Abstract
This work traces my reading experience of three books by Giorgio Agamben: Homo sacer. Sovereign power and bare life, State of Exception and Karman. Reading, in fact a dialogue at a distance with the author, whose way of questioning the sources creates a sense of conviviality with tradition, has played a significant role in the elaboration of a psychoanalytic perspective on the current reality that now engages me by now many years. This perspective reformulates the conflict between Eros and Thanatos, seen by Freud in terms of life and death drives, rethinking it as a decisive clash within civilization between life based on desire and on its socialization, which follows the path of transformations (and therefore of politics), and life sucked into the principle of psychic inertia. This principle tends to reduce the human being in a purely biological existence, in “raw” life.