Rapidly becoming one of the most celebrated and controversial contemporary thinkers, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has made an original contribution to ‘first-philosophical’ debates. He uses his ideas about ontology – the philosophy of being – as a foundation for his political theory. Sergei Prozorov looks at Agamben's entire corpus of political thought in this systematic and critical introduction to his fundamental concepts. He pulls out the concept of 'inoperativity' as central to Agamben's work from his earliest writings and shows how this concept works in the domains of language, law, history and humanity