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.

【作者简介】

吉奥乔·阿甘本（1942— ） 意大利哲学界和激进政治理论界的领袖人物。他早年任教于意大利的马切拉塔大学和维罗纳大学，之后在威尼斯建筑大学、巴黎的国际哲学研究院、瑞士萨斯斐的欧洲研究生院和瑞士门德里西奥建筑学院担任教职至今。另外，他还是美国西北大学与加州大学伯克利分校的客座教授。

阿甘本深受海德格尔和本雅明思想的熏陶，曾参加过海德格尔关于黑格尔和赫拉克利特的研讨班，主持过本雅明著作意大利译本的翻译工作。他对欧陆哲学、政治思想、宗教研究以及文学和艺术的融会贯通，使他成为我们时代最具挑战性的思想家之一，其著作已对很多学科产生了重要影响。代表作另有《王国与荣耀》《例外状态》《万物的签名》《奥斯维辛的残余》等。

【译者简介】

吴冠军 华东师范大学政治学系教授、博士生导师、系学术委员会副主任，并兼任《华东师范大学学报》英文版执行主编、上海纽约大学双聘教授、澳大利亚墨纳士大学（Monash University）客座研究员、复旦大学社会科学高等研究院客座研究员。代表性学术著作有《多元的现代性》《日常现实的变态核心》《爱与死的幽灵学》《现时代的群学》《第十一论纲》《巨龙幻想》（英文）等。