Introduction:

Agamben as a Reader
ADAM KOTSKO AND CARLO SALZANI

One of the greatest challenges Giorgio Agamben presents to his readers

is the vast and often bewildering range of sources that he draws upon
in his work. His books, written in an elegant and refined style that is
also extremely dense and almost elliptical, venture into fields as diverse
as aesthetics, religion, politics, law and ethics, with an uncommon
erudition that ranges from ancient sources to medieval, modern and
contemporary works in various disciplines and fields. Moreover, his
peculiar ‘Italian’ style often plays with the ‘unsaid’ and practises the
Benjaminian art of ‘quoting without quotation marks’, so that the
reader is confronted not only by a wide range of sources, but also by a
subtle and not always transparent use of them.
The present volume aims to guide the reader through the maze
of Agamben’s sources, rendering explicit what remains implicit and
providing a reliable guide to his reading of the many figures he draws
from. Yet a preliminary task is required, namely that of unpacking
Agamben’s own idiosyncratic ‘style’ as a reader, his philological/philo-
sophical method of approaching a text, and the peculiar ‘use’ he puts
his sources to. This is no minor task, since not only are Agamben’s style
and method extremely idiosyncratic, often challenging the norms of
traditional philosophical writing, but they are also indissolubly inter-
twined with the ‘content’ of his writings, and are as such an essential
component of his philosophical proposal.
Given the very limited space available to us in this introduction, we
have decided to organise this short attempt around four main concepts,
which constitute, as it were, the backbone and the rationale of his
reading practices: tradition, study, citation and Entwicklungsfähigkeit.
In Agamben’s philosophy, these concepts exceed the realm of mere
methodology and trespass into that of philosophy proper: they are no
mere ‘tools’ of interpretation, but rather flow together into the broad

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 2 Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage

definition of what philosophy is and how philosophical practice is

­supposed to work.

TRADITION
Reading a text is a cultural act embedded within a centuries-old tradi-
tion, which presupposes a set of norms and practices and a cultural
heritage to draw from. From his very beginnings as a philosopher in
the late 1960s, Agamben inserted himself into a philosophical lineage
of critique of the Western cultural heritage – and hence also of its
cultural practices of transmission and reception. His first book, The
Man Without Content, is in this sense paradigmatic: the critique of
the present predicament is construed as an investigation (later called
‘genealogy’ or ‘archaeology’) of its conceptual and ideological roots.
Moreover, the critique of apparently circumscribed phenomena (here
aesthetics) partakes in a much wider critique of Western ‘metaphysics’
as a whole, considered from its very inception. Finally, if the present
is experienced as ‘crisis’, as the extreme and decisive limit of an ‘alien-
ating’ course (‘metaphysics’), the overcoming of the crisis is neither
sought in a regressive return to more ‘authentic’ historical-cultural
stages, nor in a complete rupture that would clear off all traits of the
present, but rather in a full and conscious assumption of this present
as one’s ‘own’.
For our purposes, it is not important that in The Man Without
Content this methodology is still ‘incomplete’ (since the strongly
Heideggerian approach still leads Agamben to postulate modernity as
a radical rupture to be overcome in order to regain a more ‘original’
condition); what is important is rather the fact that the critique of
metaphysical ‘nihilism’ ends up in a critique of tradition and of the pos-
sibility of transmissibility itself. This is a sort of general ‘pattern’ that
Agamben’s subsequent works will follow point-by-point. Beginning
with Stanzas, however, the gap that separates tradition from its trans-
missibility will be extended from modernity to the ‘original’ structure
of metaphysics itself. In Stanzas, the gap is that between knowledge
itself and its object, which, in the fourth and last ‘stanza’ on semiology,
is declined as the metaphysical (and thus ‘originary’) fracture between
signifier and signified (S 135–58). Here Agamben’s strategy vis-à-vis
this crisis of tradition and transmissibility is identified with ‘critique’:
the project of bridging this gap through a word and a knowledge which
merge – and thus deactivate the separation between – philosophy and
poetry, knowledge, possession and enjoyment, towards a ‘liberated’
approach – and ‘use’ – of knowledge and tradition.

