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An overview of the most significant concepts and histories in the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben's magnum opus, the nine-volume Homo Sacer series. In this celebrated work, Agamben provides a delicate and complex interweaving of his views on a wide range of themes including sovereignty, and the state of exception, the Aristotelean distinction between potentiality and actuality, through to the impossibility of stating the existence of language in words and the form-of-life lived beyond all forms of law. Requiring no prior knowledge of the text Colby Dickinson provides a guide to understanding why this series is one of the most significant philosophical texts of the past century. Key features: - The first introductory text to Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer series - Explains the series both to those unfamiliar with the series and to those more versed in his philosophy - Explores key concepts, including sovereignty, potentiality, form-of-life, the state of exception, inoperativity, glory and the messianic as they reappear throughout the series. Colby Dickinson is Associate Professor of Theology at Loyola University, Chicago.
About the author
Colby Dickinson is Associate Professor of Theology at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of
Theological Poverty in Continental Philosophy: After Christian Theology (Bloomsbury, 2021),
Theology and Contemporary Continental Philosophy: The Centrality of a Negative Dialectics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019),
Continental Philosophy and Theology (Brill, 2018),
Words Fail: Theology, Poetry, and the Challenge of Representation (Fordham University Press, 2016),
Between the Canon and the Messiah: The Structure of Faith in Contemporary Continental Thought (Bloomsbury, 2013),
Agamben and Theology (T&T Clark, 2011). He is co-author of
Agamben's Coming Philosophy: Finding a New Use for Theology with Adam Kotsko (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). He is also the co-editor of
The Challenge of God: Continental Philosophy and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2020) and
Agamben and the Existentialists (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
