In 2004 the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben was scheduled to spend the spring semester as a visiting professor at NYU. On January 5 of that year, however, the Department of Homeland Security launched a new program to collect fingerprints from foreign visitors. Though EU citizens were exempted, three days later Agamben announced that “personally, I have no intention of submitting myself to such procedures,” and he refused to come to the US. In a statement first published in La Repubblica, he warned that collecting fingerprints marked a new “threshold in the control and manipulation of bodies”—what Michel Foucault had named “biopolitics.” Agamben described fingerprint collection as a perfect example of this tyranny over bodies and called it “biopolitical tattooing,” analogous to the tattooing of numbers on prisoners’ arms at Auschwitz.
Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben began his career in the 1970s and 1980s as what Adam Kotsko, who has translated many of his books into English, calls “a hermetic aesthetic thinker” mainly interested in problems of language. But starting with the publication of his book Homo Sacer in 1995 he became, Kotsko writes, “one of the foremost political minds of our era.” In nine densely argued and dizzyingly erudite books published over the next two decades, Agamben investigated the concepts of law, sovereignty, and power in the Western political tradition.
These books—retroactively designated as the Homo Sacer project and collected in a 1,300-page volume, The Omnibus Homo Sacer (2017)—argued (among other things) that “today it is not the city but rather the [concentration] camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.” Plato and Aristotle thought of politics on the model of the city or polis, a public realm where people came together to make decisions. But Agamben writes that state power has invaded the private, bodily realm and is now exercised directly over human bodies. Auschwitz, for him, is not an aberrant evil but the ultimate expression of the modern state’s drive to reduce human beings to “bare life,” creatures that can be exterminated at will.
In making this case, Agamben seldom engages directly with current events. When he writes about the danger of a government suspending its laws during a “state of exception” or the way technology is used to extend official surveillance and control, he is more likely to find his examples in ancient Rome or Weimar Germany than the present. But Agamben’s concepts could easily be mapped onto the post–September 11 world, where America’s “war on terror” was used to justify torture and the detention of suspects without charge. So when he refused to be fingerprinted to enter the US, his admirers praised him for putting theory into practice.
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck sixteen years later, Agamben made another public intervention. Italy was the first European country to be hit hard by the coronavirus, recording some 28,000 deaths by the end of April 2020, and the government imposed a national lockdown. To Agamben it was once again clear that the state was taking advantage of a crisis to declare a state of exception and expand its biopolitical control, and he began to denounce Covid lockdowns.
“Why were there no protests and opposition, as is usually the case in these situations?” he asked in March 2020 in a short text titled “Reflections on the Plague.” The reason was that “people no longer believe in anything other than a bare biological existence”; to save their skins, they were ready to turn themselves into the very “bare life” that Agamben had long seen as the ultimate degradation. He warned that, having renounced its freedoms in the name of safety, the Western public would find it difficult to reclaim them: “The fear of losing one’s life can only serve as the foundation of tyranny, of the monstrous Leviathan with his unsheathed sword.”
But while resistance to the “war on terror” had been a progressive cause in the US, resistance to Covid protocols was a reactionary one, and this time Agamben’s admirers were consternated. “What Happened to Giorgio Agamben?” Kotsko asked in an article in Slate. An article on Verso’s website was more succinct: “Agamben WTF?” The truth, however, is that Agamben’s reasoning in 2020 was entirely consistent with his reasoning in 2004. He had said all along that when governments take charge of matters of health, reproduction, and bodily autonomy, they will ultimately exercise power over life and death; that is the meaning of biopolitics.
Indeed, when conspiracy theorists claimed that Covid vaccines were merely a cover for Bill Gates to inject Americans with tracking devices, they were telling a folk version of the same story Agamben had told about fingerprinting being a kind of “biopolitical tattooing.” In both cases, of course, his dire prophecies proved false. Covid restrictions disappeared along with Covid; Italians are no less free in 2025 than they were in 2019. And Americans have yet to be issued Auschwitz-style tattoos.