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 Introduction 3

The last essay of Infancy and History, ‘Project for a Review’, connects
with the last chapter of The Man Without Content and with the project
of Stanzas by calling for a ‘“destruction” of literary historiography’
(IH 143). Confronted with the irreparable fracture between the cultural
heritage and its transmission, the task of the never-published review
(and of the ‘coming philosophy’) would be to perform a philological
Aufhebung of mythology and transform it into a ‘critical mythology’,
an ‘interdisciplinary discipline’ assimilated to ‘critique’, into which all
human sciences would converge and whose goal would be a ‘general
science of the human’ (IH 146–7). More generally, the thread holding
together the essays collected in Infancy and History is precisely to
confront the modern ‘destruction of experience’ – that is, of a fecund
relation to tradition and cultural heritage – while trying to prepare a
‘likely ground’ in which the ‘germinating seed of future experience’
can mature (IH 15). The reflections about the loss of experience are an
extension of those about the crisis of tradition, and the whole theory
of ‘infancy’ connects with the previous – and subsequent – attempts to
rethink language beyond the deadlock of Western metaphysics.
Language and Death does not depart from this pattern, since the
whole analysis of the metaphysical link that binds language (that is,
Western tradition) and ‘negativity’ (or death) aims at an overcom-
ing of this ‘original’ structure – and thus of Western tradition as
such – towards a liberated ‘post-historical humanity’ (LD 104). The
final excursus is particularly important insofar as it sketches and con-
tains in nuce the core problems of what, a decade later, will become
Agamben’s ambitious political project, and also anticipates its innova-
tive and ground-breaking vocabulary: the problem with Western tradi-
tion is that its ‘original’, metaphysical ‘negativity’, its ‘groundlessness’
(LD xiii), entails a ‘sacrificial’ self-grounding, a foundation in sacrifice,
and thus a paradigmatic sacrum facere that is intrinsically violent and
leads to the ‘inclusionary exclusion’ of the homo sacer and to the sac-
rifice of ‘bare life’. The task of the coming philosophy is thus to over-
come the sacer, the negative and ineffable foundation, and to invent
a praxis and a speech ‘transparent to themselves’ (LD 106). At this
stage – and throughout the 1980s – Agamben’s project focuses on a
‘linguistic’ critique and a ‘linguistic’ project of overcoming of Western
tradition, and through various essays (some of which were later col-
lected in the first part of Potentialities, but also in the literary-poetic
studies of The End of the Poem) and philosophical ‘experiments’ on
and with language (the most important and ‘successful’ being Idea of
Prose) he will consistently carry on the critique begun with The Man
Without Content.

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 4 Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage

The transition to the more overtly ‘political’ project that began in

the 1990s is not so much a rupture as an extension and a widening
of the scope of critique: a critique and an overcoming of metaphysics
through language, which is never left behind, opens a space for, and
almost ‘naturally’ leads to, a quest for a new concept of ethics and a
new concept of politics. This transition is worked out through a series
of short essays at the end of the 1980s, epitomised by ‘Experimentum
Linguae’, which tellingly concludes:

if the most appropriate expression of wonderment at the existence of the

world is the existence of language, what then is the correct expression for
the existence of language? The only possible answer to this question is:
human life, as ethos, as ethical way. The search for a polis and an oikia
befitting this void and unpresupposable community is the infantile task of
future generations. (IH 9–10)

In its essence, Agamben’s ‘political’ project is a critique of the whole

Western tradition and of its deepest structures, whereby language, aes-
thetics, ethics, politics and ontology all merge in an all-encompassing
‘deactivation’ of tradition.
This is precisely the point of the archaeological (or genealogical)
method which results from the ‘graft’ of the Foucauldian method on
to Agamben’s own practice: archaeology searches tradition for the
‘moment of a phenomenon’s arising’ (ST 89) by confronting itself with
the sources and by deactivating the paradigms through which tradition
conditions and regulates access to them. Archaeology thus consists pre-
cisely in the deactivation of tradition and of its sedimented structures
and apparatuses, a deactivation that simultaneously transforms the
archaeologist himself: ‘It is never the emergence of the fact without at
the same time being the emergence of the knowing subject itself: the
operation on the origin is at the same time an operation on the subject’
(ST 89).
It is against this background that we have to read Agamben’s inter-
pretations, uses and ‘bending’ of his sources. His philosophical lineage
is not merely a reservoir from which he draws, but it is rather a tradi-
tion turned against itself, a tradition that, being itself alienated and
‘intransmissible’, is further disavowed, betrayed, warped, ‘deactivated’
and put to a new ‘use’.

