Giorgio Agamben

Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction

Kevin Attell

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780823262069
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Agamben's thought has been viewed as descending primarily from the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, and, more recently, Foucault. This book complicates and expands that constellation by showing how throughout his career Agamben has consistently and closely engaged (critically, sympathetically, polemically, and often implicitly) the work of Derrida as his chief contemporary interlocutor.The book begins by examining the development of Agamben's key concepts—infancy, Voice, potentiality—from the 1960s to approximately 1990 and shows how these concepts consistently draw on and respond to specific texts and concepts of Derrida. The second part examines the political turn in Agamben's and Derrida's thinking from about 1990 onward, beginning with their investigations of sovereignty and violence and moving through their parallel treatments of juridical power, the relation between humans and animals, and finally messianism and the politics to come.

Part One: First Principles

1. Agamben and Derrida Read Saussure

Un vieux sphinx ignoré du monde insoucieux, Oublié sur la carte . . .

—Charles Baudelaire, “Spleen II”

Overture: “Before the Law”

Perhaps the best-known instance of Agamben’s debate with Derrida comes, not surprisingly, from what is surely his best-known and most frequently cited book, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. While oblique and overt references to deconstruction are scattered throughout that work—and indeed, as we will examine in some detail in chapter 4 below, the book’s central concept of the “ban-structure” of sovereignty is conceived in response to deconstruction—it is in the chapter on Franz Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” that Agamben explicitly challenges Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s iconic text, and with it a number of fundamental tenets of deconstructive thought. The programmatic nature of both Agamben’s and Derrida’s readings of the Kafka text, in which each thinker plays in abbreviated and distilled form some of the central motifs of his work, makes this episode a fitting overture to the following pages’ effort to trace the intricate and intertwining lines of their theoretical itineraries.

As is well known, Kafka’s “Before the Law” tells the story of a “man from the country” who arrives one day at the gate of the law, would like to gain admittance and enter, but is prevented from doing so by an enigmatic doorkeeper. The man is, however, never physically barred by the doorkeeper, but rather told by him that though there is nothing preventing him from entering, he nevertheless cannot enter at the moment—a situation that proves to extend for days and years. The man waits before the door for what appears to be his entire lifetime, never succeeding in gaining access from the doorkeeper. In the end, as the man’s eyes grow weak and the world begins to darken, the doorman tells him that this open gate was made for him alone, that no one else could ever enter it, and he moves to shut it.

The paradox of the tale, at least the one that interests us here, lies in the law’s simultaneous openness and inaccessibility. The law both holds the man in its power and excludes him from its full presence, and it never takes the form of any specific command or statute beyond the pure force to hold the man fascinated in its power, to hold the man forever “before the law”: an empty and absolute law with no specific laws, which demands submission before it but commands nothing, a law that is “in force without significance” (HS 51). As the priest who tells K this parable in The Trial says, “the court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.”¹

In his essay on Kafka’s parable, Derrida offers a reading of the paradoxical figure of the law that is in force without significance as a figure of différance, a juridical threshold that is as intangible as it is potent:

The present prohibition of the law is not a prohibition in the sense of an imperative constraint; it is a différance. For after having said to [the countryman] “later,” the doorkeeper specifies: “If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto.” Earlier he had said merely “not at the moment.” He then simply steps aside and lets the man stoop to look inside through the door, which always remains open, marking a limit without itself posing an obstacle or barrier. It is a mark, but it is nothing firm, opaque or uncrossable. (BtL 202–3)

The gate is perpetually open, and yet never to be entered or crossed. This is not only because the man never does cross it, but also because, as the doorkeeper informs him, behind this door there is another and then another, each with a doorkeeper more frightening than the last—doorkeepers whom the man, in fact, never actually sees.

In a gesture that we will see in many modulations in the following pages, Derrida identifies this obscure threshold with différance, and what is more, with a différance that not only is impassable, but whose play of deferral and nullification is the foundational (non)source and (non)origin of the law. The countryman’s entrance into the law is not directly prevented but endlessly deferred by the enigmatic doorkeeper, whose station, he tells the man, is simply the first of an evidently endless series of such deferring thresholds. What, then, is this place before the law where the countryman spends the rest of his life waiting patiently? It is, on Derrida’s reading, the point, the place, the topos, at which the law, in holding the man purely in its power yet leaving him free, has its originary event (though, for Derrida, what is figured here is precisely neither a topological place nor an originary event).

