Agamben: Study and Experience

Introduction

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1942) has written an extensive work characterized by his profound knowledge and the diversity of subjects and authors he has covered. His first texts (1970–1985) were primarily focused on issues of aesthetics, language, and history of philosophy, with a close connection to the philosophies of M. Heidegger, W. Benjamin, and A. Kojève. Agamben analyzes issues such as the status of art and poetry, the issue of human language, and the “transmissibility” of culture in the so-called posthistory. With the publication of Homo Sacer I (1995), Agamben began his research on political conceptions in the west, which would span 20 years and comprise nine volumes, known as the Homo Sacerseries. This research marks him as one of the most influential philosophers in the study of “biopolitics,” that is, the admission of natural life as such into the political sphere. In this series, Agamben used a different definition of biopolitics from Michel...