Agamben’s inglorious interventions into political debates do not diminish his achievements as a philosopher, but they do make clear that seeing him as a political philosopher was always a category mistake. In Self-Portrait in the Studio, a short autobiographical text first published in Italian in 2017 and now translated into English, he writes that he considers philosophy a “poetic practice,” a “supreme music.” Another way of putting it is that his writing strives primarily to be beautiful rather than true, or, at any rate, that the kind of truth it offers has to do with evoking the human condition, not accurately interpreting politics and society.
This poetic understanding of the philosopher’s calling is one of Agamben’s legacies from Martin Heidegger. Self-Portrait is structured as a series of meditations on objects in his writing studio—photographs, books, artworks—and the first is a photo of the young Agamben with the aged Heidegger in 1966, at one of his famous late seminars in Le Thor in Provence. Agamben remembers this as a transformative experience: “In life there are events and meetings that are so decisive that it is impossible for them to enter into reality completely…. These meetings never cease to accompany us until the end.”
The power of Heidegger’s thought comes in large part from the way he turns philosophy into historical detective work. Writing after World War I, he begins from the premise that modern European civilization has gone catastrophically wrong and looks to the history of philosophy to explain why. His thesis is that, starting with Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have taken for granted that “to be” means to be a thing—physical, perceptible, available for manipulation and use. In doing so, they lost sight of what Heidegger claims was the more primal understanding of the pre-Socratic Greeks, which was oriented not toward individual beings but toward Being itself.
Because the West’s original sin is metaphysical, correcting it requires retracing the history of Western philosophy to locate where our understanding of Being went wrong. That is why most of Heidegger’s writing takes the form of very close readings of his predecessors, from Aristotle to Descartes to Kant. In his magnum opus, Being and Time, Heidegger called this kind of reading Destruktion—a term that Jacques Derrida later rendered as “deconstruction,” to emphasize that it does not simply mean destroying a text but reverse engineering it to uncover its errors. As Heidegger writes, “To bury the past in nullity is not the purpose of this destruction; its aim is positive.”
Agamben’s themes and points of reference are different from Heidegger’s, but what one might call the “plot” of his work—the story he tells about the history of Western thought, the way he deconstructs its sources, and the alternative future he proposes—is similar. In the Homo Sacer project, he frequently suggests that a reckoning with the Western political tradition is urgently necessary because our lives have become more lawless and more vulnerable than ever before. “What confronts us today is a life that as such is exposed to a violence without precedent precisely in the most profane and banal ways,” he wrote in Homo Sacer. Eight years later, in State of Exception (2003), he wrote that the state of exception, in which governments absolve themselves from legal constraints and assert the power to kill anyone for any reason, “has continued to function almost without interruption from World War One, through fascism and National Socialism, and up to our own time.” Indeed, “the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment.”
One might have thought that a citizen of Europe in 2003 was a great deal safer from state violence than one in 1943, when World War II was raging and Auschwitz was operating at peak capacity. But as we have seen, this kind of merely empirical consideration has never carried much weight with Agamben. The absence of actual death camps does not impair his conviction that “the camp…is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living.”
How did we get here? Historians might answer the question by looking at great events, forces, and personalities, but Agamben is a philosopher, and he believes that our destiny is forged first of all by ideas. Sometimes these are the kinds of ideas that Heidegger investigated—the concepts of seminal thinkers. Homo Sacer begins by examining Aristotle’s use of two different Greek words for “life”: zoe, which Agamben says “expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings,” and bios, “which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group.” As zoe, one might say, we eat and reproduce and age; as bios, we consider and argue and vote. For Aristotle, bios was superior to zoe in the same way that the city is superior to the household.
But in the modern world, Agamben argues, the boundary between these kinds of life has disappeared, with disastrous results. The “decisive event of modernity,” he writes, was “the entry of zoē into the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare life as such.” This was the origin of Foucault’s biopolitics, in which the state radically expands its power over our lives and bodies. “Placing biological life at the center of its calculations,” Agamben writes, “the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life.”
