In this celebrated work, Agamben provides a delicate and complex interweaving of his views on a wide range of themes including sovereignty, and the state of exception, the Aristotelean distinction between potentiality and actuality, through to the impossibility of stating the existence of language in words and the form-of-life lived beyond all forms of law.Requiring no prior knowledge of the text Colby Dickinson provides a guide to understanding why this series is one of the most significant philosophical texts of the past century.