With this book Giorgio Agamben concludes the Homo sacer project, began in 1995, which marked a new direction in contemporary thought. After the archaeological investigations of the previous eight volumes, here the ideas and concepts that guided the research are elaborated and defined into an unexplored territory, whose boundaries coincide with a new use of bodies, of the technique and of the landscape. The concept of action, which we have been accustomed for centuries to collocate at the center of politics, is replaced by that of use, which refers not to a subject, but to a form of life; the concepts of work and production are replaced by the one of unindustriosity, which does not mean inertia, but an activity that deactivates and opens to a new use the works of economics, law, art and religion; the concept of a constituent power through which, from the French Revolution, we are accustomed to thinking of great political changes, is replaced by that of a dismissing power, which is never reabsorbed into a constituted power. And, every time, the definition of concepts is interwoven with the analysis of the life form of some key figures of contemporary thought.