In the opening to a short essay on the metropolis Agamben relates the following story:

The fact that Debord rejected Agamben's discussion of ‘political philosophy’ over ‘strategy’ is a distinction that is important to maintain. What is at stake here is not a debate over the proper disciplinary boundaries within which we should approach Agamben's work, a debate which obfuscates the nature of the work itself. Instead I would like to use the distinction as for both Debord and, I would suggest, Agamben, it sustains both the necessity and the potential for a critique, a ‘poetics’ that exists in a symbiotic relation with the category of life.

The importance of Debord in Agamben's work has been observed by a number of critics, yet the relationship has, as yet, not been explored in any great depth. If the reasons for this are unclear, I would suggest it centres around questions of Agamben’s political philosophy and the rather strange place occupied by Debord in contemporary critical theory, and perhaps more importantly in recent French politics.