Perhaps the best-known instance of Agamben’s debate with Derrida comes, not surprisingly, from what is surely his best-known and most frequently cited book,Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. While oblique and overt references to deconstruction are scattered throughout that work—and indeed, as we will examine in some detail in chapter 4 below, the book’s central concept of the “ban-structure” of sovereignty is conceived in response to deconstruction—it is in the chapter on Franz Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” that Agamben explicitly challenges Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s iconic text, and with it a number of fundamental tenets...

In his 1989 introduction to the French edition ofInfancy and History, Agamben describes his work from 1977 to 1982 (the year ofLanguage and Death) as constituting a single, and in large part unrealized project, to which he gives the title “The Human Voice”:

[B]etweenInfancy and History(1977) andLanguage and Death(1982), many pages have been written which attest the project of a work that remains stubbornly unwritten. The title of this work isLa voce umana(The Human Voice) or, as otherwise noted,Etica, ovvero della voce(Ethics, an essay on the voice). One of these...

In one of the final, aphoristic chapters of his 1985 bookIdea of Prose, Agamben tells a story about the great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna and his fraught relation to both his adversaries and his disciples. While the nomadic philosopher, author ofStanzas of the Middle Way, found the ritual of refuting the objections of the orthodox monks who charged him with nihilism to be tedious and depressing, Agamben tells us that

[w]hat distressed him were the arguments of those logicians who didn’t even come forward as adversaries, but rather claimed to profess the same doctrine as himself. The difference between...

The second half of this book is dedicated to periods in Agamben’s and Derrida’s careers that have both been described as turns from their first-philosophical work toward more overtly political theory. In the case of Derrida, this turn is often located atSpecters of Marx(1993), while for Agamben it is located perhaps atThe Coming Community(1990), but most certainly by the time he begins his magisterial and, at this writing, ongoingHomo Sacerproject (1995–). There is, of course, good reason for this view of things. To be sure, Derrida’s book on Marx, which will be discussed...

In the years around the turn of the century, Agamben and Derrida both focused their attention on the question of the animal and its relation to the human. Though Derrida’s bookThe Animal That Therefore I Am[L’animal que donc je suis] was published in French in 2006, two years after his death, the component parts of that book have a slightly complicated publication history that is worth briefly reviewing here not least because this will establish the timeline of these texts’ appearance in relation to Agamben’s bookThe Open: Man and Animal. As recounted in Marie-Louise Mallet’s foreword to...

In the last decade of the millennium, both Derrida and Agamben take up the question of “messianism” or “the messianic.” As commentators have noted, few terms of this strong a religious provenance have received such heavy usage in recent philosophical debates, and certainly many of Agamben’s and Derrida’s texts of this period have been central to discussions of a supposed “religious turn” in contemporary philosophy.¹ While the issue of the messianic appears in a number of places in Derrida’s work, the key text in which he addresses the question is, perhaps surprisingly, 1993’sSpecters of Marx; Agamben’s central text on...