Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life: Agamben and Levinas

Description

This first book-length study into the influence of Emmanuel Levinas on the thought and philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life demonstrates how Agamben's immanent thought can be read as presenting a compelling, albeit flawed, alternative to Levinas's ethics of the Other. The publication of the English translation of The Use of Bodies in 2016 ended Giorgio Agamben's 20-year multi-volume Homo Sacer study. Over this time, Agamben's thought has greatly influenced scholarship in law, the wider humanities, and social sciences. This book places Agamben's figure of form-of-life in relation to Levinasian understandings of alterity, relationality and the law. Considering how Agamben and Levinas craft their respective forms of embodied existence - that is, a fully-formed human which can live an ethical life - the book considers Agamben's attempt to move beyond Levinasian ethics through the liminal figures of the foetus and the patient in a persistent vegetative state. These figures, which Agamben uses as examples of bare life, call into question the limits of Agamben's non-relational use and form of existence. As such, it is argued, they reveal the limitations of Agamben's own ethics, whilst suggesting that his 'abandoned' project can and must be taken further. 　 This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers, graduate students and anyone with an interest in the thought of Giorgio Agamben and Emmanuel Levinas in the fields of law, philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences. 　 Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of
Contents Acknowledgements Table of cases Table of statutes Introduction: continuing an abandoned project Immanent life My argument My methodology The structure 1. An ever-divided life Introduction Biopolitics and the division of life The appropriation of Foucault The scholarship on Agamben and Foucault The inclusive exclusion of bare life Derrida: enter stage right The state of exception The anthropological machine Conclusion 2. The transmission of negativity Introduction A foundational negativity Language and death Negativity and the split between sovereignty and government Oikonomic government The dispositif and transcendent resistance in Foucault Oikonomia and Agamben’s philosophical archaeology Agamben’s philosophical archaeology What philosophical archaeology means The stakes of the division of life Conclusion 3. Immanence, Levinas, ethics and relationality Introduction Absolute immanence Levinas and transcendent relationality Responsibility, the Self and the Other The elision of ethics and law Agamben and Levinas on shame The face Substitution and the ethical singularity: a defence of Levinasian ethics Ethics, Kant and duty Conclusion 4. The inoperative potential of a messianic life Introduction Form-of-life Immanent potentiality Modal ontology The how Messianism in Agamben, Derrida, Levinas Conclusion 5. Agamben’s hyper-hermeneutics Introduction An immanent politics of agency Hyper-hermeneutics Paradigmatic gestures and repetition Gestures and destitute use Conclusion 6. The origins of form-of-life Introduction Setting the stage Form-of-life and the unborn Levinas on sexual and ethical difference Lisa Guenther on the “gift of the Other” Judgment and institutional justice Conclusion 7. The limits of form-of-life Introduction The end of life Agamben on medicine, the incapable patient and the end of life Levinas and the end of life Conclusion Abandoning a continued project Form-of-life The problems of transcendent relationality Hyper-hermeneutics Liminal lives What next? Bibliography Index