S T U DY
Reading as a cultural act – and especially as a philosophical practice –
culminates in study. Study is a learned set of techniques and strategies

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 Introduction 5

implemented in order to acquire and master a given knowledge in a

given discipline, and is a highly defined and regulated practice. But it
is also an ‘idea’ and ‘ideal’, which has defined for centuries the aims
and scope of Western culture, so much so that in the Middle Ages the
term studium defined the university itself. Agamben almost epitomises
the classical idea of the traditional ‘scholar’, the archetypical ‘man of
learning’, extraordinarily erudite (even in comparison to his peers) and
versed in many different disciplines. However, in his case, study does
not remain at the descriptive, utilitarian level of a set of techniques
and methodologies, but is problematised together with the relation
to tradition and transmissibility and enters his specific philosophical
vocabulary, becoming a pillar of his soteriological proposal.
The valence and importance of study in Agamben’s philosophy is
condensed in the extremely compressed and almost elliptical elabora-
tion of one of the ‘ideas’ of Idea of Prose, ‘The Idea of Study’ (IP 63–5).
Here Agamben connects to this ‘idea’ a whole set of notions (‘messian-
ism’, ‘potentiality’, ‘completion’, ‘inoperativity’) which constitute the
core of his soteriology and at the same time epitomise his own idea of
philosophy and of philosophical work. The short text begins with a
historical overview of the circumstances leading to the enthronement of
study at the core of Judaism (Talmud in Hebrew means ‘study’): first
the Babylonian exile and then the second destruction of the Temple
by the Romans forced Judaism to make the Talmud the ‘real temple
of Israel’ and led to a transformation at the heart of Judaism itself,
rendering it ‘a religion which does not engage in worship but makes it
an object of study’. Study therefore acquires a messianic connotation,
insofar as at issue in it is redemption, and thus its goal is salvation itself.
This messianic connotation, however, entails a ‘polarity’, because
study is, by definition, interminable: study is, as such, a labyrinthine
pursuit, since every passage and fragment opens up new, divergent
paths of investigation, which not only hinder a proper ‘termination’,
but make it also undesirable. The person immersed in study is therefore
lost in an interminable maze of stimuli, which renders the compari-
son with the labyrinth less accurate and makes us rather think of the
Baudelarian–Benjaminian modern metropolis. And in fact Agamben
refers then to the etymology of studium – from the root st- or sp-, indi-
cating an impact or collision and the deriving shock – which it shares
with ‘stupefy’ but also with ‘stupid’: lost, stupefied and stunned, the
studioso remains unable to grasp and absorb the amazing amount of
stimuli that are striking him, and is at the same time unwilling to take
leave of them. On the other hand, the messianic nature of study inces-
santly drives it towards completion, towards parousia, and this polarity

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 6 Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage

