Daniel McLoughlin

The Fiction of Sovereignty and the Real State of Exception: Giorgio Agamben’s Critique of Carl Schmitt

Agamben is perhaps best known for his analysis of the “logic of sovereignty” drawn from Carl Schmitt. This article examines the critique of sovereignty that Agamben develops through his reading of Walter Benjamin’s messianism. For Agamben, Schmitt’s analysis of sovereignty claims that the state of exception is a juridical condition, in that the law survives its suspension in the form of the “force-of-law.” Drawing on Benjamin, Agamben argues that sovereignty is a fiction that covers over the originary inoperativity of the law and the illegitimacy of authority. The purpose of Agamben’s analysis is to open space for a new understanding of the relationship between law and political action that responds to the contemporary crisis of tradition.

Giorgio Agamben on security, government and the crisis of law

In State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben argues that contemporary security politics is an extension of a crisis into which the liberal constitutional state entered after World War I, when the state of exception ‘became the rule’. Agamben has been criticised for focusing too narrowly on the problem of sovereignty and for failing to explain the causes of the crisis he identifies, yet he also describes this process as one in which the state of exception becomes a ‘technique of government’. Building on fragments disseminated across Agamben’s work, I argue that his account of the crisis of legality should be understood in the context of Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics and government, the problem of total war, and the rise of the administrative state. By drawing on these reference points, the article develops an account of the context informing the crisis of legality, and offers a new interpretation of what is at stake in the ‘normalisation of the state of exception’.

On Political and Economic Theology

Abstract Giorgio Agambens The Kingdom and the Glory opens by intervening in a debate between the jurist Carl Schmitt and the theologian Erik Peterson. Petersons “Monotheism as a Political Problem” undermined Schmitts thesis that the modern concept of sovereignty derives from Christian theology by arguing that divine monarchy is a Judaic and Greek idea that was liquidated by the doctrine of the Trinity. Agamben, by contrast, argues that the Trinity preserves and transforms the model of divine monarchy by casting God as singular in his being and multiple in his management of the world (his oikonomia). I argue that this critique of Peterson in fact builds upon the “Monotheism” essay, which shows how political theologians inherited and rearticulated conceptual problems derived from Aristotles Metaphysics, and is driven by Agambens concern with the impact of Aristotles thought on ontology and politics.

FROM VOICE TO INFANCY giorgio agamben on the existence of language

Abstract The main concern of Agambens work, prior to the Homo Sacer project, is how to understand the existence of or potentiality for language. Contemporary philosophy casts language as the unsayable presupposition of discourse. Agamben criticises this as an incomplete nihilism that remains within the horizon of metaphysics, and attempts to think the experience of language without an unsayable ground. I examine Agambens critique of the role of the ineffable in the theory of the subject, and in the thought of Heidegger and Derrida. I contrast this with his account of infancy as an experience that fully assumes the groundlessness of language.

Crisis, Modernity, Authority: Carl Schmitt on Order and the State

Jurist Carl Schmitts work Political Theology is used as a focal point for analysis of contemporary crisis politics.