Giorgio Agamben

Life and Intellectual Background

Giorgio Agamben (born 22 April 1942 in Rome) is an Italian philosopher whose work spans political philosophy, legal theory, theology, literary studies, and aesthetics. He studied law and philosophy at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” writing a thesis on Simone Weil. Early in his career he attended Martin Heidegger’s seminars at Le Thor in the late 1960s, an experience that shaped his engagement with ontology, language, and the problem of being.

Agamben became part of the Italian intellectual milieu surrounding figures such as Italo Calvino and Pier Paolo Pasolini, appearing as the apostle Philip in Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). His early scholarly work included editing the Italian edition of Walter Benjamin’s writings, which decisively influenced his style of philosophical criticism, especially in relation to history, messianism, and the fragmentary form of thought.

Over several decades he held academic positions in Italy and abroad, including at the University of Macerata, the University of Verona, and as a visiting scholar at institutions such as the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. He is often associated with the broader tradition of continental philosophy and critical theory, drawing systematically on Aristotle, Hobbes, Schmitt, Benjamin, Foucault, and Heidegger.

From the late 1990s onward, Agamben became widely known in the Anglophone world, particularly after the translation of his Homo Sacer project. His interventions on contemporary politics—including the “war on terror,” security measures, and later public health responses during the COVID-19 pandemic—have generated significant debate, both extending and contesting his theoretical framework.

Major Works and Concepts

Agamben’s thought is often organized around a series of interconnected concepts developed across multi-volume projects. Three overarching themes are especially prominent: biopolitics, sovereignty and the state of exception, and messianic time and potentiality.

A central reference point is the long-term project begun with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). Here, Agamben reformulates Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics—the governance of life—by situating it within a theory of sovereignty. He revives the ancient Roman legal figure of homo sacer, a person who could be killed but not sacrificed, as emblematic of a life included in the juridical order only through its exclusion. Agamben names this exposed existence bare life (Italian: nuda vita), a life stripped of political qualification.

Sovereign power, he argues, is defined by the capacity to create a state of exception, a situation in which the law is suspended yet continues to function. Drawing on Carl Schmitt, Agamben claims that the exception is not an anomaly but has become the normal paradigm of government in modernity. The camp (from concentration camps to detention centers and other exceptional spaces) serves as a paradigmatic site where the indistinction between law and violence is realized, and where bare life is produced and managed.

In subsequent volumes, including State of Exception (2003), Remnants of Auschwitz (1998), The Kingdom and the Glory (2007), and The Highest Poverty (2011), Agamben expands this framework. He examines modern constitutional democracies, the “permanent” emergency powers of states, and the role of bureaucracy and administration. In The Kingdom and the Glory, he advances a political theology of economy, tracing how Christian theological concepts of divine oikonomia (government of the world) inform modern understandings of administration, governance, and “glory”—the spectacle that grants legitimacy to power.

Beyond political theory, Agamben’s philosophy of language and potentiality is central. In texts such as Language and Death (1982) and Potentialities (1999), he investigates how human beings are constituted through language and how potentiality (the capacity both to do and not to do) underlies ethical and political life. He links this to a notion of messianic time, developed from the Apostle Paul and Walter Benjamin, where the present is understood as a time of interruption and transformation rather than a mere transition between past and future.

In The Time That Remains (2000) and The Coming Community (1990), Agamben explores forms of community without identity, emphasizing belonging that is not grounded in fixed properties or identities. This anticipates his later reflections on form-of-life, particularly in relation to monastic rules and Franciscan poverty in The Highest Poverty and Opus Dei (2012), where he examines life lived in such a way that it is inseparable from its form, resisting juridical capture.

Agamben has also written extensively on aesthetics and literature, including works on poetry, the image, and the authorial gesture. His essays often treat poets such as Dante and Hölderlin, as well as modern writers, as sites where the limits of language, law, and subjectivity become legible.

Reception and Influence

Agamben’s work has had a wide impact across disciplines, including philosophy, political theory, legal studies, anthropology, literary criticism, theology, and cultural studies. Proponents regard his analyses of bare life, camp, and state of exception as offering a powerful critical vocabulary for understanding modern and contemporary phenomena such as refugee regimes, emergency legislation, extraordinary rendition, and mass surveillance.

His conceptualization of biopolitics is often discussed alongside, or in tension with, Foucault’s. Where Foucault maps diffuse dispositifs of power, Agamben emphasizes juridico-political structures and their roots in Western metaphysics and theology. Supporters argue that this synthesis of legal theory, philology, and theology produces a distinctive critical genealogy of Western politics.

Critics, however, contend that Agamben’s arguments sometimes rely on sweeping historical claims and analogies, especially concerning the continuity between democratic constitutional states and totalitarian regimes. Some scholars argue that his focus on the camp as “nomos of the modern” risks obscuring important differences among forms of power and historical contexts. Others question whether the category of bare life is too abstract to capture the complex social and material conditions of marginalized populations.

Agamben’s public interventions have also been controversial. His analyses of security policies in the context of terrorism, and later his writings on public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, applied the language of state of exception and biopolitics to contemporary restrictions. Supporters view these as consistent warnings about the normalization of emergency powers; detractors argue that such applications can underplay concrete epidemiological and social considerations.

Despite disagreements, Agamben remains a central reference in debates on sovereignty, law, and life in contemporary thought. His work continues to stimulate reassessment of how political communities are formed, how legal orders relate to violence, and how alternative forms of life and community might be conceived beyond the structures of sovereignty and exception he analyzes.