Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942, Rome) is an Italian philosopher best known for Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) and its sequels. Homo sacer is a figure from Roman law stripped of citizen rights, killable by anyone but not fit for ritual sacrifice — caught inside the law "solely in the form of its exclusion," and read by Agamben as the mirror image of the sovereign. He calls the distinction between bare life (zoē) and qualified, political life (bios) "the fundamental categorial pair of Western politics," and, drawing on Carl Schmitt, describes the state of exception — law suspended indefinitely without being abolished — tracing it back to the Roman justitium and forward to the Reichstag Fire Decree and Guantánamo. He engages critically with Foucault's biopolitics, arguing biopower is not a modern invention but built into Western sovereignty from the start. Source: Wikipedia (T2, tertiary).
Agamben and Stoicism
post-modern-stoics-thecollector (TheCollector, T4) describes him as ambivalent toward Stoic ethics, working under Foucault's influence but pulling in two directions at once. On one side, he reads Stoic providence as an early apparatus of governmentality — "an ancient paradigm of governance" that helped reshape the concept of sovereignty — a critical, biopolitical reading consistent with his homo sacer work above. On the other, he turns to Stoicism for a theory of language's own limits, treating Stoic practice as using language to correct language, which he reads as therapeutic. Quoted in the piece: "To believe that will has power over potentiality… this is the perpetual illusion of morality."
In the conversation
Agamben's ambivalence is the spoke's clearest single case of one thinker holding both readings the other five in this ingest split between them — Stoicism as an instrument of governance/control (Foucault's biopower reading, which Agamben extends) and Stoicism as a resource for living or for language (Hadot, Kristeva). His own biopolitics is a direct continuation of Foucault's, making him the spoke's link from 20th-century Stoic reception back to the power/knowledge thread already on michel-foucault's page.
Related
stoicism · michel-foucault · julia-kristeva · post-modern-stoics-thecollector