Andreas Kalyvas

Politics, metaphysics, and death : essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo sacer

Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead / Andrew Norris 1 Au Hasard / Thomas Carl Wall 31 Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law / Peter Fitzpatrick S/Citing the Camp / Erik Vogt 74 The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp / Andreas Kalyvas 107 Anagrammatics of Violence: The Benjaminian Ground of Homo Sacer / Anselm Haverkamp 135 Spaceing as the Shared: Heraclitus, Pindar, Agamben / Andrew Benjamin 145 Cutting the Branches of Akiba: Agambens Critique of Derrida / Adam Thurschwell 173 Linguistic Survival and Ethnicality: Biopolitics, Subjectivication, and Testimony in Remnants of Auschwitz / Catherine Mills 198 Supposing the Impossibility of Silence and of Sound, of Voice: Bataille, Agamben, and the Holocaust / Paul Hegarty 222 Law of Life / Rainer Maria Kiesow 248 The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer / Andrew Norris 262 The State of Exception / Giorgio Agamben 284 Contributors 299 Index 301

From the Act to the Decision Hannah Arendt and the Question of Decisionism

There is much disagreement amongmany commentators of HannahArendt’s work aboutwhether her contributions to politics and philosophy contain a clandestine version of decisionism or, by contrast, represent an explicit attempt to break away from the elements of voluntarism, arbitrariness, and irrationality, which are considered to be inherent to any theory of the decision. Despite the many disagreements that set apart these two interpretations of Arendt, however, there is a common presupposition that both share. They are in agreement concerning the decision: it is a threat and a vice, intrinsically dangerous and potentially totalitarian in nature, which ought to be expelled from any theory of politics with a normative content. As a result, the terms of the debate pertain solely to whether Arendt was a (crypto-) decisionist and not to the nature and evaluation of the decision as such. This paper argues, contrary to Arendt’s critics, that although elements of a theory of the decision can be found scattered throughout many of her writings, she was nonetheless unswerving in her opposition to decisionism. But unlike her defenders, it also argues that had Arendt built on these elements to elaborate a systematic theory of the decision, she would have avoided many of the flaws and inconsistencies that plague her concept of politics.

The Rhetoric of the Market: Adam Smith on Recognition, Speech, and Exchange

We probe the connections linking the market, speech, and sympathy in the work of Adam Smith, stressing how individuals strive for social esteem and ethical credit while competing in markets. We demonstrate how Smith approached speech and rhetoric as constituting attributes of markets, the modern analogue of previous institutional foundations for social order. Thus, markets are not simply, or exclusively, arenas for the instrumental quest by competitive and strategic individuals to secure their material preferences. They are a central mechanism for social integration derived not from strategic self-interest but from the inexorable struggle by human agents for moral approbation. Part One retranslates the master concept of Moral Sentiments into a modern theory of recognition. Part Two considers how Smith, in his Rhetoric , established the mutual constitution of recognition and speech. Part Three carries this understanding to his Jurisprudence , the most integrative of his texts, which relocates these impulses inside the market itself. The pivotal second chapter of Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations , “Of the Principle which gives occasion to the Division of Labour, ” opens with the oft-cited claim that the foundation of modern political economy is the human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” This formulation plays both an analytical and normative role. It offers an anthropological microfoundation for Smiths understanding of how modern commercial societies function as social organizations, which, in turn, provide a venue for the expression and operation of these human proclivities.

Who's afraid of Carl Schmitt?

John McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Peter Caldwell, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997) David Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, Hermann Heller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) Renato Cristi, Carl Schmitt and Liberal Authoritarianism: Strong State, Free Economy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998)

