In recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive Profanations The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question.

The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or 'state of exception,' has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states. Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission.

Agamben exception