Introduction
Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942, Rome) is an academic cosmopolitan. He teaches in Italy at the University of Venice and in France at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris and travels the world as a visiting professor. His oeuvre is correspondingly diverse, encompassing the fields of political philosophy and ethics and those of metaphysics, aesthetics, anthropology, and linguistics. The core of his political theory is his analysis of the ambivalence of politics and its ill-fated relationship with the law. The key figure of this relationship, the biopolitical product, is the homo sacer, a figure that dates back to ancient Roman law. For Agamben, the homo saceris the perfect manifestation of the sovereign power since it has created the homo sacer by banning it as an outlaw who can be harmed or even killed with impunity – all in the name of the law. His political theory aims at revealing the inherent logic of the sovereign power and its effects in determining the legal...
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References
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Lembcke, O.W. (2023). Agamben, Giorgio. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6519-1_739
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6519-1_739
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