Agamben knows how to formulate and average a lot of important things. And if at times he seems to wander off the subject, unnecessarily and unrestrainedly piling up successive thresholds of understanding, it is always the unclear language that is to blame. The thought itself is frightfully, glaringly clear. It is just a few motifs taken after Benjamin, Arendt, Schmitt or Foucault and developed, thought out to the end “as a warning.” If they carry a prophecy, what is it about? Man? His time? The world in which he is made to live? The near future? Or does it, rather, tell us more about what happened, what has already taken place? Finally, the most important question is: who is it that Agamben is addressing? Man? Or does he formulate his thought in the form of an epitaph after man, so to speak, over his grave? If so, who needs it? Who shall sing this prophecy and who will care?

Bios and zoe

For Foucault, the study of past events—Agamben observes—generally resembles the play of shadow that the present casts over the past; the shadow reaches back to the seventeenth century at the latest. The shadow that Agamben's work casts over the past, however, seems to be much longer. Agamben himself admits that he likes to create at dusk, when shadows dominate, when things are enveloped in darkness.