To illuminate this modern plight, Agamben turns to the term homo sacer, which is drawn from Roman jurisprudence. While it could be literally translated as “holy man,” the homo sacer was actually an outlaw, someone who had been placed outside the protection of the legal system and so could be killed by anyone without punishment. In Agamben’s repeated formula, “life that cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed is sacred life.” The homo sacer is thus deeply paradoxical: he cannot be sacrificed to the gods in an act of official violence, because in a sense he already belongs to the gods, being sacred. Yet removing him from the human realm renders him defenseless against unofficial violence.
Agamben’s historical investigation of the concept of homo sacer resembles in form Heidegger’s research into Greek concepts of Being. But Agamben often seems to be projecting his own philosophical agenda onto the past rather than discovering momentous truths. (Arguably that is what Heidegger did, too, but he did it more convincingly.) For instance, he asserts that politics, for Aristotle, was an expression of bios, not zoe, even though Aristotle designated the human being as a politikon zoon, a political animal. Agamben acknowledges this and tries to defend his distinction, but it seems clear that it is not really Aristotle’s.
It should instead be credited to Hannah Arendt, whom Agamben acknowledges as one of his most important influences. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt observed that the first step in the Nazi genocide was to strip German Jews of citizenship, thus putting them outside the legal order and reducing them to what Agamben would later call “bare life.” In Self-Portrait, he remembers getting Arendt’s New York address from Heidegger, her longtime teacher, lover, and friend, and sending her one of his first essays. “Once again, it appears to me that a mysterious connection binds the people who were dear to me in various ways,” he reflects.
More often, however, Agamben’s focus is not on major figures like Aristotle or Arendt but on minor writers and obscure concepts that cannot plausibly be considered significant influences on the European mind. The concept of homo sacer originated in the Roman Republic and was already antique and ambiguous by the time of the Empire; to illuminate it, Agamben cites Pompeius Festus, a second-century grammarian, and Macrobius, a fifth-century writer. So when he says later in the book that Hobbes’s state of nature should be understood as “a condition in which everyone is bare life and a homo sacer for everyone else,” he cannot mean that this is how Hobbes understood it, because the concept of the homo sacer did not exist for him. Rather, it is a fragment of erudition that Agamben has repurposed as a symbol or metaphor.
This is an essentially poetic way of thinking, and Agamben’s writing lies at the intersection of poetry and philology. In Self-Portrait in the Studio, he calls philology—the close study of classical texts and languages—“one of my most enduring temptations…which I have never been able to separate from philosophy.” The word “temptation” is fitting, since Agamben’s books are apt to wander away from their arguments to revel in abstruse details for their own sake.
This tendency is most pronounced in The Kingdom and the Glory (2007), the fifth and longest book in the Homo Sacer project. Here Agamben explores the origins of concepts like sovereignty, glory, and providence in Christian theology. It is a cabinet of curiosities where the reader encounters—to take some examples at random—“Matthew of Acquasparta’s questions on providence,” “the bishops assembled at Serdica by Emperor Constantius in 343,” and a papal decree of 1245 in which Innocent IV stripped power from King Sancho II of Portugal and assigned it to Sancho’s brother Afonso of Boulogne.
Such baroque erudition can be delightful or tedious, depending on the reader’s taste, but it is hard to see how it tells us anything essential about the Western political tradition. Rather, Agamben uses his references like mosaic tiles, building up an image of a political utopia that would transcend what he calls “the governmental machine.” This transcendence, he writes, finds “its exemplary symbol…in the image of the empty throne,” which “adorns the triumphal arches and apses of the paleo-Christian and Byzantine basilicas.”
In Christian iconography the empty throne is an emblem of divine majesty, but for Agamben it serves as a metaphor for the radical subversion of power—not just the power of this or that state or ruler but power itself. In its place, Agamben exalts an ideal he calls “inoperativity,” which “does not mean inertia or inactivity…but a form of action that implies neither suffering nor effort.” If government means controlling human beings in order to accomplish certain goals, then liberation requires freeing ourselves from the very notions of goal and accomplishment.