between interminability and completion constitutes the ‘rhythm’ of

study: a succession of stupor and lucidity, discovery and bewilderment,
passion and action.
This is the very condition, Agamben argues, which Aristotle named
‘potential’: on the one hand potentia passiva, passivity, pure and virtu-
ally infinite passion, and on the other potentia activa, relentless tension
towards completion, incessant drive to ‘actuality’. The scholar’s long
dwelling in potential explains a trait that has been attributed to them
at least since Aristotle’s Problemata (XXX, 953a) and that Agamben
names melancholia philologica, borrowing the definition from the
Italian classical philologist Giorgio Pasquali.1 And there is no doubt
that, if he surmises that Pasquali intended this definition for himself
while feigning to attribute it to Theodor Mommsen, Agamben himself
uses this whole ‘idea’ as a (thinly) disguised self-portrait as much as a
personal discours de la méthode. All these traits that he attributes to
study, however, are not so much a description of the great philologist
or the ‘saintly scholar’, but rather of a figure pitted against traditional,
‘sanctified’ scholarship (and against tradition as a whole): the student,
such as he appears in the writings of Kafka and Robert Walser, and
whose extreme exemplar is to be found in Melville’s scrivener Bartleby.
Unlike the classical figure of the ‘saintly scholar’ lionised by tradition,
these students are ‘failures’, and as such they undermine the whole
construct of cultural transmission and legitimacy. In Bartleby, however,
there occurs the messianic reversal, whereby the messianic polarity of
study is surpassed, or better deactivated: Bartleby, who for Agamben
represents ‘pure potentiality’ (PO 259), is a scrivener who has ceased to
write, and thus his gesture represents a potential that does not precede
but follows its act. This ‘liberated’ potential frees study of its melan-
choly and returns it to its truest nature, which is not the work, but
rather inspiration, ‘the self-nourishment of the soul’.
Bartleby and the students of Kafka and Walser represent a study
released both from the oikonomia of the Western cultural tradition
and from that of its Christian heritage, impassive before, and freed
from, divine judgement and socio-cultural imperatives. This form of
study goes far beyond a simple relation to texts, taking on a messianic
charge that comes to epitomise a fundamental operation in Agamben’s
soteriology: deactivation. In opposition to action and performance,
study brings about a standstill in the workings of cultural apparatuses;
it ‘jams’ the cultural machine, as it were, and opens it up to a new ‘use’.
As such, it also becomes an important component of the pars constru-
ens of Agamben’s project, and is usually linked to interpretations of
Kafka.2

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 Introduction 7

This idea derives in fact from Benjamin, who, in his 1934 essay on
Kafka (and in his correspondence with Scholem), emphasised the mes-
sianic charge of study, and in his short reading of Kafka’s ‘The New
Advocate’ compared Bucephalus’s renunciation of the practice of the
law in order to immerse himself in its study to an opening up of a way
towards justice. Agamben famously took up this interpretation in State
of Exception in order to identify the task of the coming philosophy: not
a destruction (of law, of tradition, of the cultural heritage) followed
by a proactive new foundation, but rather its deactivation. ‘What opens
a passage toward justice’, he writes, ‘is not the erasure of law, but its
deactivation and inactivity [inoperosità] – that is, another use of the
law’ (SE 64). The same point is made in ‘K.’, where Agamben briefly
rehearses his famous interpretation of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ in
Homo Sacer (HS 49–57), adding, however, an unexpected twist: here
what is at stake is not the study of the law, but rather ‘the long study
of its doorkeeper’ in which the man from the country was immersed
throughout his long sojourn before the law. ‘It is thanks to this study,
to this new Talmud’, Agamben writes, ‘that the man from the country
– in opposition to Josef K. – was able to live to the very end outside
the trial’ (NU 31). And it is from the ‘trial’ of tradition that this new
Talmud releases the scholar of the coming philosophy.

C I TAT I O N
This new Talmud jams the workings of the cultural machine in a number
of ways, and one of its peculiar strategic tools is a disruptive theory
of citation. Agamben has often struck his (mostly Anglo-American)
readers as not always complying to the strict rules of academic citation,
not always citing his sources explicitly or properly, declining at times to
name them altogether, and leaving it to the reader to figure them out for
themselves. However, in Agamben this is not the snobbish sloppiness of
the esoteric ‘saintly scholar’ who clouds in obscurity a wisdom reserved
to the ‘initiated’ (a still quite common practice in Italian academia),
but rather a specific strategy of disruption of this very authoritative
tradition.
The last chapter of The Man Without Content opens with a theory of
citation that refers back to Benjamin’s own idiosyncratic citation style
– without citing it properly. Agamben starts the chapter with a quota-
tion from Benjamin’s One-Way Street: ‘Quotations in my work are
like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller
of his conviction’ (MC 104). Benjamin’s theory, Agamben glosses, did
not subscribe to the traditional aims of citation (‘to transmit [the] past

