Agamben's Heidegger notebooks published: the Le Thor seminars

The notebooks Giorgio Agamben kept in his twenties have been published. The Time of Thinking: The Le Thor Seminars with Heidegger (1966 and 1968) consists of the notes the young Agamben took at two seminars Martin Heidegger held in the village of Le Thor in Provence.

What was Le Thor?#

At the invitation of the poet René Char, Heidegger held seminars with small groups in the south of France in 1966, 1968 and 1969. The number of participants was tiny; sessions took place in a garden or a village house, almost as private tutorials.

Agamben was then twenty-four. He would later say that these seminars were among the founding experiences of his own thought.

Why it matters#

Agamben's mature work — Homo Sacer, State of Exception, Remnants of Auschwitz — appears to be about political philosophy and law. But the method beneath those texts comes largely from Heidegger: excavating the history of a concept in order to make its present operation visible.

The Le Thor notes are a primary document showing directly how that connection was made. The book was translated into English from the Italian and is distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

A second book#

Zone Books also reissued Agamben's collection Profanations in the spring of 2026. The book gathers his essays on photography, the novel and cinema.

Profanation has a particular place in Agamben's vocabulary: to draw something out of the sacred sphere and return it to common use. Contemporary capitalism, on his account, does the opposite — it opens everything to consumption while leaving nothing genuinely usable.