Agamben, Giorgio (1942—)
Italian philosopher. Born in Rome, Agamben studied at the University of Rome, where he completed a doctorate on the political thought of Simone Weil. He undertook postdoctoral study in Germany, participating in Heidegger, Martin’s seminars on Heraclitus and genre. He was close friends with Pier Paolo Pasolini (who gave him the bit part of the Apostle Philip in his film The Gospel According to St Mathew (1964)) and Calvino, Italo, two of Italy’s most prominent intellectuals of the period. Passionate about Benjamin, Walter’s work, which he researched extensively in the archives at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where he discovered several important manuscripts, Agamben also edited the translation into Italian of his complete works. A highly erudite philology, Agamben reads contemporary works through the lens of classical philosophy. His early works, reflecting his Heideggerian training, are focused on the history of metaphysics in western philosophy. He is particularly interested in the relation between language and death and the way western philosophy since Hegel has tended to posit an ineffable dimension to language as an equivalent to death. He sets out this argument in the aptly titled Language and Death (1991) and extends the discussion in Infancy and History (1993). He argues that infancy, which literally means being without language, provides an instance of experience that is unmediated by language and therefore provides the grounds for thinking that experience precedes language in ontological terms, not just chronological terms. From metaphysics, Agamben moved onto aesthetics in Stanzas (1993) and Idea of Prose (1995), which argues that the division between poetry and philosophy is essentially impossible to maintain. His most well-known work, the cycle of books devoted to the holocaust (Homo Sacer (1998), Remnants of Auschwitz (1999), Means Without End (2000), State of Exception (2005), The Signature of All Things (2009), and The Use of Bodies (2016)), draws on his classical background to develop a theory of what he calls bare life (nuda vita). Agamben notes that classical philosophy, unlike contemporary western philosophy, distinguishes between political life (bios), i.e. a form of life regulated by notions of the good and the proper, and the simple fact of life itself (zōē), i.e. that which animals and humans have in common. Agamben shows that although this distinction does not exist in most modern European languages, it nevertheless persists in the operation of what Foucault called biopolitics. As he shows with respect to the Holocaust, the Nazis first of all removed the Jews from the realm of bios by denying them citizenship and then interning them in camps where they reduced to the most abject form of zōē imaginable. The separation of political life from bare life is, Agamben argues, the genesis of fascism because it enables a politics that puts biological traits and concerns before the social, regulating bodies not people. As he shows in Means Without End, the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers around the world---Australia, Europe, and the US in particular---follows the same logic: the refugees are left to die in the desert or drown in the sea because their place of birth, their skin colour, or their religion makes them ‘undesirable’. Agamben’s later work follows the thread from this starting point to the paradoxes of democratic constitutions, which allow that to ‘save’ democracy, democracy itself may be suspended by the declaration of martial law. Agamben describes this as a ‘state of exception’, and his work traces the way this paradoxical process of excluding to include features in a wide variety of social mechanisms. Agamben has also written a long cycle of books on religious themes in Judaeo-Christian thought, focusing particularly on messianism (continuing Benjamin’s work): The Open (2004), The Kingdom and the Glory (2011), and The Highest Poverty (2013). Further Reading: K. Attell Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction (2014). L. De la Durantaye Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (2009). C. Mills The Philosophy of Agamben (2008).
http://www.iep.utm.edu/agamben/ • A comprehensive overview of Giorgio Agamben’s work, with references and further reading.