Giorgio Agamben has gained widespread popularity in recent years for his rethinking of radical politics and his approach to metaphysics and language. However, the extraordinary breadth of historical, legal and philosophical sources which contribute to the complexity and depth of Agamben's thinking can also make his work intimidating. Covering the full range of Agamben's work, this critical introduction outlines Agamben's key concerns: metaphysics, language and potentiality, aesthetics and poetics, sovereignty, law and biopolitics, ethics and testimony, and his powerful vision of post-historical humanity. Highlighting the novelty of Agamben's approach while also situating it in relation to the work of other continental thinkers, "The Philosophy of Agamben" presents a clear and engaging introduction to the work of this original and influential thinker.

In attempting to answer the question posed by this book's title, Giorgio Agamben does not address the idea of philosophy itself. Rather, he turns to the apparently most insignificant of its components: the phonemes, letters, syllables, and words that come together to make up the phrases and ideas of philosophical discourse. A summa, of sorts, of Agamben's thought, the book consists of five essays on five emblematic topics: the Voice, the Sayable, the Demand, the Proem, and the Muse. In keeping with the author's trademark methodology, each essay weaves together archaeological and theoretical investigations: to a patient reconstruction of how the concept of language was invented there corresponds an attempt to restore thought to its place within the voice; to an unusual interpretation of the Platonic Idea corresponds a lucid analysis of the relationship between philosophy and science, and of the crisis that both are undergoing today. In the end, there is no universal answer to what is an impossible or inexhaustible question, and philosophical writing—a problem Agamben has never ceased to grapple with—assumes the form of a prelude to a work that must remain unwritten.

This book collects new contributions from an international group of leading scholars – including many who have worked closely with Agamben – to consider the impact of Agamben’s thought on research in the humanities and social sciences. Giorgio Agamben: Legal, Political and Philosophical Perspectives addresses the potential of Agamben’s thought by re-focusing attention away from his critiques of Western politics and towards his scheme for a political future. Part I of the book draws upon a wide range of issues such as legal oaths, legal reasoning and Christian conceptions of love in order to examine the potential for Agamben’s work to impact upon future legal scholarship. Part II focuses on political perspectives that include references to Marx, Rousseau and Agamben’s conception of the ‘messianic’. Theology, biology, and the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin and Antonin Artaud are all drawn upon in Part III to explore philosophical perspectives in Agamben’s thought. This book demonstrates the importance and originality of Giorgio Agamben, who has articulated a vision of politics that must be recognised as an influential contribution to modern philosophical and political thinking. It is a book that will be of considerable interest to many working across the humanities and social sciences.

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. The essays consider several figures in the history of philosophy; the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics.

Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher well known for his brilliance and erudition, as well as for the difficulty and diversity of his seventeen books. The interest which his Homo Sacer sparked in America is likely to continue to grow for a great many years to come. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction presents the complexity and continuity of Agamben's philosophy—and does so for two separate and distinct audiences. It attempts to provide readers possessing little or no familiarity with Agamben's writings with points of entry for exploring them. For those already well acquainted with Agamben's thought, it offers a critical analysis of the achievements that have marked it.

Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states. The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt. In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals.