Tuesday, March 08, 2005
(8:26 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
Part 1 of Covering Agamben's use of "Critique of Violence"
---We will then have before us a "pure" law ... a word that does not [violently] bind, thatneither [violently] commands nor [violently] prohibits ..."
Agamben (slightly emended)
from the last paragraph of State of Exception
Agamben's State of Exception (SE) is worth its 88-page-thin weight in gold and more if only for the chapter on Benjamin (especially "Critique of Violence") and Schmitt; Agamben's erudite genius has uncovered far more than the traditionally known "exoteric dossier of this debate." And this is not to mention the jaw slacking achievement of convincingly geneaologizing states of exception as the death of democracy -- and to Agamben's credit, he has no intention of bringing out the dead -- in no less than six countries: Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, England, and of course that great protector of the only slice of freedom on the island of Fidel Castro. Going in, I was something of a skeptic on this score, but the power and precision of chapter one's mere thirty-one pages is truly something to behold. But I digress.
With a slight bit of tweeking in a few deft strokes, Agamben seeks to accomplish by analysis alone what Benjamin hoped to accomplish by a provocation to actual violence. In this I think Agamben is slightly less than successful, though slightly really must be emphasized. May it not be the case, however, that by slight adjustments to both Benjamin and Agamben we may commence a provocation worthy of their noble efforts?
Chapters two and three shrewdly introduce Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty, especially in Dictatorship and the more often remarked on Political Theology. They do so respectively by way of compact histories of the term Force of Law (including a somewhat subtle criticism of Derrida's similarly titled Cardozo lectures) and the ancient Roman concept of Iustitium (which Agamben informs us literally means a "standstill" or "suspension of the law" in extreme cases involving "an emergency situation in Rome resulting from a foreign war, insurrection, or civil war"). Chapter four gets down to brass tacks by elucidating the movements of Benjamin and Schmitt, "the two players facing each other across the chessboard of history." The match procedes so delicately that, to lesser trained eyes, the players scandalously "seem always to be moving a single pawn"; yet, "what is nevertheless decisive is that in each case" Bejamin is orchestrating "the dissolution of the relation between violence and law" (63).
And here is where we must note the slight, but critical distance between Benjamin and the project for which Agamben wishes to appropriate him.
From Critique of Violence (CV) in 1921 right up throuh his suicide slightly more than two decades later, one can almost not escape the sense that Benjamin's aim is to justify and create the conditions for a blood and barricades revolution, or as CV puts it, divine violence. Divine Violence, as SE reminds us, is for Benjamin the only possible way to escape the dialectic of law establishing versus law perserving violence. According to the first of many gems offerred by Agamben in this regard, Benjamin's CV is established as a direct repsonse to a similar distinction in Schmitt's Dictatorship. But where Benjamin wants a reign of terror in Berlin, one gets the very real sense with Agamben would rest content with a mere analytical unmasking of or "deactivation" of the link between violence and the law. This is most evident in the conclusion to the otherwise convincing analysis of Benjamin's eighth thesis on the concept of history (57-59), in the last paragraph of the Benjamin-Schmitt chapter, and in the final paragraph of the book. Taking only the example from the end of the book: "To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space for human action ... which severs the nexus between violence and law." The note on which SE then concludes, together with a few scattered earlier references to St. Paul, gives the English only reader a foretaste of what we can expect in Agamben's forthcoming book set to be released on April 30th.
"And only beginning from the space just opened will it be possible to pose the question of
a possible use of law after then deactivation of that device that, in the state of
exception, tied it to life. We will then have before us a 'pure' law, in the sense in which
Benjamin speaks of a 'pure' language and a 'pure' violence. To a word that does not bind,
that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an
action as pure means, which shows itself, without any relation to end. And, between the
two, not a lost original state, but only the use and human praxis that the powers of law
and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception."
Where Agamben unfortunately slavishly follows Benjamin right over the cliff is in Benjamin's Kafkaesque insistence against Scholem that the proper correlative of divine violence is "the enigmatic image of a law that is studied but no longer kept" (63 and passim) - and here, not coincidentally, begin the references to St. Paul.
Maintaining either side of this disequation -- divine or revolutionary violence delinked from a law that is studied but not kept -- is quixotic academese. In spite of Agamben's final desperate insistence that "of course, the task at hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its spatially and temporally defined boundaries," this is precisely what is bound to happen when the legal scholars get a hold of SE. There is almost certainly a countermove to every attempt to theoretically equate revolutionary and statist violence or, relatedly, to discover a divine violence that escapes the law-perserving/law establishing dialectic. Stalemate is the only possible outcome.
As much as I am taken by Agamben's use of Benjamin, this is where I simply depart from Foucault and other Nietzschean political theories. Agamben is after a political animal with access to violence who nevertheless "play[s] with the law just as children play with disused objects." Riiight. Political and "canonical" uses of the law are inextricable. We are animals, yes. But political animals. Irreducibly political animals. And this means that fanciful attempts to open some space for bodies unsubjectified by any externality or for a realized anarchy, anomie (the subject of chapter five - "because he is a living law, the sovereign is anomos"), and yes I suspect even autonomia are simply unable to sustain the types of strategies necessary to nurture long term resistance.
Where Agamben ends with a Foucauldian/Derridean dream of a new human being beyond all traditional uses of law, we must instead perform (another) reversal of Benjamin that will give us similar, but more decisive results. Where Benjamin and Agamben wish to desuture violence and the law (the former by revolution, the latter by erudite analysis) by means that are forever reinscribable within the logic of violent sovereignty, we must instead perform this überimportant task by means of a reengagement with divine law rather than by means of divine violence. A Law, that is, which is unsuspendable, unavoidable. Agamben and Benjamin, at least in CV, ignore this possibility altogether. Strange, a Jewish thinker who bypasses altogether his own tradition's solution to an intractble problem. Certainly not unheard of in early 20th century Germany, but strange nonetheless, especially from a thinker as rigorous as Benjamin.
Enter Robert Cover stage left.
