• Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) and the subsequent volumes through The Use of Bodies (2014)
• State of Exception (2003)
• The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (2000)
• The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life (2011)

¶Where his work figures in this library

Agamben is foundational for the agambenian subdomain. His analysis of acedia (in Stanzas), monastic form-of-life (in The Highest Poverty), and the messianic-Pauline reading (in The Time That Remains) figure in cybernetic postliberalism’s ecclesial recurrence and in the broader analysis of the contemporary pastoral apparatus.