In the last book in the Homo Sacer project, The Use of Bodies (2014), Agamben coins the term “form-of-life” to describe this new way of living. “Form-of-life, the properly human life,” he writes, “is the one that, by rendering inoperative the specific works and functions of the living being, causes them to idle, so to speak, and in this way opens them into possibility.” The poetic and religious quality of Agamben’s thought is never more apparent than when he discusses form-of-life, for like all visions of redemption, it can be described only by negation and paradox: “In the idea of a ‘form-of-life,’ just like existence and essence, so also do zoè and bios, living and life contract into one another and fall together.”
The theoretical definition of form-of-life is seldom more lucid than this, but what it means to Agamben becomes clearer in scattered examples that function almost as parables. In The Use of Bodies he mentions Fernand Deligny, a twentieth-century French pioneer of what is now called special education. “Deligny never sought to recount the life of the autistic children with whom he lived,” Agamben writes; instead, “he attempted to scrupulously transcribe on tracing paper the routes of their movements and encounters in the form of what he called ‘lines of drift.’” The simple, habitual movements of nonverbal children, Agamben suggests, are a form-of-life: they cannot and need not be explained, they simply are.
In Self-Portrait, Agamben offers an even more surprising emblem of utopia: a “photograph of a girl urinating” that he once displayed in his studio in Venice. He hints that the picture has some private meaning for him, which “I don’t think I would like to explain.” But it also has a philosophical meaning. Urination is the kind of bodily function Aristotle disparaged as vegetative, merely biological, as opposed to the sensitive and intellectual life that makes us truly human. This ancient distinction between body and mind, private and public, zoe and bios, is exactly what Agamben hopes to abolish. “Urination is entirely homogeneous with thought,” Agamben insists, and “plants are…a form of life in every way superior to ours.”
It is difficult to say what a political order built on the model of autism and urination would look like in concrete terms. But Agamben concludes The Use of Bodies by insisting that, whatever his readers and commentators may have thought, the Homo Sacer project “did not propose to critique or correct this or that concept, this or that institution of Western politics.” Rather, his goal was “to call into question the place and the very originary structure of politics.”
Another way of putting it is that Agamben challenges the definition of human beings as political animals, which has been at the foundation of Western thought since Aristotle. Perhaps that is what we have always been in practice, he suggests, but it is not our essence, and since living politically has led to world wars, the Holocaust, and a perpetual “state of exception,” we must begin to look for other, more essential ways to live.
Of course, Agamben is not the first philosopher to reach this conclusion. Diogenes, a contemporary of Aristotle’s, was notorious for urinating and defecating in public and sleeping inside a large ceramic jar in the marketplace—behavior that earned him the nickname Cynic, meaning “doglike.” Agamben appears in Self-Portrait in the Studio as an exquisitely civilized person—so much so that he hardly seems to know anyone who is not a famous thinker, writer, or artist—but he shares this longing to sabotage or short-circuit the ways of the world.
More immediately, Agamben’s ideal of inoperativity is influenced by the thought of Heidegger, whom he fatefully encountered six decades ago. After tracing the fatal flaw of Western metaphysics from Plato to the twentieth century, Heidegger came to the conclusion that the only way to escape it was to embrace a new ethic of Gelassenheit, “letting go” (or “releasement,” as it is often translated). Agamben’s late work, too, celebrates a kind of passivity as an antidote to the West’s addiction to assertion and domination.
Heidegger took the term Gelassenheit from the Christian mysticism of Meister Eckhart, just as Agamben draws inspiration from Christian theology and monasticism. Any thinker who aims at the redemption of our fallen world will inevitably pass over from politics and philosophy to religion and literature, because only the latter speak of the good and the beautiful, while the former are confined to the true. Whether that limitation is a blessing or a curse depends on what we turn to a thinker for. In Agamben’s case, it seems wise to take him at his word in Self-Portrait in the Studio: “I became a philosopher in order to deal with a poetic aporia that I could not get to the bottom of. In this sense, I am perhaps not a philosopher but a poet.”
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