In this volume of Homo sacer, Giorgio Agamben makes an ambitious attempt to analyze the dual genealogy: the ontologies of reality and the ethics of duty as they were developed in the history of Western thought. The first was criticized by Heidegger, the second by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; in his study, Agamben not only relies on them, but seeks to correct and supplement their argumentation. Thus, he demonstrates that the central role in the development of both paradigms is played by Christian worship with its very special understanding of action and effectiveness, as well as the concept of “duty”, which came into Christian liturgical thought from the Stoic ethics developed by Cicero. Because of these assumptions, ontology and ethics eventually become connected in a single circle, which now corresponds to a special subject, literally doomed to effectively perform actions that do not belong to him. This concept and its consequences, as Agamben shows, actively influence the sphere of politics up to the present day.