Giorgio Agamben was born in Rome. He studied law at the University of Rome and received his degree in 1965 with a thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. Agamben’s most valuable work turns to the enigmatic figure of the “homo sacer” in archaic Roman law and the paradoxical notion of the “state of exception” that founds the Western democratic juridical order. From this linguistic basis, Agamben’s work constructs erudite meditations on ontology, ethics, politics, and representation. Agamben asserts the immanence of this concept to linguistics, seventeenth-century emblematics, troubadour poetry, and philosophical theories of memory in a work that has repercussions for not only philosophy but also medieval studies, psychoanalysis, poetics, and art history. Through a transformation of the idea of representation—the idea of prose as such—Agamben posits a linguistic, ontological, and political concept of community. The most extended presentation of Agamben’s thoughts on art is his The Man Without Content.