Thinking the law with and against Luhmann, Legendre, Agamben

Law and Critique

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 107-136

  Schütz, Anton ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

"Instituting life"; Agamben; Aristotle; Autopoiesis; Benjamin; Closure openness; Desubjectivation; Dogma; Legendre; Life bare life; Luhmann; Messianism; Power; Rule exception; Schmitt; Systems theory

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846282291     PISSN: 09578536     EISSN: 15728617     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1008939323404     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. Chamfort, "Charactères et Anecdotes", an. 702, quoted after Chamfort, Produits de la civilisation perfectionnée: Maximes et pensées; Charactères et Anecdotes, éd. par Jean Dagen (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), 209.
2. On a different level, this mutually exclusive content of keeping company and fusing together plays an equivally important role in connection with love and intimacy, starting with the Bible's fusional imperative and "one-flesh" doctrine of marriage (Gen. 2:24) - a doctrine which, enjoining their fusion, seems to explicitly outlaw company between partners. Yet, there is a minority view, shared by Rashi, the famous French 11th century commentator on the Talmud, according to which the referent of "one flesh" is not, in fact, the married couple, but the child. Cf. Pierre Legendre, La 901e Conclusion (Paris: Fayard, 1998) 389, with further references.
3. "Gehorsam und lange Beine", cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Der Fall Wagner", quoted after Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV, 1980), vol. VI, 39.
4. "Id quod per aliud non potest concipi, per se concipi debet": Spinoza, Eth., Book I, Axiom II. This axiom is quoted as epigraph to Luhmann's last book, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 10.
5. French for: "overall positive outcome". The formula used to act the part of the official jargon euphemism to which the French Communist Party used to have recourse in assessing the history of Soviet and Eastern European socialism.
6. Cf. Tiqqun, Théorie du bloom (Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2000). Drawing on the Guy Debordian concept of société de spectacle and working in close collaboration with Giorgio Agamben, the Paris-located collective Tiqqun (no relation to the American periodical Tikkun) strives to unfold the philosophical implications of Agamben's notions of coming community and planetary petty bourgeoisie. The concept of bloom denotes individual existence in its current, post-subjective state. Its sources include James Joyce's phrase: "They understand us better than we understand them". By "they", Leopold Bloom refers to cats, Tiqqun, instead, to advertising and the media.
7. The term alteuropäisch, a luhmannian creation, has been designed to encompass the entire Western pre-history of contemporary world-society, thus deliberately ignoring even the roughest internal differentiations (antiquity, middle ages, modernity), in order to focus all attention on the single watershed: traditional/modern.
8. Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), 42; 131; 748ff., on social complexity. Specifically on "life", id., Social Systems, tr. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
9. According to Legendre that integrative function will, rather than disappear, find a different attributee: no longer law and religion but science or economics, with the difference that the latter, prevented by the definition of their finalities from doing that integrative "job" officially and admittedly, must do this part of their work incognito - with the travesty resulting from this, and especially with the need to build up a whole theodicy in order to bolster the all-justifying objectiveness of method in science, of the market in economy, for otherwise the incognito is at risk. Cf. Legendre, Sur la question dogmatique en Occident: Aspects théoriques (Paris: Fayard, 1999) 119.
10. This is the critical point in Agamben's discussion of Foucault who, ever oscillating between social techniques and technologies of the self, macro - "governmentalities" - and "micro-powers", omnes and singulatim -, never thematizes their relationship.
11. Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 310;
12. Anton Schütz, "L'immaculée conception de l'interprète et l'émergence du système juridique", Droits: Revue française de théorie juridique, 21 (1995), 113-126.
13. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
14. The formula, the importance of which for Legendre's own teaching about the institutional grasp on life in the West cannot be overrated, is from Augustin's letter 53 (39). Its immediate context concerns the science of liturgy, which is described as a science functioning "like some sort of a machinery" to the purpose of "lifting up", or "keeping up", that "structure of love": "Scientia tamquam machina quaedam, per quam structura caritatis adsurgat". Cf. with further references, Pierre Legendre, "Les Maîtres de la loi: Etude sur la fonction dogmatique en régime industriel", in: 38 Annales: Economies - Sociétés - Civilisations (1983),
15. also reprinted in Pierre Legendre: Ecrits juridiques du Moyen Age occidental (London: Variorum Reprints, 1988), 507-537 (533, note 20).