Guardian after guardian. This differantial topology [topique différantielle] adjourns, guardian after guardian, within the polarity of high and low, far and near (fort/da), now and later. The same topology without its own place, the same atopology [atopique], the same madness defers the law as the nothing that forbids itself and the neuter that annuls oppositions. The atopology annuls that which takes place, the event itself. This nullification gives birth to the law[.] (BtL 208–9)

What the man from the country comes up against, then, is the structure—or, in Rodolphe Gasché’s term, infrastructure—of différance itself, which is the unsurpassable limit that blocks or breaks up the path (poros) that leads to the (illusory) presence of the law and to its originary, establishing event.² The threshold before the law is a line not to be crossed; it is an impasse both impassable and impassive because it is a line that marks nothing but its own absence.

Agamben see things differently. For him, what Derrida is able to discern in the law that remains in force but prescribes nothing is not simply, or not only, an exposed différance, but the fundamental structure of sovereignty and sovereign exception that Homo Sacer attempts not only to uncover, but, more importantly, to undo. For Agamben, Derrida reads the parable in terms that bring to light the logic of law and sovereignty (and indeed define its paradox as the very logic of différance), but cannot or will not go beyond it. “According to the schema of the sovereign exception,” Agamben writes, “law applies to [the man from the country] in no longer applying, and holds him in its ban in abandoning him outside itself. The open door destined only for him includes him in excluding him and excludes him in including him. And this is precisely the summit and the root of every law” (HS 50). The ban, the inclusive exclusion, the “relation of exception” (HS 18), Agamben argues, is the fundamental structure of law and sovereignty, and while Agamben and Derrida might agree on this description of the ban-structure (which, indeed, Agamben adopts from Jean-Luc Nancy, and which I will discuss in greater detail in chapter 4 below), what separates their readings of the parable is the nature or status they assign to that structure.

What is the significance of that impasse of the structure of sovereignty that includes in excluding and excludes in including, the law that is “in force without significance”? For Derrida, the impassability of this threshold indicates precisely the insuperability of différance:

Their [i.e., the doorkeepers’] potency is différance, an interminable différance, since it lasts for days and “years,” indeed, up to the end of (the) man. Différance till death, and for death, without end because ended. As the doorkeeper represents it, the discourse of the law does not say “no” but “not yet,” indefinitely. . . . What is deferred forever till death is entry into the law itself, which is nothing other than that which dictates the delay. (BtL, 204–5)

The important comment to make here, for the purposes of this opening discussion, is that for Derrida, the image of the door of the law, which is open and impassable, which commands but “wants nothing,” is the very figure of the originless displacement, the différance, that (un)grounds the structure of the law. Or, to say this another way, the inaccessibility of the law is the final juridical aporia which Derrida interprets as a figure for the euporia of différance: for the man (and for man) there is “no itinerary, no method, no path to accede to the law, to what would happen there, to the topos of its occurrence” (BtL 196). The entry to the law never happens, and the man from the country never sets foot in the place (topos) where the law is grounded, because there is no such place. There is only the différance that holds the man from the country (and the doorkeeper) always before the law, until the door is finally shut as the man approaches death.

Derrida’s interpretation of the significance of this final event—the closing of the door—is precisely the point Agamben challenges in his counterreading of the parable. For Derrida, the door of the law remains open and impassable “forever till death” because of its “differantial topology” or “atopology,” and any desire to step beyond that threshold into the presence of the law amounts to a metaphysical dream of presence itself. But for Agamben, “not want[ing] to enter into the door of the Law but [not permitting] it to be closed either” is precisely the limitation of deconstruction, which, in not permitting the closing of the door, will not permit itself to imagine an undoing of the sovereign ban-structure at the root of all law and thus cannot read anything but death in the figure of the closing door (HS 54; my italics). Agamben, then, agrees with Derrida that the tale brings to light the “differantial topology” of sovereignty, but then sharply distinguishes himself from the deconstructive reading by suggesting that this structure is not the ultimate limit of thought, but precisely the obscure threshold whose abolition Kafka’s tale gestures toward: “The prestige of deconstruction in our time lies precisely in its having conceived of the entire text of tradition as being in force without significance, a being in force whose strength lies essentially in its undecidability and in having shown that such a being in force is, like the door of the Law in Kafka’s parable, absolutely impassable. But it is precisely concerning the sense of this being in force (and of the state of exception that it inaugurates) that our position distinguishes itself from that of deconstruction” (HS 54). What distinguishes their readings, then, is the way they understand the countryman’s ultimate fate as he stands before the law.

