One of the greatest challenges Agamben presents to his readers is the vast and often bewildering range of sources he draws upon in his work. Looking at figures including Michel Foucault, St Paul, Nietzsche, the Marquis de Sade, Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, this one-stop reference to Agamben's influences covers 30 thinkers: his primary interlocutors, his secondary references, and the figures who lurk in the background of his arguments without being directly mentioned.

With The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben introduced a new vocabulary and a new conceptuality in the lexicon of many different fields, from animal studies to biopolitics and political philosophy. However, he thereafter abandoned the whole question and left its rich potential largely unexplored. Agamben's oeuvre, in general, is a rich mine of unthematized issues concerning the animal question and provides important conceptual tools for others to call into question the anthropocentric context within which he himself remains a prisoner. Though never managing to escape the dualisms of the...

The striking actuality of Walter Benjamin's work does not rest on a supposed "usefulness" of his philosophy for current concerns, but rather on the high "legibility" to which his oeuvre has come in the present. Indeed, this legibility is a function of critique, which unearths the truth-content of a work in a constellation of reading with the present, and assures thereby that the work lives on. Following this methodological tenet, this book approaches Benjamin's work with two foci: the actuality of his critique of violence, a central and unavoidable topic in the contemporary...