16. "Toute grandeur, toute puissance, toute subordination repose sur l'exécuteur ; il est l'horreur et le lien de l'association humaine. Otez du monde cet agent incompréhensible; dans l'instant même l'ordre fait place au chaos, les trônes s'abîment et la socié té disparaît." Joseph de Maistre: Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg, ou entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la providence (1821), vol. 1, quoted after the edition by Guy Trédaniel (Paris: Editions de la Maisnie, 1980), 34.
17. Cf. Pierre Legendre, Leçons III, Dieu au miroir: Etude sur l'institution des images (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 191ff.
18. Cf. Pierre Legendre, Leçons IV, Les Enfants du Texte: Etude sur la fonction parentale des Etats (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 237ff;
19. Leçons VII, Le Désir politique de Dieu: Etude sur les montages de l'Etat et du droit (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 105ff.
20. Pierre Legendre, "La France et Bartole", in: Bartolo di Sassoferrato: Studi e documenti, vol. 1, Milan (Giuffrè) 1961,
21. also reprinted in: Pierre Legendre: Ecrits juridiques du Moyen Age occidental (London (Variorum Reprints), 1988); 133-172 (154).
22. Cf. Pierre Legendre, Leçons I, La 901e Conclusion: Etude sur le théâtre de la Raison (Paris: Fayard, 1998).
23. Cf. Pierre Legendre, Leçons II, L'Empire de la Vérité: Introduction aux Espaces Dogmatiques Industriels, Paris (Fayard) 1983.
24. Legendre's use of the term "institution" refers to both the transitive action of institutionalising - cf. the greek/roman formula vitam instituere - and its solidified product, or substrate. Different from the social historian Norbert Elias, whose study on the civilisation of customs particularly stresses the transitive sense, Legendre's point is about the inseparable or recto/verso relation of both senses.
25. Pierre Legendre, Sur la question dogmatique en Occident: aspect théoriques (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 8ff.
26. Although Legendre names the addressee of subjective alienation, that in the name of which a discourse is uttered, a Reference, the freudian term of a transference, whose meaning was, as one knows, first reserved to a condition of the psychoanalytical cure, is present in his general lay-out of subjectivity. On the historical and political potential of the notion of transference, cf. also the volume: Übertragung und Gesetz, Gründungsmythen, Kriegstheater, und Unterwerfungstechniken von Institutionen, ed. by Armin Adam and Martin Stingelin (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1995).
27. Giorgio Agamben, "The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin", in: Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed., tr. and with an introd. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 160-174 (174).
28. For Agamben's recent distinction between messianic time and eschatological (or apocalyptic) time - which he rejects - cf. Il tempo che resta: Un commento alla Lettera ei Romani (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), 63ff.
29. Cf., in addition to the last pages of Homo Sacer: Giorgio Agamben, Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz: L'archive et le témoin (Homo Sacer III), quoted after the French edition, tr. Pierre Alferi (Paris: Bibliothèque Rivages, 1999). Engl. edition: Remnants of Auschwitz, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). For a different, classically foucaldian account of man as an artifact, cf. Walter Seitter, Menschenfassungen: Studien zur Erkenntnispolitikwissenschaft (Munich: Boer, 1985).
30. For an impressive historical account of political power as uncapitalisable quantity, cf. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, tr. Maurizia Boscagli, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
31. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, op. cit.
32. "Blood is the symbol of mere life", cf. Walter Benjamin, "Zur Kritik der Gewalt", in id., Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II/1, 179-203,
33. tr. as "Critique of Violence" by Edmund Jephcott, in: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1996), 236-252 (250).
34. "Fördern" (or "fördernd einwirken"), i.e. "fostering", is the term Goethe used when referring to sovereign - and particularly: his own personal - attention and intervention in whatever activity, as it might be added with respect to Benjamin's personal Goethekult. Indeed, pure divine violence is interpreted by Benjamin as form of fostering - fostering of "gifted", as opposed to "mere" - life.
35. On the mythical dimension of legally ordered violence, cf. Werner Hamacher, "Afformative, Strike", 13 Cardozo Law Review (1991 ), 1133-1157;
36. also, Alexander Garcia Düttmann, "Die Gewalt der Zerstörung", in Gewalt und Gerechtigkeit, ed. A. Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994).
37. Although Edmund Jephcott (cf. note 26) translates Benjamin's "blosses Leben" as "mere (rather than "bare") life".
38. "Zur Kritk der Gewalt" op. cit., 201/2; Giorgio Agamben consistently adopts Benjamin's stance against life's "holiness".
39. Including Jephcott, cf. p. 250: "the dissolution of legal violence".
40. Loc. cit. (tr. modified).
41. Cf. Giorgio Agamben's comments on Paul's epistles as well as on Walter Benjamin's close - and sympathetically messianic - reading of them, in his forthcoming: Il tempo che resta, note 23.
42. Cf. Yan Thomas, "Vitae necisque potestas: Le père, la cité, la mort", in: Du châtiment dans la cité: Supplices corporels et peine de mort dans le Monde antique (Rome: Presses de l'Ecole Française de Rome, 1984).
