Giorgio Agamben

Legal, Political and Philosophical Perspectives

Tom Frost

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134097869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This book collects new contributions from an international group of leading scholars – including many who have worked closely with Agamben – to consider the impact of Agamben's thought on research in the humanities and social sciences. Giorgio Agamben: Legal, Political and Philosophical Perspectives addresses the potential of Agamben's thought by re-focusing attention away from his critiques of Western politics and towards his scheme for a political future. Part I of the book draws upon a wide range of issues such as legal oaths, legal reasoning and Christian conceptions of love in order to examine the potential for Agamben's work to impact upon future legal scholarship. Part II focuses on political perspectives that include references to Marx, Rousseau and Agamben's conception of the 'messianic'. Theology, biology, and the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin and Antonin Artaud are all drawn upon in Part III to explore philosophical perspectives in Agamben's thought.

This book demonstrates the importance and originality of Giorgio Agamben, who has articulated a vision of politics that must be recognised as an influential contribution to modern philosophical and political thinking. It is a book that will be of considerable interest to many working across the humanities and social sciences.

Part I

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Before the law

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Chapter 1

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The curse of the law and the coming politics

On Agamben, Paul and the Jewish alternative

Adam Kotsko*

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The Apostle Paul is widely recognized among contemporary continental theologians as one of the most essential political thinkers in the Western tradition, and among the recent philosophical interpreters of Paul, Agamben has distinguished himself in at least two ways. The first is the erudition and depth of his reading, above all in his book The Time That Remains: A Commentary On The Letter To The Romans.¹ The second is the degree to which his work on Paul is integrated into his larger project. While Badiou presents his reading of Paul as a more or less detachable ‘example’ of his notion of faithfulness to a truth-event,² Agamben has claimed Paul's letters as fundamental for a style of thought that is central to Agamben's philosophical approach: namely, messianism. Accordingly, Agamben has also had recourse to Pauline arguments in many of his works, including the Homo Sacer series. Paul comes up at key moments in State of Exception,³ for example, and the argument of The Kingdom and the Glory hangs crucially on a close reading of Paul's concept of oikonomia and how it is taken up by later patristic writers.⁴

In this chapter, I would like to address Agamben's use of Paul in another work in the Homo Sacer series, namely The Sacrament of Language.⁵ This work includes what seems to me to be a substantial new engagement with Paul, and with the New Testament more broadly. This engagement is primarily situated in the aleph-note to §16, where he attempts to demonstrate that the Greco-Roman concept of law is intimately tied up with the concept of the curse that Agamben characterizes as a kind of ‘fall-out’ of the oath. The passage is as follows:

It is in the perspective of this technical consubstantiality of law and curse (present even in Judaism–cf. Deuteronomy 21:23–but very familiar to a Jew who lived in a Hellenistic context) that one must understand the Pauline passages in which a ‘curse of the law’ (katara tou nomou –Galatians 3:10–13) is spoken of. Those who want to be saved through works (the execution of precepts)–this is Paul's argument–‘are under a curse [hupo katara eisin]; for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey [emmenei, the same word that one finds in the law of Caronda] all the things written in the book of the law.”’ Subjecting himself to the judgment and curse of the law, Christ ‘redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us–for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”’ The Pauline argument–and, therefore, the very meaning of redemption–can be understood only if it is situated in the context of the mutual belonging, in a juridical and not only religious sense, of law and curse.⁶

At first glance, this seems to be typical Agamben bombast–only Agamben has noticed this crucial aspect of Paul's argument (despite the fact that Paul is one of the most commented-upon writers in the history of humanity), and without this profound insight, one is doomed to chronic misunderstanding. Yet given the depth of Agamben's previous work on Paul, I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and to treat this as, at least potentially, a productive commentary on Paul. On the other hand, given the important role of Paul for Agamben's thought, it is likely that his use of Paul here can, in turn, shed light on Agamben's overall project, providing new avenues of inquiry for future scholarship on Agamben's work.

Accordingly, in this chapter I investigate Agamben's passage on Paul from The Sacrament of Language first in terms of what it says about Agamben– namely, where it fits within his project in this book as well as in the Homo Sacer series as a whole–and second in terms of what it says about Paul. In this latter connection, I argue that Agamben's insight here is at least potentially revolutionary in the answer it provides to one of the most important and sharply contested questions of Pauline interpretation: what Paul means by ‘the law’. If Agamben's interpretation is taken seriously, it means that Paul must be understood as a simultaneously and equally religious and political thinker–failing to hold together those two aspects of his thought means missing the true radicality of Paul's messianic preaching, as well as its continuing relevance for our ostensibly ‘secular’ world. At the same time, I will conclude by suggesting that Agamben's reading allows us to see ways in which Paul's historical circumstances may have blinded him to the messianic potential of the very structure he is most often presented as critiquing and even rejecting: the Jewish law.

I.

So first: what does this passage say about Agamben? To understand this, I'd first like to situate The Sacrament of Language within the Homo Sacer project as a whole. The goal of this body of political theory is to present ‘the West’, broadly considered, as most fundamentally a machine that attempts to claim all of life.⁷ While this machine regulates itself in various ways, its most fundamental trajectory tends toward the confrontation between sovereign power and bare life, in the words of the subtitle of the first volume of the series.⁸ The sovereign is one who is empowered to use limitless violence to enforce the claim of the machine on life, while bare life is the life that the machine has given up to destruction. Volume three of the series, Remnants of Auschwitz, analyzes the most extreme manifestation of bare life: the ‘Muselmann’ of the concentration camp, the prisoner who had ‘touched bottom’.⁹

Interestingly, volume three's detailed analysis of bare life was published before volume two, which goes into greater detail on the structure of sovereignty. Both are to be followed by a fourth volume, on ‘forms of life’, which will presumably lay out Agamben's ‘alternative’ to the Western machine. This fourth volume, however, has only recently begun to appear–and meanwhile, volume two continues to get bigger. After State of Exception, Agamben wrote two subsequent works that were designated as ‘part-volumes’: The Kingdom and the Glory, which is volume two, part two; and The Sacrament of Language, volume two, part three. As far as I can tell, these two subsequent parts were not necessarily anticipated in the initial structure, and the place of The Kingdom and the Glory in Agamben's overall project is particularly problematic in my mind. Yet if we take Agamben at his word and view these three books as somehow constituting a broad analysis of sovereignty, we can see that Agamben does not believe that the Western ‘machine’ is limited to the political realm in any narrow sense: it encompasses the economy, the ‘society of the spectacle’, and the religious sphere.

Most radically, it encompasses language itself, and The Sacrament of Language is concerned not only with understanding language on the model of the logic of sovereignty, but with demonstrating how the Western stance toward language actually grounds all the other aspects of the Western machine. His way into this problem is through the phenomenon of the oath, which may seem strange–or at least unexpected, given that Agamben hasn't paid a great deal of attention to the oath in the other Homo Sacer writings.

The oath turns out to be promising for two reasons, however. First, it is inherently a borderline phenomenon, incorporating the political and the religious in a way that, at least in Agamben's view, has misled and baffled modern scholars. Given that Agamben's methodol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Figures
• The limit of thought
• Part I Before the law
• Part II Politics: or, on the vocation of man
• Part III Philosophy: or, on the world-to-come
• Bibliography
• Index