Giorgio Agamben's political philosophy seeks to account for the unbearable ease with which democracies deteriorate to dictatorships, rights to systemic discrimination, and the politics of well-being to cleansing hygiene. The genetic code of all forms of Western politics is the capacity to legally suspend the law (state of exception), thus abandoning its subjects to a legally-sanctioned violence (homo sacer), or regimenting their exposed biological existence, in a way that empties their political being. This philosophy has two radical aims: the decipher this trans-historical code; and to offer a redemptive vision beyond the principle of sovereignty and bare life. These aims rely on the problematic claim that every form given to life—political, technological, even linguistic—is problematic by definition; and second, that we can hope to return to a pre-political life. Agamben's logic fails to distinguish different types of potentiality, and hence is tempted by an impossibility: to completely eradicate the immanent risk of constitutive power, which Agamben himself demonstrates is ineradicable. This leads to a problematic philosophy of history that shows no interest in analyzing interests or power relations, and a monolithic conception of every body politic, which ignores internal conflicts or struggles against the given form of political sovereignty. The result is a philosophy trapped in a radical temptation, which empties its own achievements.