Adam Kirsch at the NYRB:
In 2004 the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben was scheduled to spend the spring semester as a visiting professor at NYU. On January 5 of that year, however, the Department of Homeland Security launched a new program to collect fingerprints from foreign visitors. Though EU citizens were exempted, three days later Agamben announced that “personally, I have no intention of submitting myself to such procedures,” and he refused to come to the US. In a statement first published in La Repubblica, he warned that collecting fingerprints marked a new “threshold in the control and manipulation of bodies”—what Michel Foucault had named “biopolitics.” Agamben described fingerprint collection as a perfect example of this tyranny over bodies and called it “biopolitical tattooing,” analogous to the tattooing of numbers on prisoners’ arms at Auschwitz.
Born in Rome in 1942, Agamben began his career in the 1970s and 1980s as what Adam Kotsko, who has translated many of his books into English, calls “a hermetic aesthetic thinker” mainly interested in problems of language. But starting with the publication of his book Homo Sacer in 1995 he became, Kotsko writes, “one of the foremost political minds of our era.” In nine densely argued and dizzyingly erudite books published over the next two decades, Agamben investigated the concepts of law, sovereignty, and power in the Western political tradition.
more here.
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