Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher who has held academic positions at many Italian universities and currently teaches at the Università della Svizzera Italiana. This volume is the ninth, and perhaps the last, in the Homo Sacer series, which began with the book of that name in 1995. Agamben's earliest work was on the French philosopher Simone Weil, and his most significant interlocutors have been the German philosopher Walter Benjamin and the Austrian-English philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Homo Sacer series is a work of political philosophy and philosophical anthropology, and is among the most influential works in those fields to have been published in any language since 1945.

The series as a whole is designed to elucidate the distinction, rooted in Aristotle, between zoe (bare life) and bios (political life, life as a citizen), and to show that it is characteristic of the modern state to arrogate to itself the capacity to determine, by declaring a state of exception, the conditions under which some individual or group may be reduced from the latter to the former condition.

In the first part of this volume, Agamben treats the use and care of the human body, with special reference to work and its lack, and to the relations between the body and inanimate instruments of work. Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault are prominent in this discussion; especially significant here is Agamben's engagement with Hadot's late-life critique of Foucault's work (95–108), and his argument that Hadot never fully understood Foucault's work. Agamben endorses Foucault's understanding of life-as-work-of-art, but not his blindness to the state of exception and its meanings. In the second and third parts of the volume, on ontology and forms-of-life, Agamben uses his preferred method, which is intellectual archaeology. To see what, if anything, of the ontological apparatus of the West remains usable, it is necessary, he thinks, to see where that apparatus has come from and how it has been used (part 2); similarly with the conceptual apparatus used to depict and analyze (human) life and its possible forms (part 3).

Among the most important features of Agamben's work, evident in this volume as much as in the whole series, is his attention to theological categories, and his realization that secular political philosophy roots its concepts in them. Constituent and constituted power, for example, is a reflection of the genealogically prior distinction between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. And in the penultimate volume of the series, The Highest Poverty (2013), the (broadly Wittgensteinian) concept form-of-life is elucidated through the early Franciscan attempt to abolish the distinction between rules and communal life. Ordinarily, law is understood to be extraneous to life: it requires and constitutes juridical persons, which are, by definition, not concrete persons; attempts to overcome that distinction do so by establishing forms-of-life to which there is no outside, forms-of-life where norms are “lifed” rather than life normed. That theme is revisited in the third part of this volume, and there, as in the earlier work, it's nourished by specifically theological concerns. Agamben is not exactly a theologian, even though he was happy, in 2009, to lecture the archbishop of Paris on the relations between church and world (see Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 2012). But his work is nonetheless the most theologically attuned to be found in contemporary political theory, and can be read with much profit by theologians sensu stricto.

This is an important book. It can be read by itself, with profit, as a version of the arguments Agamben has been offering for more than three decades. It has its frustrations, especially for the Anglophone reader, not least among which is a self-conscious and obfuscatory delight in allusiveness and density rather than clarity and the light touch. Another is that Agamben's world is ascetically free of engagement with Anglophone philosophy and political theory: his interlocutors write in Greek, Latin, French, German, and (of course) Italian, but very rarely in English. That wouldn't make him parochial were his intellectual ambitions not so global. Still, these are minor criticisms of a major work by one of the most stimulating writers currently at work.