43. Walter Benjamin, "Zur Kritik der Gewalt", op. cit., 203 (German edition), 252 (English edition).
44. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz: op. cit., 72f., with reference to Primo Levi and Robert Antelme.
45. In: Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience and the Origins of History, tr. Liz Heron, (London: Verso, 1993).
46. Cf. for the first part, Gilles Deleuze, "Pour en finir avec le jugement", Critique et Clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993) 158-169 (169),
47. "To have done with judgment", Essays: Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 126-135 (135),
48. tr. modified; and for the last sentence, Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 76.
49. Cf. Stanley Fish, There Is No Such Thing as Free Speech ...and it's a Good Thing Too (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
50. Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale II (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 65
51. (Problems in General Linguistics, tr. Mary Elisabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971);
52. Giorgio Agamben, Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz: L'archive et le témoin, op. cit., 151.
53. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience and the Origins of History, op. cit., 66ff.
54. Giorgio Agamben, Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz: L'archive et le témoin, op. cit., 79ff.
55. Agamben's key source on life in the camps are Primo Levi's reports. However, it should be pointed out that reading Levi and reading Agamben are exercises of an entirely different nature. Specifically, the Muselmann of the NS concentration camp, the most extreme occurrence of bare life in Agamben's work, a work dedicated to embodiments of bare life, appears not only as the live testimony of inclusive exclusion, but appears simultaneously in a different, uncertain light, as the bearer of a messianic charge. In Levi, a professional chemist, who provided Agamben with the decisive information on witnessing and testimony, no trace of messianism can be found.
56. Quoted in: Giorgio Agamben, "Philosophie et Linguistique", Annuaire philosophique (Paris: Seuil, 1990) 97-116.
57. (Tr. in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed., tr., and introd. by Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) 62-76).
58. For further comments on Kojève, cf. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, op. cit., 60f.
59. Quoted in: Giorgio Agamben, "Philosophie et Linguistique", Annuaire philosophique (Paris: Seuil, 1990) 97-116.
60. (Tr. in Giorgio Agamben, Annuaire philosophique ibid., 62-76).
61. For further comments on Kojève, cf. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, op. cit., 60f.
62. Formulated en hommage to Carl Schmitt's comment on the theme of an end of law: "Das Staatsrecht hört hier auf ("Here public law touches its limit"). Cf. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität, 2nd edition (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1934).
63. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Doctrine of Sovereignty, tr. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
64. Giorgio Agamben, Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz: L'archive et le témoin, op. cit., 19 (ch. 1.4).
65. Niklas Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 308. Luhman goes on: "Otherwise, the decision, being already decided, would only need to be discovered".
66. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, op. cit., 44.
67. Cf. on Robert Walser, Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, tr. by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993) 30, 38, 58f.
68. Homo Sacer, op. cit., 44-48;
69. The Coming Community, op. cit., 35-37;
70. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, op. cit., passim.
71. I am of course referring to Heidegger's well-known appraisal of the biographic genre, cast in the words: "Aristotle was born, worked, and died".
72. On the psychoanalytical notion of the incomparable father, cf. Guillermo Batista's study, L'incomparable père du Président Wilson (Paris: Anthropos, 1999).
73. Michel Foucault, "Subjectivité et Vérité (Cours du 6 janvier 1982)", in Cités: Philosophie, Politique, Histoire 2 (2000), 143-185, (161f.).
74. This is the common theme of Agamben's pieces translated and collected in the volume Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, op. cit.
75. The story is referred to in Jacques Lacan, cf. "Kant avec Sade", Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966) 765-790 (784).
76. Cf. Stanley Fish, There Is No Such Thing as Free Speech ...and it's a Good Thing Too, op. cit., 238.
77. Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 120ff., 127f.
78. Pierre Legendre, Sur la question dogmatique en Occident: aspect théoriques (Paris: Fayard 1999).
79. Giorgio Agamben, "Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality", Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, op. cit., 205-219 (215).
80. Giorgio Agamben, Id., "On Potentiality", in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, op. cit., 177-184 (177f.), with reference to an utterance of the poet Anna Akhmatova.
81. Tou autou kai kata to auto pasa dynamis adynamia, Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Theta, 1046 e 25-6; Agamben, Potentialities op. cit., 181f.
82. Or - per Agamben, op. cit., 182 - "welcome", "receive", "admit". Cf. Aristotle, op. cit., 1050 b10.
83. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, op. cit., 15 (tr. modified).