The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In "Homo Sacer, " Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed--a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals.

【作者簡介】

吉奧喬·阿甘本（1942— ） 意大利哲學界和激進政治理論界的領袖人物。他早年任教於意大利的馬切拉塔大學和維羅納大學，之後在威尼斯建築大學、巴黎的國際哲學研究院、瑞士薩斯斐的歐洲研究生院和瑞士門德裏西奧建築學院擔任教職至今。另外，他還是美國西北大學與加州大學伯剋利分校的客座教授。

阿甘本深受海德格爾和本雅明思想的熏陶，曾參加過海德格爾關於黑格爾和赫拉剋利特的研討班，主持過本雅明著作意大利譯本的翻譯工作。他對歐陸哲學、政治思想、宗教研究以及文學和藝術的融會貫通，使他成為我們時代最具挑戰性的思想傢之一，其著作已對很多學科産生瞭重要影響。代錶作另有《王國與榮耀》《例外狀態》《萬物的簽名》《奧斯維辛的殘餘》等。

【譯者簡介】

吳冠軍 華東師範大學政治學係教授、博士生導師、係學術委員會副主任，並兼任《華東師範大學學報》英文版執行主編、上海紐約大學雙聘教授、澳大利亞墨納士大學（Monash University）客座研究員、復旦大學社會科學高等研究院客座研究員。代錶性學術著作有《多元的現代性》《日常現實的變態核心》《愛與死的幽靈學》《現時代的群學》《第十一論綱》《巨龍幻想》（英文）等。