ABSTRACT
Born in 1942 and educated at the University of Rome, Agamben is the rst continental philosopher in this book who has no clear memories of the Second World War. is does not mean that his philosophy ignores it, or that he somehow philosophizes as if the war had never happened. To understand the modern world, the one in which we live, requires, for Agamben, a confrontation with all the horrors of the mid-twentieth century and, most especially, with the Holocaust. Agamben’s lack of concrete memories seems, however, to enable him to approach the horror of that time more conceptually, and hence more directly philosophically, than do his older colleagues.
