Agamben's Homo Sacer

3.0 credits · Graduate

This course will examine Giorgio Agamben’s nine-volume Homo Sacer project. Beginning with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) and ending with The Use of Bodies (2015) we will follow Agamben’s thought as it addresses such topics as biopolitics, the legal order, political theology, oikonomia, work and inoperativity, form-of-life, and others. We will also read Agamben in relation to a number of his influences and interlocutors, such as Arendt, Benjamin, Benveniste, Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Kantorowicz, and Schmitt.