A Life Undivided: On Agamben's Use of Heidegger and Benjamin

Although the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s political thought has drawn substantial critical attention in North America over roughly the last decade, this coverage tends to focus on only a few works in isolation. This study is one of the few full-length examinations seeking to correct this limitation by providing a synthetic exposition and analysis of a substantial portion of Agamben’s body of work. Not only does this study address the relative lack of attention paid to Agamben’s early work on language and aesthetics, it also advances an original assessment of the relative influence on Agamben’s work as a whole by two key figures, namely, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. By proceeding in this way, the study has the objective of establishing that Agamben’s more recent and explicitly political work does not constitute a shift or break with his earlier thinking, but is an extension and elaboration of it.