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 8 Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage

and allow the reader to relive it’), but was rather based on the idea of
Entfremdung, whereby alienating a fragment of the past from its his-
torical context ‘makes it lose its character of authentic testimony and
invests it with an alienating power that constitutes its unmistakable
aggressive force’. The true ‘authority’ of a quotation rests precisely on
the ‘destruction of the authority that is attributed to a certain text by
its situation in the history of culture’, and its ‘true content’ emerges
precisely from this violent alienation (MC 104).
Subscribing to Benjamin’s theory, Agamben aims at disrupting what
in Stanzas he calls the ‘vicious circle of authority and citation (the
authority is the source of the citation but the citation is the source
of authority)’, which has transformed cultural transmission (and
contemporary academia) into an ‘“authoritarian” counterfeit’ (S 74).
Throughout his career he has waged a war against ‘academic prose’
because this shelters itself behind a normative blandness, thereby
distancing itself from an authentic experience of language, and in
the 1980s he attempted a series of experiments with language that
renounced the whole apparatus of traditional philosophical prose and
that are exemplified by the complete absence of references in Idea of
Prose. In an interview that he gave for the publication of this book he
said:

Precisely because poetry, just like philosophy, is essentially an experience of

language, nay an experience of language ‘as such’, of what is at issue for man
in the very fact of speaking, the place in which the speaking subject positions
itself must be extremely clear. Footnotes, quotation marks, bibliographical
references, ‘cf.’, they all refer to a subject of knowledge sheltered like a ven-
triloquist behind the speaking subject, as if it were possible to speak from
two places at the same time. This is why current academic prose is so often
unfortunate, torn as it is between an authentic experience of speech, which
cannot have anything to say before measuring itself against speech, and its
defensive castling into a position of knowledge.3

Adopting the ‘art of citing without quotation marks’, Agamben thus

challenges the automatic support of a tradition turned into a ‘fortress of
knowledge’ and vindicates an anti-authoritarian experience of language
which measures its truth value only against its own merits.
At the end of The Time that Remains Agamben again explicitly refers
to Benjamin’s theory of citation in order to argue that, in the theses ‘On
the Concept of History’, Benjamin quoted Paul’s messianism ‘without
quotation marks’, and that it is Paul whom one has to see in the figure
of the hidden, ‘theological’ dwarf of the first thesis (TR 139–40). Here,
however, he makes another important point about a theory of ‘reading’
as such, and thus also about his own reading practice. In his unveiling

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 Introduction 9

of the ‘textual […] and not mere conceptual correspondence’ (TR 144)
between Benjamin’s theses and Paul’s letters, he draws attention to the
identical structure of Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’ and Paul’s concept
of typos: both signify a temporal structure ‘wherein an instant of the
past and an instant of the present are united in a constellation where
the present is able to recognize the meaning of the past and the past
therein finds its meaning and fulfilment’ – and the messianic kairos
is precisely this ‘typological relation’ (TR 142). However, this rela-
tion depends on a ‘historical index’, whereby the image and the typos
become ‘legible’ and ‘knowable’ only at a certain time, which Benjamin
called ‘the now of legibility (or knowability)’: every text ‘contains a
historical index which indicates both its belonging to a determinate
epoch, as well as its only coming forth to full legibility at a determinate
historical moment’ (TR 145). This thesis constitutes a true ‘theory of
reading’ that Benjamin proposed and refined throughout his life, and by
concluding The Time that Remains on this note, Agamben also reveals
something about his own ‘theory of reading’: his reading (and citing)
practice obeys a logic of ‘legibility’ (and ‘citability’) which, by wrench-
ing its source from its historical context, ‘actualises’ it – as Benjamin
would say – by transforming it into something of his own.

