Vol. 6 No. 1 (2025): Limiares destituintes: política, direito, teologia e linguagem (jan/jun 2025)
Special Dossier

Agamben before the law: biopolitics and form-of-life

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Letizia Konderak
Vita-Salute San Raffaele University
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Published 2025-06-29

Keywords

  • Agamben ,
  • Law,
  • Sovereignty,
  • Biopolitics

Copyright (c) 2025 Letizia Konderak

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

KONDERAK, Letizia. Agamben before the law: biopolitics and form-of-life. (Des)troços: revista de pensamento radical, Belo Horizonte, v. 6, n. 1, p. e57596, 2025. DOI: 10.53981/destrocos.v6i1.57596. Disponível em: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/article/view/57596. Acesso em: 25 dec. 2025.
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Abstract

This paper explores Agamben’s philosophy of law, highlighting how his view on the topic relies on his reading of sovereignty and biopolitics. Indeed, within the fertile debate on Foucault’s biopower, Agamben provides an original and radical reading of the political inclusion of life. His exegesis embeds biopolitics within a theory of the very essence of Western tradition, and of its fundamental elements that are law and sovereignty. In the paper, deviations from a Foucauldian “orthodoxy” are traced back to the Italian philosopher’s fascination with Heidegger, Benjamin, and Kafka. Hence, Agamben develops an unedited method and positive political proposal. Last, this paper exhibits some shortcomings of his method, as an ontologizing approach to politics could obliterate, rather than clarify, the manifold historical manifestations of power and make ineffective the positive strategies against its violence.

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