Agamben and Authenticity

The article argues that the contentious and complex concept of ‘authenticity’, which Agamben develops from Heidegger, forms a central continuity between Agamben’s earlier work, which focuses more on language and art, and his later work, which focuses more on politics. Moreover, I suggest that although this concept is often unquestioned and elided in his work, it plays a crucial role in the deep structures of his thought. Moreover, the ‘unthought concept’ of ‘authenticity’ is of concern because, while authenticity might possibly have a role to play in the sphere of how we come to understand and relate to artworks, there are reasons to be suspicious of this concept in the political realm if, indeed, these two ‘realms’ can be understood separately. If these two spheres cannot be clearly separated, as seems more likely, then it is even more important to explore and question the terms and cluster of concepts around ‘authenticity’.     

Government-Voluntary Sector Compacts: Governance, Governmentality, and Civil Society

In 1998 government and the main representatives of the voluntary sector in each of the four countries in the United Kingdom published 'compacts' on relations between government and the voluntary sector. These were joint documents, carrying forward ideas expressed by the Labour Party when in opposition, and directed at developing a new relationship for partnership with those 'not-for-profit organizations' that are involved primarily in the areas of policy and service delivery.This article seeks to use an examination of the compacts, and the processes that produced them and that they have now set in train, to explore some of the wider issues about the changing role of government and its developing relationships with civil society. In particular, it argues that the new partnership builds upon a movement from welfarism to economism which is being developed further through the compact process. Drawing upon a governmentality approach, and illustrating the account with interview material obtained from some of those involved in compact issues from within both government and those umbrella groups which represent the voluntary sector, an argument is made that this overall process represents the beginning of a new reconfiguration of the state that is of considerable constitutional significance.     

Rethinking Agamben: Ontology and the Coming Politics

Giorgio Agamben’s work has often been criticised for being bleak, pessimistic, and of little use for thinking about political action. This image of Agamben has, however, resulted from a narrow reading of the Homo Sacer project that isolates it from his early thought on language and ontology. This essay draws on new works by Mathew Abbott and Jessica Whyte to explore the ways that Agamben attempts to think the conditions for overcoming the political nihilism of the present. It argues that the two works diverge on the question of where Agamben locates the potential for political transformation, and that this results from their differing approaches to the relationship between ontology and politics.     

Thinking the law with and against Luhmann,Legendre, Agamben

After the failure of all enterprises in legal ontology, and after the success of all enterprises in legal system internal theodicy, the field of legal theory is now open to receive a range of more complex, less universalist, less politicised, but also more personally shaped, more fragile suggestions. My article focusses on three such ways of dealing with the law question: the work of Pierre Legendre, a French psychoanalyst and specialist of the history of administrative law and Christian religion, the work of Niklas Luhmann, the recently deceased founder of a new German schoolof sociological systems theory, and that of Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher whose re-opening of the discussion on the Benjaminian notion of bare life and its relationship to law has provoked worldwide attention. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Sovereignty, Exception, and Norm

Carl Schmitt's Political Theology is the locus classicus of contemporary discussions of sovereignty. I argue that Schmitt's conception of sovereignty is excessively metaphysical and that it posits an incoherent 'sovereign' ability to decide what shall count as normal. Schmitt follows and radicalizes the late Bodin's claims – themselves the product of a political theology, namely, Bodin 's conversion to Judaism – regarding the necessity of an indivisible and absolute sovereignty. In each, the relation between the executive and the other parts of government is reduced to what Schmitt describes as an 'either/or.' This move is a disastrous mistake. The question is not whether exceptions and emergencies such as terrorist attacks are real, but to what extent the executive branch can rightly claim a monopoly on the ability to determine whether an exception exists, and whether its resulting actions will be permanently unchecked and unregulated. Recent work by Bruce Ackerman is a better guide in these matters than the metaphysics of either Schmitt or Bodin.     

Sovereignty,Power and Resistance

This article will analyse the three conceptualapproaches to sovereignty which prevail in thecontemporary discourse, and which can besummarily identified as follows: firstly,sovereignty is the notion which accounts forboth the form and the source of politicalpower, then sovereignty is a function of law,and lastly, sovereignty manifests itself as aform of resistance. This conceptual overview ofthe theoretical elaborations on sovereigntywill show that what is named as sovereignty infact indexes, above all, an oscillation betweenthe impossibility of self-presence and thedrive to achieve such self-presence, and that,in spite of, or maybe even by virtue of thisoscillation, it nonetheless succeeds insustaining the political discourse, if only inthe guise of a performative suspension of thenation as immanent community.     

