Agamben was close to the poets Giorgio Caproni and José Bergamín, and to the Italian novelist Elsa Morante, to whom he devoted the essays "The Celebration of the Hidden Treasure" (in The End of the Poem) and "Parody" (in Profanations).

He has been a friend and collaborator to such eminent intellectuals as Pier Paolo Pasolini (in whose The Gospel According to St. Matthew he played the part of Philip), Italo Calvino (with whom he collaborated, for a short while, as advisor to the publishing house Einaudi and developed plans for a journal), Ingeborg Bachmann, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, Jean-François Lyotard and many, many others.

[10] Agamben has engaged since the nineties in a debate with the political writings of the German jurist Carl Schmitt, most extensively in the study State of Exception (2003).

[13] At this time, Agamben also analyzed the ontological condition and "political" attitude of Bartleby (from Herman Melville's short story) – a scrivener who "prefers not" to write.

Agamben's concept of the homo sacer rests on a crucial distinction in Greek between "bare life" (la vita nuda or zoê /ˈzoʊi/; Gk.

Agamben says that "What happened in the camps so exceeds (is outside of) the juridical concept of crime that the specific juridico-political structure in which those events took place is often simply omitted from consideration."

[citation needed] Agamben mentions that basic universal human rights of Taliban individuals while captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo Bay in 2001 were negated by US laws.

Within a state of exception, when a detainee is placed outside the law he or she is, according to Agamben, reduced to "bare life" in the eyes of the judicial powers.

During the hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay prison, accusations and founded claims of forced feedings began to surface in the autumn of 2005.

In The Coming Community, published in 1990 and translated by longtime admirer Michael Hardt in 1993, Agamben describes the social and political manifestation of his philosophical thought.

Employing diverse short essays he describes the nature of "whatever singularity" as that which has an "inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence".

Following the same trend, he employs, among others, the following to describe the "watershed of whatever": Other themes addressed in The Coming Community include the commodification of the body, evil, and the messianic.

Matter that does not remain beneath form, but surrounds it with a halo.The political task of humanity, he argues, is to expose the innate potential in this zone of indistinguishability.

Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.In his main work "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" (1998), Agamben analyzes an obscure[38] figure of Roman law that poses fundamental questions about the nature of law and power in general.

Agamben draws on Carl Schmitt's definition of the Sovereign as the one who has the power to decide the state of exception (or justitium), where law is indefinitely "suspended" without being abrogated.

The power of law to actively separate "political" beings (citizens) from "bare life" (bodies) has carried on from Antiquity to Modernity – literally from Aristotle to Auschwitz.

"In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference" (Agamben, pg 40).

Augustus, the first Roman emperor who claimed auctoritas as the basis of princeps status in a famous passage of Res Gestae, had opened up his house to public eyes.

[45]: xii The concept of auctoritas played a key-role in fascism and Nazism, in particular concerning Carl Schmitt's theories, argues Agamben: To understand modern phenomena such as the fascist Duce or the Nazi Führer, it is important not to forget their continuity with the principle of auctoritas principis {Agamben refers here to Augustus's Res Gestae}.

Following Walter Benjamin's lead, he explains that our task would be to radically differentiate "pure violence" from right, instead of tying them together, as did Carl Schmitt.

What was evidently an ideology or a fictio aiming to be the groundwork of auctoritas' preeminence or, at least, specific rank compared to potestas thus became a figure of right's {"droit"} immanence to life.

Although it is evident that there can't be an eternal human type that would incarnate itself each time in Augustus, Napoleon, Hitler, but only more or less comparable ("semblables") mechanisms {"dispositif", a term often used by Foucault} – the state of exception, justitium, the auctoritas principis, the Führertum -, put in use in more or less different circumstances, in the 1930s – overall, but not only – in Germany, the power that Weber had defined as "charismatic" is related to the concept of auctoritas and elaborated in a Führertum doctrine as the original and personal power of a leader.

{"identité de souche entre le chef et son entourage"}[47]Agamben's thoughts on the state of emergency leads him to declare that the difference between dictatorship and democracy is thin indeed,or even ontologically non-existent, as rule by decree became more and more common, starting from World War I and the reorganization of constitutional balance.

Agamben often reminds that Hitler never abrogated the Weimar Constitution: he suspended it for the duration of the Third Reich with the Reichstag Fire Decree, issued on 28 February 1933.

Agamben traces earlier versions of the term 'form-of-life' throughout the development of monastic life, beginning with the establishment of a genre of written rules in the fourth century.

[49] Agamben turns to the Franciscans to survey a unique historical incident of a group organising itself with a rule that is their life, and thinking of their own lives not as their own possession but as a communal 'use'; he examines the ways in which this idea developed and how it eventually lapsed into the law of the Catholic Church.

Agamben points out a general tendency of modernity, recalling for example that when Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon invented "judicial photography" for "anthropometric identification", the procedure was reserved to criminals; to the contrary, today's society is tending toward a generalization of this procedure to all citizens, placing the population under permanent suspicion and surveillance: "The political body thus has become a criminal body".

[52] Furthermore, Agamben's political criticisms open up in a larger philosophical critique of the concept of sovereignty itself, which he argues is intrinsically related to the state of exception.

Agamben, in an article published by Il Manifesto on 26 February 2020, quoted the NRC in saying that there was no COVID-19 pandemic: "In order to make sense of the frantic, irrational, and absolutely unwarranted emergency measures adopted for a supposed epidemic of coronavirus, we must begin from the declaration of the Italian National Research Council (NRC), according to which 'there is no SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Italy.'

[56] Agamben's views were strongly criticised by Sergio Benvenuto, Roberto Esposito, Divya Dwivedi, Shaj Mohan, Jean-Luc Nancy, Benjamin H. Bratton, and others.