E N T W I C K L U N G S FÄ H I G K E I T
What Benjamin called ‘actualisation’ is inflected by Agamben
through a peculiar term that he derives from Ludwig Feuerbach:
Entwicklungsfähigkeit, ‘capacity for elaboration’. In the preface to his
Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der Leibnitz’schen Philosophie
(Presentation, Development and Critique of Leibniz’s Philosophy,
1837), Feuerbach called the ‘essential’ task of philosophy that of
‘immanent elaboration’, which makes of the ‘capacity for elaboration
[Entwicklungsfähigkeit] the very mark of what philosophy is’. The
elaboration is, for Feuerbach, the ‘decipherment of the true meaning
of a philosophy, the unveiling of what is positive in it, the presenta-
tion of its idea within the historically determined and finite conditions
which have defined this idea’; therefore ‘[t]he possibility of elaboration
is the idea itself’.4 This is why, for example, unlike Leibniz’s, Locke’s
philosophy does not possess this capacity for elaboration, because in it
everything is already stated and self-contained.
Agamben cites Feuerbach’s thesis in various interviews and in the
preface to The Signature of All Things precisely to define his relation
to the authors who have marked his life and career. The point of this
relation lies in something the source has left ‘unsaid’: this is ‘the germ,

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 10 Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage

what has been left unsaid and can thus be developed, resumed. I have
always followed this line.’5 This ‘germ’ is the ‘potentiality’ of a work
that, while present, remains unstated and undeveloped, and thus is left
for others to unveil and elaborate in different ways. It is also, as for
Feuerbach, what marks and distinguishes the true ‘idea’ of a work (ST
7–8).
This, however, leads to a relation and interaction between the phi-
losopher and his sources that borders on a commingling: as Agamben
again states in the preface to The Signature of All Things, ‘[i]t is pre-
cisely when one follows such a principle that the difference between
what belongs to the author of a work and what is attributable to the
interpreter becomes as essential as it is difficult to grasp’ (ST 8). The
philosophical ‘idea’, which lies in potentia in a work, can be taken in
directions unforeseen – and perhaps undesired – by the author, and thus
transformed into something no longer attributable to them. This point
marks many of the controversial ‘corrections’ of other philosophers’
ideas that Agamben has proposed in his career (most [in]famously of
Foucault, but also of Benjamin, Heidegger and others). But, to return to
Feuerbach, this is precisely the true task of philosophy: ‘Elaboration is
difficult, whereas critique is easy. […] True critique lies in elaboration
itself, because the latter is possible only through the separation of the
essential from the accidental, of the necessary from the contingent, of
the objective from the subjective.’6
Finally, Agamben also applies this practice to his own works and
ideas: archaeology, he writes, ‘must retrace its own trajectory back to
the point where something remains obscure and unthematized. Only a
thought that does not conceal its own unsaid – but constantly takes it up
and elaborates it – may eventually lay claim to originality’ (ST 8). Each
completed work – including the author’s own – contains within itself
something left ‘unsaid’ which demands to be further elaborated and
taken up, perhaps by someone else. It is therefore telling that Agamben
warns the readers of the final volume of the Homo Sacer series that they
will not find a ‘conclusion’ in this book: his twenty-year-long investiga-
tion, ‘like every work of poetry and of thought, cannot be concluded
but only abandoned (and perhaps continued by others)’ (UB xiii). This
is a quotation from the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti that Agamben
had been repeating in interviews, conferences and seminars during the
years leading up to the publication of The Use of Bodies.7 The ‘poten-
tiality’ of a work is not exhausted by the last brushstroke or the last
word – in fact, it can never be exhausted, and its true philosophical
‘idea’ lies precisely in its inexhaustible potential which traverses epochs
and generations. If, as Agamben states, ‘philosophy does not have a

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 Introduction 11

content purely of its own’,8 then this Feuerbachian ‘idea’ is perhaps the
true ‘idea of philosophy’.

