Agamben and Law

Thanos Zartaloudis is Senior Lecturer in the Law School at the University of Kent, UK and a Lecturer at the Architectural Association, School of Architecture, History and Theory Studies, London, UK.

• Contents: Introduction. Part I Life and Sovereignty: The fading memory of homo non sacer, Anton Schütz; Homo sacer and the politics of indifference, William Watkin; The rule of the norm and the political theology of ‘real life’ in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Kirk Wetters; No life is bare, the ordinary is exceptional: Giorgio Agamben and the question of political ontology, Mathew Abbott. Part II State of Exception and Government: Boundary stones: Giorgio Agamben and the field of sovereignty, Steven DeCaroli; Giorgio Agamben on security, government and the crisis of law, Daniel McLoughlin; The ontology and politics of exception: reflections on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Gullì; ‘The king reigns but he doesn’t govern’: thinking sovereignty and government with Agamben, Foucault and Rousseau, Jessica Whyte; Imperatives without imperator, Anton Schütz. Part III Law, Violence and Justice: On justice, Thanos Zartaloudis; The creature before the law, Mathew Abbott; Playing with law: Agamben and Derrida on postjuridical justice, Catherine Mills; The hyper-hermeneutic gesture of a subtle revolution, Tom Frost; The threshold and the topos of the remnant: Giorgio Agamben, Paolo Bartoloni. Part IV Fulfilling the Law: the Power of Experience: Passivity at work: a conversation on an element in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Alice Lagaay and Juliane Schiffers; Resistance, potentiality and the law: Deleuze and Agamben on ‘Bartleby’, Alexander Cooke; In a messianic gesture: Agamben’s Kafka, Carlo Salzani; The curse of the law and the coming politics: on Agamben, Paul and the Jewish alternative, Adam Kotsko; The ungovernable, Nicholas Heron. Part V Studying the Law: Thinking the law with and against Luhmann, Legendre, Agamben, Anton Schütz; In force without significance: Kantian nihilism and Agamben’s critique of law, Daniel McLoughlin; Agamben, Arendt and human rights: bearing witness to the human, John Lechte and Saul Newman; The mask and Agamben: the transitional juridical technics of legal relation, Connal Parsley; Political life: Giorgio Agamben and the idea of authority, Steven DeCaroli; Kafka’s land surveyor K.: Agamben’s anti-Muselmann, Boštjan Nedoh; What is a destituent power?, Giorgio Agamben (translated by Stephanie Wakefield). Name index.