Postwar Culture

Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher and radical theorist, whose work on concepts of state of exception, homo sacer, and zoe-bios has profoundly influenced postwar and contemporary art, protest, and cultural criticism. In conversation with theories of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Aby Warburg, Hannah Arendt, Guy Debord, and Antonio Negri, Agamben forged deep ties with Autonomism and the Situationist International in the 1970’s, in particular writing on Debord’s film and The Society of the Spectacle. Agamben’s concepts of political life were fundamental to Tiqqun, a French-Italian left anarchist philosophical journal (1999-2001), as well as the student protest movements post-Autonomia. In 2004, Agamben resigned from his distinguished professorship at New York University in protest against the new U.S. biometric measures.

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Agamben was born in Rome, Italy on April 22, 1942. He pursued post-secondary studies in law and philosophy at the University of Rome, which he concluded in 1965 with a thesis on the political thought of the French philosopher and social revolutionary Simone Weil. From 1966-1968, he was a post-doctoral scholar in Freiburg and participated in Martin Heidegger's 1966 and 1968 seminars on Heraclitus and Hegel. He was also a fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, from 1974-1975. Alongside the theories of Heidegger and Weil, Agamben engaged with works ranging from those of Aristotle, Carl Schmitt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. More broadly, Greek and Roman law, as well as Jewish and Christian theological texts, became crucial influences for Agamben’s trajectory as a thinker of contemporary political life. His social nexus also included numerous postwar filmmakers and writers, such as Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Pierre Klossowski, many of whom Agamben frequently wrote on or collaborated with. 

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Agamben received wide-ranging international attention for his multi-volume project entitled Homo Sacer, which was published between 1995 and 2016.  The project attends to issues of bio-politics, sovereignty, and concepts of zoe and bio under modernity. His concurrent works span aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, and nihilism, such as The Man Without Content (1970), Potentialities (1999), and The Use of Bodies (2016). Agamben received the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize by the University of Tübingen in 2013 and the Italian Premio Nonino Prize, Maestro del nostro tempo, in 2018. Agamben held professorships at the Italian Universities of Macerata and Verona and, until his retirement in 2009, at the Instituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice. He has had visiting appointments at German universities (Düsseldorf and Cologne) as well as at American institutions (UC Berkeley, Northwestern University). He has also taught at the College international de philosophie in Paris.