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“The decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict in our culture, is that between the animality and humanity of man,” so that “asking how, in man, man has been separated from non-man and animal from human, is more urgent than taking a position on the big issues, on so-called values and human rights.” This urgency has always been apparent—at least since Aristotelian metaphysics defined the principle of life—but it is manifesting itself with a new, unavoidable urgency today, at a time when it is necessary to sideline the powerful “anthropological machine” that, in the Western tradition, has for centuries articulated, through various conjunctive devices, the body and the soul, animal life and logos, the natural and the supernatural, darkness and light. Following Heidegger, Agamben continues, from another point of view, the reflection conducted in his previous books on the concept of life, and questions the critical threshold that produces the human—a threshold that distinguishes and at the same time approximates the humanity and animality of man, deciding “each time and in each individual of the human and the animal, of nature and history, of life and death.”

Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most hotly debated political philosophers today. His works on the political and legal paradigm of the West have caught the attention of philosophers, sociologists, political scientists and jurists alike, but his significance has been obscured by myths and misunderstandings. His works have been translated into more than 15 languages.