For more than two millennia, terrestrial paradise, the Garden planted by God in Eden, has been for the Western world the paradigm of all possible happiness on the face of the earth. However, it is also the place from which human beings were irrevocably expelled. On the one hand, all the revolutionary dreams of humanity can be seen as the tireless attempt to return to Eden, defying the guardians who guard access; on the other hand, the Garden is a kind of foundational trauma that condemns to failure every pursuit of happiness in this world. In both cases, paradise is essentially a lost paradise and human nature somewhat incomplete.

Through a thorough critique of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin and an exciting rereading of Dantesque Paradise, Giorgio Agamben tries to think of terrestrial paradise not as a lost past or a future to come, but as the ever-present and present image of human nature and the just abode of men on earth. A political paradigm that must be articulated and distinguished from the millennial Kingdom, which has been the model of all utopia. If only the Kingdom can give access to the Garden, only the Garden allows us to think of the Kingdom.