Agamben, Giorgio (1942–)

Abstract Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher, was born in Rome. He was influenced primarily by Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. The main topics covered by Giorgio Agamben's philosophy are ontology, language, potentiality, community, life, and biopolitics. From his earliest works, both ontology and language have played a central role. Agamben argues that there is an ontological fracture between the merely living being and the speaking being, language and life. This ontological fracture is the basis of his Homo sacer project, which studies the origin of western politics. For Agamben, ontology is important to political thought, since, ontology itself is immediately political. The fundamental political fracture is that between the human and the merely living being. Ontology is an “operation” where this relation can emerge. In fact, Agamben asserts that ontology is not an academic discipline, but rather a fundamental human becoming of the living being.