Thought is the courage of hopelessness: an interview with philosopher Giorgio Agamben by Juliette Cerf
As the church bells ring out in Trastevere, where we have fixed our appointment, his face comes to mind... Giorgio Agamben appeared as the apostle Philip in Pier Paolo Pasolini's The GospelAccording to St. Matthew (1964). At that time the young law student, born in Rome in 1942, hung around with the artists and intellectuals grouped around the author Elsa Morante. The dolce vita? A moment of intense friendships, in any case. Little by little the jurist turned toward philosophy, following Heidegger's seminar in Thor-en-Provence. He then threw himself into editing the works of Walter Benjamin, a thinker who has never been far from his thought, as well as Guy Debord and Michel Foucault. Giorgio Agamben thus became acquainted with a messianic sense of History, a critique of the society of the spectacle, and a resistance to biopower, the control that the authorities exercise over life – over citizens' very bodies. Poetical as it is political, his thought digs down for archaeological evidence, making his way back through the whirlwind of time, down to the origins of words. Author of a series of works collected under the Latin title Homo sacer, Agamben travels through the land of law, religion and literature but now refuses to go... to the United States, to avoid being subjected to its biometric controls. In opposition to any such reduction of a man to his biological data, Agamben proposes an exploration of the field of possibilities...
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Agamben in the catalog