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Giorgio Agamben

Modern European · Europe · born 1942

Italian thinker who argues that modern states keep power by deciding who is left bare of rights.

What it is

Giorgio Agamben (born 1942 in Rome) is an Italian philosopher of language, law and politics. His work is read widely in law, literature, art and political theory. He is best known for a series of books called Homo Sacer, about how states can treat some people as bare life, stripped of the protection of law.

He studied law and philosophy and wrote on the political thought of Simone Weil. He took part in Martin Heidegger's seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus. He has taught in Italy, at a college in Paris, where he was a director of programmes, and, as a distinguished professor, at the New School in New York. After the attacks of 2001 he refused what he called "biopolitical tattooing", an identification procedure asked of visitors, on entering the United States, and he has been a sharp critic of how that day was used to justify lasting emergency powers.

The main ideas

  • What it means to speak. A question runs through his work: what does it mean that language exists, and that "I speak"? He asks it of philosophy, poetry and politics alike.
  • Bare life. In Homo Sacer he looks at an old figure of Roman law, a person put outside society and left unprotected, and argues that modern power still draws such lines around some lives.
  • Biopolitics. He builds on Foucault's idea that modern power takes the biological life of populations as its object, and he ties it to sovereignty, the power to decide who is inside the law.
  • The state of exception. He traces the idea of an emergency in which normal law is suspended back to Roman law, and warns against making it the ordinary way of governing.
  • Ethics without law. After studying the camps, he asked how an ethics could be built that does not rest on law at all.
  • Form of life. He points to a "happy life" that cannot be separated from the way it is lived, as a possible basis for a new politics.

What it looks like in practice

Picture a government that declares an emergency and then keeps it going for years, with rules that no longer need a vote. Agamben would ask who is left without protection when the usual law is set aside, and who decides when the emergency ends. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Language and Death looks at the relation of poetry, philosophy and the experience of language.
  • The Coming Community (1990) describes a community of "whatever singularity", whose members share an inessential commonality.
  • Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) is his best-known and most disputed book.
  • Remnants of Auschwitz is the third part of the series, on ethics after the camps.
  • State of Exception (2005) follows the idea of a legal emergency back to Roman law.
  • The Highest Poverty (2011) studies medieval monastic rules.

Questions and criticism

  • A controversial book. Homo Sacer is called his most controversial work, and readers disagree about whether its picture of power fits modern societies.
  • A hard path through the work. His writing does not develop in a straight line, and the same ideas return in very different settings, which makes it hard to say what exactly he argues.
  • What follows from the diagnosis? It is fair to ask what a politics of "form of life" would look like in practice, since he says it is still largely to be thought.

Close neighbours

Michel Foucault named the idea of biopolitics that Agamben builds on, and Hannah Arendt's studies of totalitarianism are another of his starting points. The pages on Martin Heidegger, whose seminars he attended, and Simone Weil, the subject of his first research, show two of the thinkers he began with.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Hannah Arendt · He built on her account of people left without rights in the modern state.
  • Martin Heidegger · He attended Heidegger's seminars and took up his work on being and language.
  • Michel Foucault · He took up and extended Foucault's work on how states manage life.
  • Walter Benjamin · He edited Benjamin's works in Italian and took up his view of a permanent state of emergency.

Other Modern European thinkers

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