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'''Giorgio Agamben''' (born [[1942]]) is an [[Italy|Italian]] [[philosopher]] who teaches at the University of [[Verona]]. He also holds a professorship at the [[European Graduate School]], teaches at the [[:fr:Collège international de philosophie|Collège International de Philosophie]] in [[Paris]] and at the [[University of Macerata]] in Italy, and has held visiting appointments at several American universities. He became famous for his investigations on the [[concept]]s of [[state of emergency|state of exception]] and ''[[Homo sacer]]'' {{ref|stateofexception}}.

Giorgio Agamben is particularly critical of the United States' response to [[September 11, 2001 attacks|September 11, 2001]], and its instrumentalization as a permanent condition that legitimizes a [[state of exception]] as the dominant paradigm for governing in contemporary politics. He warns against a "generalization of the state of exception" through laws like the [[USA PATRIOT Act]], which means a permanent installment of [[martial law]] and [[emergency powers]]. In January 2004, he refused to give a lecture in the United States because under the [[US-VISIT]] he would have been required to give up his [[biometric]] information, which he believed stripped him to a state of "bare life" (''zoe'') and was akin to the [[tattooing]] that the [[Nazis]] did during World War II {{ref|Lemonde}}{{ref|Truthout}}.

Since its origins, Agamben notes, law has had the power of defining what "bare life" (''zoe'', as opposed to ''bios'': qualified life) is by making this exclusive operation, while at the same time gaining power over it by making it the subject of political control. The power of law to actively separate "political" beings (citizens) from "bare life" (bodies) has carried on from [[Ancient history|Antiquity]] to [[Modernity]] -- from, literally, [[Aristotle]] to [[Auschwitz]]. Aristotle, as Agamben notes, constitutes political life via a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of "bare life": as Aristotle says, man is an animal born to [[life]] (''zen''), but existing with regard to the [[eudemonia|good life (''eu zen'')]] which can be achieved through politics. Bare life, in this ancient conception of politics, is that which must be transformed, via the State, into the "good life"; that is, bare life is that which is supposedly excluded from the higher aims of the state, yet is included precisely so that it may be transformed into this "good life." Sovereignty, then, is conceived from ancient times as a state of exception. According to Agamben, [[biopower]], which takes the bare lives of the citizens into its political calculations, may be more marked in the modern state, but has essentially existed since the beginnings of sovereignty in the West, since this structure of ''ex-ception'' is essential to the core concept of sovereignty {{ref|biopower}}.

Agamben shows that ''auctoritas'' and ''[[potestas]]'' are clearly distinct - although they form together a [[Wiktionary:binary|binary]] system" {{ref|Agamben}}. He quotes [[Theodor Mommsen|Mommsen]], who explains that ''auctoritas'' is "less than an [[order]] and more than an advice" {{ref|Mommsen}}.

:"To understand modern phenomenons such as the fascist ''[[Duce]]'' or the nazi ''[[Führer]]'', it is important not to forget their continuity with the principe of ''auctoritas principis'' {Agamben refers here to Augustus's ''Res Gestae''}. {...} Neither does the ''Duce'' nor the ''Führer'' represent constitutionally defined public charges - even though Mussolini and Hitler endorsed respectively the charge of head of government and Reich's chancellor, just as Augustus endorsed the ''imperium consulare'' or the ''potestas tribunicia''. The ''Duce'' 's or the ''Führer'' 's qualities are immediately related to the physical person and belong to the [[biopolitical]] tradition of ''auctoritas'' and not to the juridical tradition of ''potestas'' " {{ref|6.7}}

:"It is significative that modern specialists were so enclined to admit that ''auctoritas'' was inherent to the living person of the ''pater'' or the ''princeps''. What was evidently an [[ideology]] or a ''fictio'' aiming to be the groundwork of ''auctoritas'' ' preeminence or, at least, specific rank compared to ''potestas'' thus became a figure of right's {law - "droit"} [[immanence]] to life. (...) Although it is evident that there can't be an eternal human type that would incarnate itself each time in Augustus, Napoleon, Hitler, but only more or less comparable ("semblables") mechanisms {"dispositif", a term often used by Foucault} - the state of exception, ''justitium'', the ''auctoritas principis'', the ''Führertum'' -, put in use in more or less differents circumstances, in the [[1930s]] - overall, but not only - in Germany, the power that Weber had defined as "charismatic" is related to the concept of ''auctoritas'' and elaborated in a ''[[Führertum]]'' doctrine as the original and personal power of a leader. In [[1933]], in a short article intending to define the fundamental concepts of national-socialism, Schmitt defines the ''Führung'' principe by the "root identity between the leader and his entourage" {"''identité de souche entre le chef et son entourage"''} (we shall note the use of weberian concepts)." {{ref|6.8}}

:"The correspondence between ''justitutium'' and mourning here shows its true signification. If the sovereign is a living ''[[nomos]]'', if then [[anomie]] and ''nomos'' coïncide in his person without any left-over, then anarchy (which, at his death, when the link attaching him to law his broken, threatens to unleash itself in the city) must be ritualized and controlled, by the transformation of the state of exception into public mourning and of mourning into ''justitium'' (...) Before acquiring the modern form of a decision on emergency {Schmitt's definition}, the relationship between sovereignty and state of exception presents itself under the form of an identity between the sovereign and anomie. As living law, the sovereign is deeply ''anomos''. Here also the state of exception is the life -more secret and true - of the law." {{ref|5.3}}