Hegemonic sovereignty: Carl Schmitt, Antonio Gramsci and the constituent prince

This article argues that Schmitts concept of sovereignty and Gramscis notion of hegemony represent two distinct variations on a single theme, namely the idea of the political as the original instituting moment of society. Both Schmitt and Gramsci focused on the sources, conditions, content, and scope of the originating power of a collective will. While the former located it in the constituent power of the sovereign people, the latter placed it in the popular-national will of the modern hegemon. Both thinkers explored the complex and perplexing relationship between radical founding acts and modern democratic politics in a secular age, that is of democratic legitimacy, where with the entrance of the masses into the political sphere, the references to ultimate foundations of authority and to an extra-social source of political power had begun to appear more dubious than ever. The last section of the article develops a notion of hegemonic sovereignty defined as an expansive and positing democratic constituent prince, aiming, through founding, total decisions, at the overall, radical, explicit, and lucid institution of society. The article briefly shows how the concept of hegemonic sovereignty can solve some problems pertaining to Schmitts notion of sovereignty and to Gramscis theory of hegemony. In so doing, the article seeks to establish the mutually reinforcing qualities of the two concepts.

The basic norm and democracy in Hans Kelsen’s legal and political theory

Hans Kelsen refused to develop a democratic theory of the basic norm. Given that he expounded a strong distinction between law and politics as two separate scientific disciplines he consistently argued against any attempt to politicize legal science and corrupt its object of cognition. As a result, there has been very little discussion of the basic norm in relation to his democratic theory. This article attempts to fill this gap by tracing the relationship between the basic norm and democracy in Kelsen’s legal and political writings. More precisely, it maps Kelsen’s seminal distinction between autonomy and heteronomy onto his reflections on constitutional making and probes the anti-democratic implications of his theory of the basic norm as they undermine the normative foundations of democratic theory. The article concludes by addressing the question of whether it is possible to articulate a theory of the democratic ground norm, of democratic foundings with a normative content, by proposing the idea of an immanent, performative basic norm as the source of validity of a democratic constitutional order

The Republic of the Moderns: Paine's and Madison's Novel Liberalism

The relationship between republicanism and liberalism has emerged as a central issue for students of political thought. Neo-republican scholars in particular have advanced a stark conceptual opposition between two competing intellectual and political projects, and have claimed that liberalism decisively defeated and replaced republicanism. By contrast, in exploring the writings of Thomas Paine and James Madison, this article shows how they initiated a radical and unexpected reconfiguration within the republican tradition that fashioned a surprisingly liberal doctrine for a modern republic. Their “republic of the moderns,” we argue, altered the contours and content of classical republicanism, transmuting it into an important strand of liberal political thought and institutions.

Back to Adorno? Critical social theory between past and future

For more than two decades, Jürgen Habermas has been the leading figure in the critical social theory tradition. His work, which partly grew out of dissatisfaction with the limitations of the Frankfurt School’s founding figures, rapidly attained a hegemonic standing. In particular, with his notion of communicative action, Habermas sought to revive the emancipatory impulses trapped in the founders’ excessive, self-defeating, and pessimistic denials of reason. His linguistic turn, his drifting apart from Hegel and his discovery of Kant, his sharp distinction between systems and lifeworld, his deliberative concept of the public sphere, and his discursive theory of democracy and law, all seemed to be parts of a broader project to renew the critical aspirations of social theory. Notwithstanding its contributions to interdisciplinary research and its considerable influence on the human and social sciences, this project has itself become a source of growing discontent from a younger generation of scholars working within this same critical tradition. What Habermas proposes as a solution to the decline of critical theory is now increasingly perceived as a cause of further decay and deradicalization. This disillusionment explicitly informs Martin Morris’s Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Adorno, Habermas, and the Problem of Communicative Freedom and Jay Bernstein’s Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, while lurking in the back-

Carl Schmitt's postcolonial imagination

In 1941 Carl Schmitt asserted that, “The colony is the basic spatial fact of hitherto existing European international law,” its “foundation” and “basis.” I would like to make two claims in relation to this remarkable but largely overlooked statement. First, Schmitt’s unconventional theory of international public law, with The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum as its most emblematic expression, can be systematically reconstructed from the centrality that the concept of the colony enjoys in his ambitious historical narrative of the rise and fall of the first global nomos. Second, such a reading exposes the colonial underpinnings of the modern international system. Also, themes and arguments associated with anticolonial discourses acquire a central significance and a general geopolitical framework is recommended for a critical understanding of political modernity and its postcolonial alternatives.