Giorgio Agamben

In this course

Agamben's distinction between bare life (zoe) and formed life (bios) provides a critical framework for understanding how contemporary systems—from biopolitics to computational management—reduce human existence to quantifiable, disposable populations stripped of political agency. The course readings invoke Agamben to argue that genuine politics requires confronting what Foucault sidestepped: the sovereign power to designate which lives matter and which can be abandoned, a distinction that becomes urgent when examining how AI and algorithmic systems perpetuate this reduction of humans to mere data or bare existence. His work enables interrogation of whether technological systems, presented as neutral or progressive, actually extend and intensify the biopolitical logic that treats populations as manageable resources rather than as beings capable of self-formation and intentional political becoming.

Background

Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher whose work spans political theory, ontology, aesthetics, and literature. He is best known for developing the concept of homo sacer and exploring the relationship between sovereignty, legal authority, and what he calls 'bare life'. His writings draw on sources including Aristotle, Roman law, Christian theology, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, St. Augustine and Carl Schmitt among others, and engage critically with Michel Foucault’s account of biopolitics and biopower. Agamben’s multi-volume Homo Sacer project has been widely discussed within political philosophy, jurisprudence, anthropology, and the humanities, and he is considered one of the most influential writers in contemporary continental philosophy.

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