Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his political treatises in which the decay of the citizen and the abolition of civil rights are held to account, in such works as The State of Exception (2003; English trans. 2005), Homo Sacer (1995; English trans. 1998), Stanzas (1977; English trans. 1993), Means Without End (1996; English trans. 2000) and Remnants of Auschwitz (1998; English trans. 1999). Agamben is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy. He holds the Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and also teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. His fascination with the power of images, and their relationships to gestures and language, is marked throughout his writings, and he has published some brief essays concerning cinema, “Notes on Gesture” (1992), “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord's Films” (1995) and “The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema” (2007).