Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian philosophy and radical political theory, and in recent years, his work has had a deep impact on contemporary scholarship in a number of disciplines in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Agamben is not influenced by, nor engaged with, a number of other canonical or contemporary figures in Western philosophy and political, aesthetic and linguistic theory. He certainly is, most notably Heidegger and Hegel, as well as the scholarship that follows from them, but also Aby Warburg?s iconography (Agamben worked at the Warburg Institute Library in 1974-5), Italian Autonomism and Situationism (especially Guy Debord?s influential Society of the Spectacle), Aristotle, Emile Benveniste, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt amongst others.. Beyond this philosophical heritage, Agamben also engages in multilayered discussions of the Jewish Torah and Christian biblical texts, Greek and Roman law, Midrashic literature, as well as of a number of Western literary figures and poets, including Dante, Holderlin, Kafka, Pessoa, and Caproni to name but a few. This breadth of reference and the critical stylistics it gives rise to no doubt contribute to the appearance of intimidating density characteristic of Agamben?s work. Even so, Agamben?s engagement with these figures is often mediated by his deep conceptual and thematic debt to Benjamin (he served as editor of the Italian edition of Benjamin?s collected works from 1979 to 1994) evident in his central focus on questions of language and representation, history and temporality, the force of law, politics of the spectacle, and the ethos of humanity.