Agambenʼs messianic politics

Abstract

"Agambenʼs understanding of sovereignty, law and violence works between, on the one hand, Schmittʼs theorization of sovereignty as the decision on the exception and on the other, Benjaminʼs critique of Schmitt in his eighth thesis on the philosophy of history, where he claims that the exception has increasingly become the rule. Tracing Agambenʼs mediation of this conflict also helps situate his work in relation to that of other theorists with whom he is frequently associated, particularly Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida, and specify his disagreements with them. To bring these out, I compare the ʻweak messianicsʼ of Jacques Derrida with Agambenʼs position, which I call ʻstrong messianicsʼ. In this comparison, I focus particularly on the essays in which Derrida provides an interpretation of Benjaminʼs messianics and the status of the law, these being “Force of Lawʼ and “Before the Law,” as these texts are closely paralleled in Agambenʼs work. It is worth noting at this point I have reconstructed Agambenʼs argument in Homo Sacer in a form that may initially seem at odds with the ethos of his work. One of the difficulties that Agambenʼs work presents for interpretation lies in his fragmentary and iterative style, which means that the reduction of summary is a particularly difficult task that can too easily give the impression of a greater systematicity than there is in the original work. Yet while Agambenʼs work is densely interwoven in fragments, ʻthresholdsʼ, and short essays, there is nevertheless an internal consistency of argumentation and it is this that I am concerned with here. Hence, my reconstruction of Agambenʼs argument does not attempt to either replicate or to simply obscure his stylistics but instead attends to the rigorous conceptuality that gives such a style its critical theoretical force. In doing so, I have also drawn from essays and fragments in several other books that complement the often dense and enigmatic claims made in Homo Sacer."