Interrupting the Myth of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Partage</Emphasis>: Reflections on Sovereignty and Sacrifice in the work of Nancy,Agamben and Derrida

Agamben traces the bio-political essence of modern politics to the non-sacrificial killing of Homo Sacer in Roman law. Nancy, on the other hand, links the history of Western politics to the fundamental logic of sacrifice in Western metaphysics. He nevertheless contemplates the possibility that Western societies may finally have arrived at the threshold of a non-sacrificial existence. Derrida seeks to resist the sacrificial logic of Western metaphysics and politics, but nevertheless appears to accept it as an irreducible fact of human co-existence. Unlike Nancy, he envisages no actual or actualised beyond beyond the realm of sacrificial metaphysics and politics. He thus can be said to interrupt Nancy’s ‘myth’ of a non-sacrificial partage. This article compares these three philosophical stances in the hope of throwing more light on the role of sacrifice in the law and politics of our time. Professor of Law, Rand Afrikaans University. Conversations with Ann van Sevenant, Carol Clarkson, Louise du Toit, Peter Fitzpatrick, Costas Douzinas and Adam Thurschwell gave impetus to many of the themes developed in this article. Concomitant shortcomings and inaccuracies, as always, are mine.     

Law,Sovereignty and the Nation

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique -     

Particular Rights and Absolute Wrongs: Giorgio Agamben on Life and Politics

Over the past decade, as human rights discourses have increasingly served to legitimize state militarism, a growing number of thinkers have sought to engage critically with the human rights project and its anthropological foundations. Amongst these thinkers, Giorgio Agamben’s account of rights is possibly the most damning: human rights declarations, he argues, are biopolitical mechanisms that serve to inscribe life within the order of the nation state, and provide an earthly foundation for a sovereign power that is taking on a form redolent of the concentration camp. In this paper, I will examine Agamben’s account of human rights declarations, which he sees as central to the modern collapse of the distinction between life and politics that had typified classical politics. I will then turn to the critique of Agamben offered by Jacques Ranciere, who suggests that Agamben’s rejection of rights discourses is consequent to his adoption of Hannah Arendt’s belief that, in order to establish a realm of freedom, the political realm must be premised on the expulsion of natural life. In contrast to Ranciere, I will argue that far from sharing the position of those thinkers, like Arendt, who seek to respond to the modern erosion of the borders between politics and life by resurrecting earlier forms of separation, Agamben sees the collapse of this border as the condition of possibility of a new, non-juridical politics.

Social Justice and Communication: Mill, Marx, and Habermas

This article concerns how one may theorize a social justice of communication. The article argues that the theory of democracy cannot neglect an analysis of communication and that, indeed, a social justice of communication can be identified in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas’s “deliberative” theory of democracy. The socio-political analyses of communication in John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx are examined as precursors to Habermas’s position because they are useful for setting off the unique synthesis of the liberal and critical traditions that Habermas develops. Such a social justice of communication shows how the communicative mediation of the public sphere can ameliorate the tension between individual autonomy and the solidarity of group membership by communicatively empowering individuals under conditions of mutual respect and equal dignity.

The Politics of Caesura: Giorgio Agamben on Language and the Law

The concept of division or caesura is central to the political and legal philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. This paper examines the different ways in which Agamben characterises the law in terms of caesura, and the manner in which this analysis of law is grounded in his analyses of language. I argue that there are two forms of legal division to be found in Agamben’s political analyses. The first is the division that occurs when the legal system produces determinate identities, such as those of nation, and socio-economic status. However, this form of division is itself predicated upon the division that delimits the law as such, the caesura between political and bare life. The way that Agamben sets up both of these political problems is deeply indebted to his analyses of the ‘presuppositional structure’ of metaphysical language—the fracture between signification and its excess.

主权:政治现实、道德理想与法治桥梁

准确把握主权概念是清晰理解国际法与国际关系的基础。只有消除一些误解和歧义才有可能树立正确的观念。就现实而言,主权是对内的命令、调控以及以此为基础的对外代表与参与,主要功能是政府对其行为与利益的辩护与防卫。其根源是社会分工形成的人群分层,并在此基础上形成的制度惯性以及人们对治理形式的路径依赖。其内核是无涉于道德和法律的。在认清主权的非社会契约性、非神圣绝对性之后,必须承认,主权在世界上仍会长期存在。因而有必要在人本主义的价值基点上塑造其理想,即要求主权发挥引领、代表、服务人民,在相互依赖、面临共同未来的人类处境中密切合作的职能。为此,有必要进一步完善权力—权利三角形,使主权的运作受国内宪政和国际法治的引导与制约,促进社会的健康和谐发展。     

Custodial Sovereignty: Reconciling Sovereignty and Global Environmental Challenges amongst the Vestiges of Colonialism

Netherlands International Law Review -     

The Maastricht-Urteil: Sovereignty Now

Abstract: The sovereignty issue in European law, which was recently raised again before the highest national courts, poses a challenge to legal theory. The supremacy of EC law should not be regarded as imposing a strict hierarchy within a monistic legal system. A pluralistic and interactive analysis of the relations between the legal systems of the Member States and their common system of EC law suggests instead that the highest court within each system retains interpretative competence-competence. Although pluralist legal theory therefore supports the claim that sovereignty has not passed to the organs of the Union, the same analysis confirms that sovereignty has not remained with the individual Member States either: a more subtle understanding of the meaning of sovereignty and its locus is necessary.     

Sovereignty and Representation

In this contribution the author explores some aspects of the relation between sovereignty, democracy and representation. After shortly focusing on the idea of sovereignty, he then questions Rousseau's refusal to take representation into account within a democratic framework, an idea that is however latent in his general approach.