In this volume, the renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has collected all of his fierce, passionate, and deeply personal interventions regarding the current health emergency. Alongside and beyond accusations, these texts variously reflect upon the great transformation affecting Western democracies. In the name of biosecurity and health, the model of bourgeois democracy–together with its rights, parliaments, and constitutions–is everywhere surrendering to a new despotism where citizens seem to accept unprecedented limitations to their freedoms. This leads to the urgency of the volume’s title: Where Are We Now? For how long will we accept living in a constantly extended state of exception, the end of which remains impossible to see?
Author
Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought. In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben completed studies in Law and Philosophy with a doctoral thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil, and participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus as a postdoctoral scholar. He rose to international prominence after the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995. Translated into English in 1998, the book’s analyses of law, life, and state power appeared uncannily prescient after the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, and the resultant shifts in the geopolitical landscape. Provoking a wave of scholarly interest in the philosopher’s work, the book also marked the beginning of a 20-year research project, which represents Agamben’s most important contribution to political philosophy.
