Giorgio Agamben

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Giorgio Agamben bigraphy, stories - Political philosopher

Giorgio Agamben : biography

22 April 1942 –

Giorgio Agamben (born 22 April 1942) is an Italian Continental philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception and homo sacer.Generally speaking, "state of exception" includes German Notstand, English state of emergency and others martial law. Agamben prefers using this term as it underlines the structure of ex-ception, which is simultaneously of inclusion and exclusion. "Ex-ception" can be opposed to the concept of "example" as developed by Kant.

Agamben is currently teaching at Accademia di Architettura, Mendrisio (Switzerland – Università della Svizzera Italiana) and has taught at the Università IUAV di Venezia, the Collège 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.See: Faculty profile at European Graduate School He also has held visiting appointments at several American universities, from the University of California, Berkeley, to Northwestern University, Evanston, and at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf.

Agamben received the Prix Européen de l’Essai Charles Veillon in 2006. Prix Européen de l’Essai. 2006

Art film

Agamben was interviewed in the 2003 "video-film-tract" , contributing to an analysis of the Black Bloc and anarchist participation in the 20–22 July 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy.

Biography

Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where he wrote an unpublished thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. Agamben participated in Martin Heidegger’s Le Thor seminars (on Heraclitus and Hegel) in 1966 and 1968.See Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003). In the 1970s, he worked primarily on linguistics, philology, poetics, and topics in medieval culture. During this period, Agamben began to elaborate his primary concerns, although their political bearings were not yet made explicit. In 1974–1975 he was a fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, due to the courtesy of Frances Yates, whom he met through Italo Calvino. During this fellowship, Agamben began to develop his second book, Stanzas (1977).

Agamben was close to the poets Giorgio Caproni and José Bergamín, and to the Italian novelist Elsa Morante, to whom he devoted the essays "The Celebration of the Hidden Treasure" (in The End of the Poem) and "Parody" (in Profanations). He has been a friend and collaborator to such eminent intellectuals as Pier Paolo Pasolini (in whose The Gospel According to St. Matthew he played the part of Philip), Italo Calvino (with whom he collaborated, for a short while, as counsellor of the publishing house Einaudi and developed plans for a journal), Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, Jean-François Lyotard and others.

His strongest influences include Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. Agamben edited Benjamin’s collected works in Italian translation until 1996, and called Benjamin’s thought "the antidote that allowed me to survive Heidegger."Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 53. In 1981, Agamben discovered several important lost manuscripts by Benjamin in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Benjamin had left these manuscripts to Georges Bataille when he fled Paris shortly before his death. The most relevant of these to Agamben’s own later work were Benjamin’s manuscripts for his theses On the Concept of History.See de la Durantaye, p. 148-49. 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 (2003). His recent writings also elaborate on the concepts of Michel Foucault, whom he calls "a scholar from whom I have learned a great deal in recent years".Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone, 2009), p. 7.