Re: AUT: AGAMBEN - State of Exception

["auskadi@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <auskadi@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anthony

this part - /What is important here is that Law ? not practised, but
studied ? is not justice, but the door that leads to it/; is fascinating
( well as it all):

"... What could be the sense of a Law that survives its own deposing?
The difficulty that Benjamin encounters here corresponds to a problem
that can be formulated ? and which was effectively formulated a first
time in primitive Christianity and a second time in the Marxist
tradition ? in these terms: what becomes of the law after its messianic
accomplishment? (Here is the all controversy that opposes Paul to his
Jewish contemporaries). And what becomes of the Law in a classless
society? (This is precisely the debate between Vychinski and Pasukanis).
It is to these questions that Benjamin seeks to respond with his reading
of the ?new lawyer?. It is evidently not a question of a transitional
phase that never arrives at its end or, still less, of an infinite
process of deconstruction that, maintaining Law in a spectral form,
never gets to the end of it. What is important here is that Law ? not
practised, but studied ? is not justice, but the door that leads to it.
That which opens a passage towards justice is not the cancellation but
the deactivation, the /désoeuvrement /of Law ? that is to say, another
use of it. This is precisely what the force-of-*X*law*X* ? which keeps
law in operation beyond its formal suspension ? seeks to prevent.
Kafka?s characters ? and this is why they interest us ? have to deal
with this spectral figure of Law in the state of exception: each
according to his own strategy, they seek to ?study? it, to disactivate
it, to ?play? with it.

One day, humanity will play with Law as children play with discarded
objects: not to restore them to their canonical use, but in order
finally to free them from it. What comes after law is not a more proper
and original use value that would have preceded Law, but a new use, only
born after it. Use, which has been contaminated by Law, must itself be
freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study ? or of
play. And this studious play is the passage that allows access to that
justice that Benjamin defined in a posthumous fragment as a state of the
world in which the world appears as an absolutely unappropriable good,
and one that cannot be subjected to a/(t)he juridical order. "


iles wrote:

> Hi Martin,
>
> Apologies for the blank message, the treachery of webmail.
>
> I've sent you one of the fragments translated from the book to you off
> list, I'll have to get the rest to you when I get home later today.
>
> What you are working on sounds very interesting, and relevant to some
> of the ways we were also reading the book. Personally, I found this a
> really demanding text but as one of the most credible geneologies of
> the state of exception, 'in which we live' ...essential reading.
>
> I'll probably repeat this call again at a later date but if there is
> anyone on the list who is interested/or already working on translation
> of the book into English, I can pass on the extant translated chapters
> and put them in touch with a group who have expressed interest in
> working on such a project.
>
> Anthony
>
>
>
>


--
http://www.auskadi.tk/
"the riddle which man must solve, he can only solve in being, in
being what he is and not something else...."



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