★Giorgio Agamben, a leading figure in Italian philosophy and one of the most influential contemporary political philosophers, presents his major new work of 2026. His writings have been translated into more than 20 countries and regions worldwide.
★Taking Hobbes’ theory of the “two bodies” as its starting point, Agamben conducts an in-depth analysis of the inherent, irreconcilable division between the natural body and the political body that haunts Western political thought.
★English translation is available.

At the center of Western politics, at least since Hobbes, lies the body: the flesh-and-blood body of citizens and the artificial one of the “great Leviathan,” the “automaton” or the “mortal God,” formed from the bodies of citizens joined together into a political body. The split—and at the same time the impossible articulation—of these two bodies is the legacy that Hobbes has passed on to Western politics. Agamben’s book investigates, one by one, the contradictions and difficulties in which Western political thought has become entangled in its attempt to constitute a unitary body politic, from the theological doctrine of the king’s two bodies to the theory of the multitudo in Dante and Spinoza and to Marx’s generic being. In the end, it is in the figure of the exile, in whom the natural body and the political body coincide, that these contradictions seem to be resolved, within a perspective in which exile ceases to appear as a marginal political figure and instead asserts itself as a fundamental philosophical-political paradigm—perhaps the only one that, by breaking the dense fabric of the still-dominant political tradition, could make it possible to rethink Western politics from the ground up.

The contradictions instead explode in the European Union, an organism which, insofar as it is in reality nothing more than a pact among states, necessarily lacks a unitary political body. And as long as Europe continues to feign a constitution and a people it cannot have, it will remain in every sense a political corpse, a body politically subservient from time to time to external interests. Perhaps only to a gaze that, in a Europe at twilight, seeks to grasp what has remained alive in its cultural tradition will something like a European political reality become visible for the first time.

Giorgio Agamben has taught at Italian and foreign universities, and his work has been translated into many languages. Among his books we recall the complete edition of Homo Sacer (2018) and, more recently, First Philosophy, Last Philosophy: The Knowledge of the West between Metaphysics and Sciences (2023), The Unburdened Mind. Profanations. Nudities. Fire and the Tale (2023), The Body of Language. esperruquancluzelubelouzerirelu (2024), The Language That Remains. Time, History, Language (2024), Friendships (2025), and At the River’s Mouth (2025). Published by Bollati Boringhieri: Means Without End: Notes on Politics (1996), Remnants of Auschwitz: The Archive and the Witness (1998), The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the “Letter to the Romans” (2000), The Coming Community (2001), The Open: Man and Animal (2002), State of Exception (2003), Nymphs (2007), Signatura Rerum: On Method (2008), The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2009), Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (2012), Karman: A Brief Treatise on Action, Guilt, and Gesture (2017), and Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, Homo Sacer II, 2 (2015; expanded ed. 2019).