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.