Giorgio Agamben

Italian philosopher (b. 1942)

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Born 1942 · age 84Italy

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Wikipedia
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Age
84
Born 1942
Known for
The Gospel According t…
1965

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

Italian philosopher whose idea of "bare life" — the zone where law strips people to raw biological existence — became the sharpest lens for reading sovereignty's dark edge. His work asks what happens when the state decides who counts as fully human.

Biography

About

Born 22 April 1942, Agamben built a body of thought drawing on Aristotle, Roman law, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Carl Schmitt, interrogating how legal authority carves out spaces where normal rights vanish. His multi-volume Homo Sacer project, beginning with Sovereign Power and Bare Life in 1995 and continuing through State of Exception (2003), The Kingdom and the Glory (2007), and The Use of Bodies (2014), positioned him as one of continental philosophy's most influential voices, debated across political theory, jurisprudence, anthropology, and the humanities. He taught at universities in Verona…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben

said2009

In the eyes of authority – and maybe rightly so – nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man.

— What is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays (2009), Stanford University Press, p. 35.

Giorgio Agamben

said2005

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.

— Chapter Four, p. 64.

Giorgio Agamben

said1993