Giorgio Agamben played the apostle Philip in a Pasolini film
Before becoming one of the most discussed political philosophers alive, Giorgio Agamben attended Heidegger's seminars, advised the publisher Einaudi alongside Italo Calvino, and appeared as Philip in Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew. In 1981 he found lost Walter Benjamin manuscripts in a Paris library archive.
Agamben was born on 22 April 1942 and studied at the University of Rome, writing an unpublished 1965 thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. In 1966 and 1968 he joined Martin Heidegger's seminars at Le Thor on Heraclitus and Hegel. Through the 1970s he focused on linguistics, philology, poetry and medieval culture, and a fellowship at London's Warburg Institute, arranged by Frances Yates, whom he met through Calvino, led to his book Stanzas in 1977. His circle included Elsa Morante, Ingeborg Bachmann, Guy Debord and Jacques Derrida.
Benjamin mattered most. Agamben edited the Italian edition of his collected works until 1996 and called Benjamin's thinking the antidote that let him survive Heidegger. The manuscripts he uncovered at the Bibliothèque nationale de France had been left with Georges Bataille when Benjamin fled Paris, and included drafts of his theses On the Concept of History. Agamben also argued at length with the German jurist Carl Schmitt, above all in State of Exception, and drew increasingly on Michel Foucault.
His fame rests on the Homo Sacer series, begun in 1995 with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and gathered in 2017 as an omnibus. Responding to Hannah Arendt and Foucault on totalitarianism and biopolitics, it examines how sovereign power defines itself by deciding who is reduced to bare life, existence stripped of political standing. The volumes appeared out of order and range from the oath to monastic rules. The project closes on what he calls a form-of-life, a life that can never be separated from its form. Earlier, The Coming Community imagined belonging without fixed identity, and he wrote about Melville's scrivener Bartleby, who prefers not to.
His theory has spilled into public quarrels. In 2004 he refused to enter the United States when new visa rules required fingerprinting, comparing it to totalitarian bodily registration. He has taught at Verona, Macerata and Venice and in Mendrisio, and in 2006 received the Charles Veillon European essay prize.
Source: Giorgio Agamben