What, then, according to Agamben, is the significance of the parable’s cryptic ending? For him, too, the aporia becomes euporia at the end of the tale, but it is a wholly different one—another way, where “the two terms distinguished and kept united by the relation of ban [i.e., the man and the law, bare life and sovereignty] abolish each other and enter into a new dimension” (HS 55). In Agamben’s reading, the countryman’s waiting for days and years is neither failure nor endless deferral; rather, it is precisely a successful strategy that leads not to the recognition and affirmation of the empty yet forceful ban-structure of sovereignty and the law, but, in the tale’s final image of the gatekeeper moving to shut the door, to the dissolution of the sovereign ban itself. “If it is true the door’s very openness constituted . . . the invisible power and specific ‘force’ of the Law,” he writes, “then we can imagine that all the behavior of the man from the country is nothing other than a complicated and patient strategy to have the door closed in order to interrupt the Law’s being in force” (HS 55).³ And to reaffirm this point against his primary interlocutor:

The final sense of the legend is thus not, as Derrida writes, that of an “event that succeeds in not happening” (or that happens in not happening: “an event that happens not to happen,” un événement qui arrive à ne pas arriver), but rather precisely the opposite: the story tells how something has really happened in seeming not to happen, and the messianic aporias of the man from the country express exactly the difficulties that our age must confront in attempting to master [venire a capo] the sovereign ban. (HS 57)⁴

As we will see over the course of this and the following chapters, Agamben’s influential analysis of the logic of sovereignty and law has roots that lie in his earlier thought concerning language. This philosophical-linguistic background is indicated clearly enough here, though, for there is in both Derrida’s and Agamben’s readings of “Before the Law” a close analogy drawn between the status of law, or its conditions of possibility, and the status of the literary or linguistic. As Derrida asks in the course of his reading, “what if the law, without being itself transfixed by literature, shared the conditions of its possibility with the literary object?” (BtL 191). For Derrida, the man from the country’s error, so to speak (for the law’s inaccessibility “puzzles” him), is that he wants to enter the topos of the law, wants to touch it, and does not understand that the law is not a substantial thing to whose presence one might gain full access; instead, the law is (or functions like) a text to be read (BtL 196). “Perhaps man is the man from the country as long as he cannot read; or, if knowing how to read, he is still bound up in unreadability within that very thing which appears to yield itself to be read. He wants to see or touch the law, he wants to ‘enter’ it, because perhaps he does not know that the law is not to be seen or touched but deciphered” (BtL 197; my italics). The reading of the law in the tale (and of the law outside of the tale) is thus clearly folded into Derrida’s thought on textuality, and as a text to be “deciphered” (a term that will assume greater importance toward the end of this chapter), the law is subject to the logic of the trace, to the play of différance, to reinscription, to the deconstructive unraveling to which Derrida subjects the entire text of Western metaphysics.

However, for Agamben, in volatilizing that ghostly limit, which is both impassable and open, the deconstructive reading of Kafka’s parable, for all its patience, does not quite succeed in untying the law’s tightly woven threads; rather, he suggests that deconstruction (like other earlier attempts to think the problem) “push[es] the aporia of sovereignty to the limit but still [does] not completely free [itself] from its ban. [It] show[s] that the dissolution of the ban, like the cutting of the Gordian knot, resembles less the solution of a logical or mathematical problem than the solution of an enigma” (HS 48). For Agamben, this entrapment in a logical problematic of which it cannot venire a capo is the basic limit that deconstruction runs up against, whether in its political or its linguistic version, and it is this knot that he proposes, from his earliest to his recent work, to cut through rather than untie. In order to make that cut, however, one must posit a dimension beyond the warp and woof of the texture of that textile; indeed, one must posit that there is an outside of the text.

Semiology and Saussure

The figure of the “solution of an enigma” that appears here in Homo Sacer is, in fact, a clear echo from Stanzas, published eighteen years earlier, in 1977. Indeed, it is the central figure of that book’s fourth and final section, titled “The Perverse Image: Semiology from the Point of View of the Sphinx,” the full significance of which becomes clear only when it is read as a pointed response to the first part of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, in particular to part 1, chapter 2, “Linguistics and Grammatology.” Such a reading is, in fact, suggested by Agamben’s text itself, for the footnotes to the last chapter contain two direct, though unelaborated, references to Derrida—one to Of Grammatology specifically and one to Derrida’s general debt to Heidegger (to whose memory, moreover, Stanzas is dedicated). Yet, though these are only very brief footnotes, they indicate far...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction. Agamben and Derrida: An Esoteric Dossier
• Part One: First Principles
• 1. Agamben and Derrida Read Saussure
• 2. “The Human Voice”
• 3. Potenza and Différance
• Part Two: Strategy Without Finality or Means Without End
• 4. Sovereignty, Law, and Violence
• 5. Ticks and Cats
• 6. A Matter of Time
• Coda: Play
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index