Agamben, Giorgio

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Giorgio Agamben (1942 –) is an Italian philosopher who teaches at the University of Verona. He also holds a professorship at the European Graduate School, teaches at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy, and has held visiting appointments at several American universities. He is a critic of the state of emergency and of the War on terror.

Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where he wrote a thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. Agamben participated in Martin Heidegger's Le Thor seminars (on Heraclitus and Hegel)in 1966 and 1968. In the seventies he worked primarily on linguistics, philology, poetics, and medievalist topics, where he began to elaborate his primary concerns, though without as yet inflecting them in a specifically political direction. In 1974-1975 he was a fellow at the Warburg Institute, where he wrote Stanzas (1979).

Close to Elsa Morante, on whom he has written, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in whose The Gospel According to St. Matthew he played the part of Philip, Italo Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, his strongest influences include Walter Benjamin, whose complete works he edited in Italian translation, Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault.

Work

In his main work "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" (1998), Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben analyzes an obscure figure of Roman law that poses some fundamental questions to the nature of law and power in general. Under the Roman Empire, a man who committed a certain kind of crime was banned from society and all of his rights as a citizen were revoked. He thus became a "homo sacer" (sacred man). In consequence, he could be killed by anybody - while his life on the other hand was deemed "sacred", so he could not be sacrificed in a ritual ceremony.

To a homo sacer, Roman law no longer applied, although he was still "under the spell" of law. He was excluded from law itself, while being included at the same time. This figure is the exact mirror image of the sovereign - a king, emperor, or president - who stands, on the one hand, within law (so he can be condemned, e.g. for treason, as a natural person) and outside of the law (since as a body politic he has power to suspend law for an indefinite time).

Since its origins, Agamben notes, law has had the power of defining what "bare life" is by making this exclusive operation, while at the same time gaining power over it by making it the subject of political control. The power of law to actively separate "political" beings (citizens) from "bare life" (bodies) has carried on from antiquity to modernity - from, literally, Aristotle to Auschwitz. Aristotle, as Agamben notes, constitutes political life via a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of "bare life": as Aristotle says, man is an animal born to life (zen), but existing with regard to the good life (eu zen) which can be achieved through politics. Bare life, in this ancient conception of politics, is that which must be transformed, via the State, into the "good life"; that is, bare life is that which is supposedly excluded from the higher aims of the state, yet is included precisely so that it may be transformed into this "good life." Sovereignty, then, is conceived from ancient times as a state of exception. The biopower discussed by Foucault, which takes the bare lives of the citizens into its political calculations, may be more marked in the modern state, but has essentially existed since the beginnings of sovereignty in the West.

Thus, Agamben connects Greek political philosophy through to the concentration camps of 20th century fascism, and even further, to detainment camps in the likes of Guantanamo Bay or Bari, Italy, where asylum seekers have been imprisoned in football stadiums. In these kinds of camps, entire zones of exception are being formed. Sovereign law makes it possible to create entire areas in which the application of the law itself is held suspended.

Agamben's philosophy draws from Michel Foucault as well as from Italian neo-marxist thought. He frequently cites authors as different as Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. While sometimes being cryptic in his writings, in interviews he makes himself clear as a public thinker in Foucauldian tradition who is interested in social conflicts on a global scale.

He is particularly critical of the United States' response to terrorism. In particular, he warns of a "generalization of the state of exception" through laws like the USA PATRIOT Act which would mean a permanent installment of martial law and emergency powers. In January 2004, he refused to give a lecture in the United States because under the US-VISIT he would have been required to give up his biometric information, which he believed stripped him to a state of naked life and was akin to the tattooing that the German Nazis did during the Holocaust.

Bibliography

(Only English translations are listed here; there are translations of most writings to German, French, and Spanish. There also is an updated list of publications including translations to other languages at http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgioagamben.html).

• Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1992)
• Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (1993)
• The Coming Community (1993)
• Idea of Prose (1995)
• Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998)
• The Man without Content (1999)
• The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (1999)
• Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (1999)
• Means without Ends: Notes on Politics (2000)
• Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002)
• The Open: Man and Animal (2004)
• State of Exception (2005)
• The Time That Remains: A Commentary On The Letter To The Romans (2005)

External links

• "Giorgio Agamben Faculty Website European Graduate School"
• "No to Bio-Political Tattooing By Giorgio Agamben, Le Monde, Saturday 10 January 2004"
• "Interview with Giorgio Agamben – Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life, German Law Journal, Vol. 5 (1 May 2004)"
• "Review of Stato di Eccezione"
• "Review of The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans"

• Seminario Agamben

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