This book traces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work to the present, showing how consistently and closely Agamben takes up (critically, sympathetically, polemically – and very often implicitly) the work of Jacques Derrida as his chief contemporary interlocutor. At its most fundamental level, Agamben's thought has been viewed as descending primarily from the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, and, more recently, Foucault. This book, however, complicates and expands that constellation by showing that any understanding of Agamben that does no ... More

This book traces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work to the present, showing how consistently and closely Agamben takes up (critically, sympathetically, polemically – and very often implicitly) the work of Jacques Derrida as his chief contemporary interlocutor. At its most fundamental level, Agamben's thought has been viewed as descending primarily from the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, and, more recently, Foucault. This book, however, complicates and expands that constellation by showing that any understanding of Agamben that does not take his relation to Derrida into account remains incomplete. Divided into two roughly chronological parts, the book begins with a section titled “First Principles” that examines the development of Agamben's key concepts – infancy, Voice, potentiality – from the 1960s to approximately 1990 and traces the way these concepts consistently draw on and respond to specific texts and concepts in Derrida's work. The second part, titled “Strategy without Finality or Means without End,” examines the political turn in Agamben's and Derrida's thinking from about 1990 onward, beginning with their crucial investigations of sovereignty and violence and moving through their parallel treatments of juridical power, the relation between humans and animals, and finally messianism and the politics to come.