Martin Heidegger

It would be hard to overstate the importance of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy for Giorgio Agamben’s thinking. It is not simply that the Italian philosopher turns at various points in his work to texts and themes from early and later Heidegger, as important as this obviously is. As well as abiding interests in problems of ontology, finitude, facticity and authenticity, Agamben inherits from Heidegger a philosophical programme. That programme is the critique of Western metaphysics: the tradition founded on the neglect, forgetting and oblivion of being, and which – for Agamben as for Heidegger – has reached a point of crisis in modernity after a long historical genesis. Understanding Agamben’s debt to the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics is important for grasping the basic problematic of the Homo Sacer project, for comprehending its grounds and ultimate stakes, and for getting a clearer sense of the positive political philosophy to which he gestures at crucial moments in the series.