Why does the state of emergency constitute the fundamental structure of any state order? Why has the term 'human rights' become obsolete? What are the consequences of the indistinguishability of public and private? In what way is the 'camp' the biopolitical 'nomos' of modernity? What would be the place and what the space of a future 'polis'? The texts gathered here formulate a radical critique of politics in an age of emptied categories. Referring back to Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben outlines new perspectives on the political in the context of today's democratic-spectacular societies. Concepts about 'life-form', language as the place of the political par excellence, and the gestural as a sphere of 'pure means without end' mark the field of a forthcoming thinking.