T H E S T RU C T U R E O F T H I S VO L U M E
Each chapter of the present volume provides an overview of the most
important passages in which Agamben addresses the source in ques-
tion, then discusses any ways in which Agamben’s reading is unique
or distinctive. The work is divided into three broad sections: the first,
‘Primary Interlocutors’, features more lengthy essays on Agamben’s
most important sources; the second, ‘Points of Reference’, includes
figures who are discussed in a more occasional or secondary way;
the third, ‘Submerged Dialogues’, focuses on figures who seem to be
lurking in the background of Agamben’s arguments even though he
mentions them only fleetingly, if at all.
Yet a final remark is in order, namely about the rationale that led us
to include and, more importantly, exclude some of Agamben’s sources.
While we hope that few readers of Agamben would dispute the figures
included in the first section, the second (or even the third) section of this
volume could have included any number of other figures: for example,
Augustine, Averroes, Maurice Blanchot, Odo Casel, Hobbes, Furio Jesi,
Max Kommerell, Lévi-Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas, Nicole Loraux, Erik
Peterson, Rilke, Jacob Taubes, Yan Thomas, Wittgenstein, to name
only a few possibilities. We would have liked to include many more
figures, but felt that we had to balance inclusiveness with the need to
prevent the volume from becoming unwieldy.
There is no one answer as to why any given figure was left aside in
favour of another. In some cases, the decision came down to the con-
tingencies of the editors’ academic networks: there were times when we
simply could not find someone who was both able to address a certain
figure and able to produce the chapter within a reasonable amount of
time. Yet that consideration only came up for figures we viewed as
less essential – if we could not have found a suitable author to cover
Aristotle or Schmitt, for example, we simply would not have pursued
this project at all – and several factors contributed to that determi-
nation. For instance, while recognising that this distinction is often
blurred, we did not generally commission chapters about figures whom
Agamben treats primarily as scholars rather than as philosophical
interlocutors. In some cases, this standard seemed easy to apply (Casel,
Thomas), while in others it was more difficult to decide (Loraux,
Peterson). We also tended to cut figures whose influence was limited
to only one or two of Agamben’s works (e.g., Kommerel, Levinas or

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 12 Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage

Taubes) or who seemed to be important only for one particular concept

or motif (e.g., Wittgenstein and ‘form-of-life’). In some cases, we left a
figure aside if their influence was somehow subsumed by another – for
instance, Hobbes’s place in Agamben’s work is heavily determined by
Schmitt, and Rilke is primarily a foil for Hölderlin. And finally, we
did not generally pursue figures who have had a profound personal
impact on Agamben but seldom if ever appear directly in his texts (e.g.,
Pasolini or Elsa Morante).
We understand that this explanation will not satisfy every reader
who believes a crucial interlocutor has been omitted. But we believe
that everyone who has read Agamben with understanding will rec-
ognise that any true work of commentary on Agamben can never be
completed, but only abandoned – and perhaps taken up by others.

N OT E S
1. Giorgio Pasquali, ‘Il testamento di Teodoro Mommsen’ (1951), in Pagine
stravaganti di un filologo, vol. II, ed. Carlo Ferdinando Russo (Florence: Le
Lettere, 1994), pp. 383–96.
2. And in fact ‘The Idea of Study’ was reprinted, one year after the publication
of Idea of Prose, as the fourth of the ‘Quattro glosse a Kafka’ [‘Four Glosses
on Kafka’], under the title ‘The Students’; cf. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Quattro
glosse a Kafka’, Rivista di estetica 26 (1986): 37–44, here pp. 42–4.
3. Adriano Sofri, ‘Un’idea di Giorgio Agamben’, an interview with Giorgio
Agamben, Reporter, 9–10 November 1985, p. 32.
4. Ludwig Feuerbach, Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der Leibnitz’schen
Philosophie, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3: Geschichte der neuern
Philosophie, part 2, ed. Werner Schuffenhauer (Berlin: Akademische
Verlag, 1969), pp. 3, 4 (emphases in the original).
5. Roberto Andreotti and Federico de Melis, ‘I ricordi per favore no’, an inter-
view with Giorgio Agamben, Atlas 420 (9 September 2006): 2.
6. Feuerbach, Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der Leibnitz’schen
Philosophie, p. 4.
7. See, for example, the interview by Juliette Cerf of 10 March 2012,
‘Le philosophe Giorgio Agamben: “La pensée, c’est le courage du dés-
espoir”’, http://www.telerama.fr/idees/le-philosophe-giorgio-agamben-la-
pensee-c-est-le-courage-du-desespoir,78653.php (accessed 24 April 2017).
Giacometti repeated this statement on several occasions, for example in
the film interview with Jean-Marie Drot, Un homme parmi les hommes:
Alberto Giacometti (1963).
8. Gianluca Sacco, ‘Intervista a Giorgio Agamben: dalla teologia politica
alla teologia economica’, 8 March 2004, qtd. in Leland de la Durantaye,
Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2009), p. 9.

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