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Giorgio Agamben

Italian philosopher (born 1942)

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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 (1995), State of Exception (2003), The Kingdom and the Glory (2007), and The Use of Bodies (2014), 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Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where in 1965 he wrote an unpublished laurea thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil.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 (on Heraclitus and Hegel) 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 (1977).

Agamben was close to the poets Giorgio Caproni and José Bergamín, as well as the Italian novelist Elsa Morante (on whose works the essays "The Celebration of the Hidden Treasure" and "Parody" were focused). He has been a friend and collaborator to such intellectuals as Pier Paolo Pasolini (in whose The Gospel According to St. Matthew he played the part of Philip), Italo Calvino (with whom he briefly collaborated as advisor to the publishing house Einaudi and developed plans for a journal), Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, and Jean-François Lyotard (among others).

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 thesis 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 (2003). 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 (1983), and Maurice Blanchot's response, La communauté inavouable (1983). 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 (1990). At this time, Agamben also analyzed the ontological condition and "political" attitude of Bartleby (from Herman Melville's short story) – a scrivener who "prefers not" to write.

Currently, Agamben teaches at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio (Università della Svizzera Italiana) 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 (Leviathan's Riddle, translated into English by Paul Silas Peterson).

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