Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
As Agamben points out, however, the division between Jews and non-Jews is not the only division that is constituted through the name. Aside from Iudaois, Paul also uses the terms Israel (the nation) and Hebraios (which refers originally to Hebrew as a holy tongue) to designate Jews, as opposed to goyim. So here ‘the people’ are defined through the triangulation of law, language, and nativity. As Agamben puts it ‘One could say that the name itself divides, that the law constituting Israel as am is the principle of incessant division’ (Agamben 2005a, p. 48). The politics of the name is the politics of division, the originary split in political being between Jews and non-Jews, giving rise to the need for further designations, further articulations of this division. It is as if the boundaries of political community of the ‘nation’ is deeply unstable, riven by the multiple forms through which belonging is constituted.
This oppositional political logic at operation has perhaps its most pointed modern articulation in Schmitt’s definition of the political in terms of the friend/enemy distinction (Schmitt 1996, p. 26). For the Schmitt of Concept of the Political, the fundamental political decision is the decision on the distinction between friend and enemy, and the political can only exist given the real possibility of such a distinction being made. This relation between friend and enemy is an example of the logic of the class or set, for Schmitt’s political community is brought into being through an identification, a demarcation that neatly divides the field of political being in two without there being any remainder. While deploying important aspects of Schmitt’s conceptual framework, particularly his definition of the sovereign as ‘he who decides on the exception’ (Schmitt 1985, p. 5), Agamben’s conceptual framework explicitly rejects the friend/enemy distinction as the originary moment of the political, arguing that the logic of identity that is at stake in the divisions of the law presuppose a more originary political delimitation, that of the sovereign ban (Agamben 1998, p. 110).
For example, in Infancy and History, he reworks the philosophy of the subject, not as a psychological substance that lies behind language, but rather as immanent to language, a product of the putting to use of language. Similarly, in Potentialities he mobilises the idea of the event of language to rethink a range of philosophical problems, from the concept of history to the Platonic ‘thing itself’.
This idea of a pre-juridical natural violence is also reflected in antiquity in the sophistic opposition between phusis and nomos. See Agamben’s discussion in ‘Nomos Basileus’ (Agamben 1998, p. 30).
While the problem of ‘natural violence’ at issue in social contract is Agamben’s privileged example of this logic, we can also observe this metaphysical formulation of the ground of the political name at operation in the analysis of the logic of class under capitalism outlined in Part One of this essay. Being determined as bourgeois or proletarian through the logic of klesis is predicated upon an a priori individuality that exists outside of that political-economic determination.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1991. Language and death: The place of negativity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The coming community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999a. Remnants of Auschwitz: The witness and the archive. New York: Zone Books.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999b. Potentialities: Collected essays in philosophy. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005a. The time that remains: A commentary on the letter to the Romans. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005b. State of exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. Infancy and history. London: Verso.
Marx, Karl, and Frederich Engels. 1975. Collected works. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The concept of the political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
McLoughlin, D.P. The Politics of Caesura: Giorgio Agamben on Language and the Law. Law Critique 20, 163–176 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-009-9047-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-009-9047-0