17 Facts About Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life and homo sacer.

Giorgio Agamben participated in Martin Heidegger's Le Thor seminars in 1966 and 1968.

Giorgio Agamben has been a friend and collaborator to such eminent intellectuals as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, Jean-Francois Lyotard and many, many others.

Giorgio Agamben edited Benjamin's collected works in Italian translation until 1996, and called Benjamin's thought "the antidote that allowed me to survive Heidegger".

In 1981, Giorgio Agamben discovered several important lost manuscripts by Benjamin in the archives of the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

Giorgio Agamben has engaged since the nineties in a debate with the political writings of the German jurist Carl Schmitt, most extensively in the study State of Exception.

Giorgio Agamben's political thought was founded on his readings of Aristotle's Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, and treatise On the Soul, as well as the exegetical traditions concerning these texts in late antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Giorgio Agamben proposed his own model of a community which would not presuppose categories of identity in The Coming Community.

Currently, Giorgio Agamben is teaching at Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio and has taught at the Universita IUAV di Venezia, the College International de Philosophie in Paris, and the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland; he previously taught at the University of Macerata and at the University of Verona, both in Italy.

Giorgio Agamben has held visiting appointments at several American universities, from the University of California, Berkeley, to Northwestern University, and at Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf.

Giorgio Agamben received the Prix Europeen de l'Essai Charles Veillon in 2006.

Giorgio Agamben would continue to expand the theory of the state of exception first introduced in "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life", ultimately leading to the "State of Exception" in 2005.

Giorgio Agamben refers a continued state of exception to the Nazi state of Germany under Hitler's rule.

Giorgio Agamben often reminds that Hitler never abrogated the Weimar Constitution: he suspended it for the duration of the Third Reich with the Reichstag Fire Decree, issued on 28 February 1933.

Giorgio Agamben turns to the Franciscans to survey a unique historical incident of a group organising itself with a rule that is their life, and thinking of their own lives not as their own possession but as a communal 'use'; he looks at the ways in which this idea developed and how it eventually lapsed into the Church' law.

Giorgio Agamben is particularly critical of the United States' response to 11 September 2001, and its instrumentalization as a permanent condition that legitimizes a "state of exception" as the dominant paradigm for governing in contemporary politics.

Giorgio Agamben warns against a "generalization of the state of exception" through laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, which means a permanent installation of martial law and emergency powers.