Giorgio Agamben's Books, Ranked: Homo Sacer and Beyond

Giorgio Agamben (born 1942 in Rome) has had one of the strangest careers in contemporary philosophy. As a young man he attended Martin Heidegger’s seminars at Le Thor in 1966 and 1968, and he played the apostle Philip in Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew. He edited the Italian edition of Walter Benjamin’s works and spent two decades writing slim, erudite books on language, poetry and aesthetics. Then, in 1995, he published Homo Sacer, and almost overnight he became one of the most cited political philosophers in the world.

The book launched a twenty-year project of nine volumes on sovereignty, law, theology and life. Its concepts of “bare life,” the “state of exception” and the camp as the hidden paradigm of modern politics spread far beyond philosophy, into law, geography and human rights. In 2020 his essays opposing pandemic lockdowns damaged his reputation in many circles. The books, though, remain unavoidable. This ranking weighs influence, originality, and how well each book stands on its own for a reader new to Agamben.

1. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995; English 1998)

The starting point and still the essential book. The homo sacer was a figure in archaic Roman law who could be killed by anyone but not sacrificed. In Homo Sacer, Agamben makes that figure the key to Western politics. Sovereign power, he argues, constitutes itself by including life only through its exclusion, producing “bare life” stripped of political meaning. He combines Foucault’s biopolitics with Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty and Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the camps. His provocative conclusion is that the camp, not the city, is the biopolitical paradigm of the modern West.

2. State of Exception (2003; English 2005)

The most immediately political book in the series, and the shortest route into it. State of Exception traces how emergency powers, from Roman law to Weimar Germany to the post-9/11 detention of terror suspects, have become a normal technique of government. Written in the shadow of the USA PATRIOT Act and Guantánamo, it remains depressingly relevant.

3. Remnants of Auschwitz (1998; English 1999)

Agamben’s most moving and most controversial book. Remnants of Auschwitz reads Primo Levi and other survivors to think about testimony, shame and the figure of the Muselmann, the prisoner reduced to the threshold between life and death. Some critics found its philosophical use of Auschwitz troubling. No one has found it easy to dismiss.

4. The Coming Community (1990; English 1993)

Before Homo Sacer, there was this short, luminous book. The Coming Community imagines a community of “whatever singularities,” people who belong together without any shared identity, nation or property. It’s Agamben at his most hopeful, and its brief final chapter on Tiananmen Square is unforgettable.

5. The Open: Man and Animal (2002; English 2004)

How does the West decide who counts as human? The Open describes an “anthropological machine” that keeps producing the human by separating it from the animal within. Reading Heidegger, Kojève and the history of biology, it’s one of his best-written books and an important text for animal studies.

6. What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (2006–2008; English 2009)

Three short essays, and the best one-sitting introduction to Agamben. The title essay, What Is an Apparatus?, extends Foucault’s concept of the dispositif to every device that captures and shapes human behavior, from prisons to mobile phones. “What Is the Contemporary?” is a small classic about what it means to belong to one’s own time.

7. The Kingdom and the Glory (2007; English 2011)

The most ambitious of the middle volumes. The Kingdom and the Glory traces modern economic management back to early Christian theology, where oikonomia named God’s administration of the world. It also asks why power has always needed acclamation and glory, a question with obvious relevance to modern media spectacle.

8. Means without End: Notes on Politics (1996; English 2000)

A collection of short political essays written alongside Homo Sacer, including “Beyond Human Rights,” on the refugee as the central figure of our political age. Means without End is a compact and accessible companion to the big theory.

9. The Use of Bodies (2014; English 2016)

The final volume of the Homo Sacer project. Here Agamben turns from diagnosis to something like a positive program. The Use of Bodies develops “form-of-life,” a life inseparable from its form, and “destituent power,” a politics that deactivates rather than seizes the machinery of government. It’s difficult and unfinished by design, but it’s the key to what the whole project was for.

10. Profanations (2005; English 2007)

Ten short essays on play, parody, genius and the “profanation” of what capitalism has made sacred. Profanations shows the lighter, literary Agamben, and the essay “In Praise of Profanation” is a gem.

Honorable mentions

The Highest Poverty (2011; English 2013): Franciscan monks and the dream of life without property.
The Time That Remains (2000; English 2005): a commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans that influenced a wave of philosophical readings of St Paul, alongside Alain Badiou’s and Slavoj Žižek’s.
Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics (2021): his pandemic essays. Read them to understand the controversy, not for the epidemiology.
The Spirit and the Letter (2026): his newest book in English, on the interpretation of scripture.

Agamben and his contemporaries

Agamben is part of a remarkable generation. With Badiou and Žižek he shares the turn to Paul and political theology. Judith Butler has engaged his idea of bare life while questioning whether anyone is ever truly outside power. Antonio Negri, his fellow Italian, built a much more optimistic biopolitics on the creative power of the multitude. Agamben’s own position is unusually consistent. In 2004 he canceled a course at New York University rather than submit to biometric fingerprinting at the US border, which he called a form of “biopolitical tattooing.” His pandemic writings, whatever one thinks of them, came from the same place.

Conclusion: an Agamben reading order

What Is an Apparatus?: a short taste.
State of Exception: the political Agamben.
Homo Sacer: the core theory.
The Coming Community: the hope behind the critique.
The Use of Bodies: the destination.

Agamben writes in short, dense chapters full of etymology and legal history. Read him with a pencil, and remember that his darkest diagnoses are meant to open a way out.

A quick note on links: Philosophy Ranked is reader-supported. When you buy a book or subscribe to a writer through links on this page, we may earn a small commission or referral fee, at no extra cost to you. It never decides who makes the list.