the relation of abandonment

quotes from giorgio agamben from homo sacer

"the cipher of this capture of life in law is not sanction (which is not at all an exclusive characteristic of the juridical rule) but guilt (not in the technical sense that this concept has in penal law but in the originary sense that indicates a being-in-debt: in culpa esse). . . guilt refers not to transgression, that is, to the determination of the licit and the illicit, but to the pure force of the law, to the law's simple reference to something."

"the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence."

"language also holds man in its ban insofar as man, as a speaking being, has always already entered into language without noticing it. everything that is presupposed for there to be language (in the forms of something nonlinguistic, something ineffable, etc.) is nothing other than a presupposition of language that is maintained as such in relation to language precisely insofar as it is excluded from language."

"one of the peculiar characteristics of kafka's allegories is that at their very end they offer the possibility of an about-face that completely upsets their meaning. the obstinacy of the man from the country thus suggests a certain analogy with the cleverness that allows ulysses to survive the song of the sirens. just as the law in 'before the law' is insuperable because it prescribes nothing, so the most terrible weapon in kafka's 'the sirens' is not song but silence ('it has never happened, but it might not be altogether unimaginable that someone could save himself from their song, but certainly never from their silence.')"

"the law of this oscillation [between the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it] rests on the fact that all law-preserving violence, in its duration, indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence represented by it, through the suppression of hostile counterviolence. . . this lasts until either new forces or those earlier suppressed triumph over the violence that had posited law until now and thus found a new law destined to a new decay. in the interruption of this cycle, which is maintained by mythical forms of law, in the deposition of law and all the forces on which it depends (as they depend on it) and, therefore, finally in the deposition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded." -walter benjamin

"sovereign violence opens a zone of indistinction between law and nature, outside and inside, violence and law. and yet the sovereign is precisely the one who maintains the possibility of deciding on the two to the very degree that he renders them indistinguishable from each other. as long as the state of exception is distinguished from the normal case, the dialectic between the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it is not truly broken, and the sovereign decision even appears simply as the medium in which the passage from the one to the other takes place."

"the sentiments provoked by the one and the other are not identical: disgust and horror are one thing and respect another. nonetheless, for actions to be the same in both cases, the feelings expressed must not be different in kind. in fact, there actually is a certain horror in religious respect, especially when it is very intense; and the fear inspired by malignant powers is not without a certain reverential quality. . . the pure and the impure are therefore not two separate genera, but rather two varieties of the same genus that includes sacred things. there are two kinds of sacred things, the auspicious and the inauspicious. not only is there no clear border between these two opposite kinds, but the same object can pass from one to the other without changing nature. the impure is made from the pure, and vice versa. the ambiguity of the sacred consists in the possibility of this transmutation." -emile durkheim

"once placed in relation with the ethnographic concept of taboo, this ambivalence is then used - with perfect circularity - to explain the figure of homo sacer. there is a moment in the life of concepts when they lose their immediate intelligibility and can then, like all empty terms, be overburdened with contradictory meanings."

"the sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life - that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed - is the life that has been captured in this sphere."

"sacred life is in some way tied to a political function. it is as if, by means of a striking symmetry, supreme power - which, as we have seen, is always vitae necisque potestas and always founded on a life that may be killed but not sacrificed - required that the very person of sovereign authority assume within itself the life held in its power. and if, for the surviving devotee, a missing death liberates this sacred life, for the sovereign, death reveals the excess that seems to be as such inherent in supreme power, as if supreme power were, in the last analysis, nothing other than the capacity to constitute oneself and others as life that may be killed but not sacrificed."

". . .ancient germanic law was founded on the concept of peace and the corresponding exclusion from the community of the wrongdoer, who therefore became friedlos, without peace, and whom anyone was permitted to kill without committing homicide. the medieval ban also present analogous traits: the bandit could be killed (. . . 'to ban' someone is to say that anyone can harm him) or was even considered to be already dead."

"we have seen that the state of nature is not a real epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the city but a principle internal to the city, which appears at the moment the city is considered tanquam dissoluta, 'as if it were dissolved' (in this sense, therefore, the state of nature is something like the state of exception). accordingly, when hobbes founds sovereignty by means of a reference to the state in which 'man is a wolf to men,' homo hominis lupus, in the word 'wolf' (lupus) we ought to hear an echo of the wargus and the caput lupinem of the laws of edward the confessor: at issue is not simply fera bestia and natural life but rather a zone of indistinction between the human and the animal, a werewolf, a man who is transformed into a wolf and a wolf who is transformed into a man - in other words, a bandit, a homo sacer."

hobbes, from leviathan: "this is the foundation of that right of punishing, which is exercised in every common-wealth. for the subjects did not give the soveraign that right; but onely in laying down theirs, strengthened him to use his own, as he should think fit, for the preservation of them all: so that it was not given, but left to him, and to him onely; and (excepting the limits set him by naturall law) as entire, as in the condition of meer nature, and of warre of every one against his neighbour."

"the relation of abandonment is so ambiguous that nothing could be harder than breaking from it. the ban is essentially the power of delivering something over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in relation to something presupposed as nonrelational. what has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it - at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured. the age-old discussion in juridical historiography between those who conceive exile to be a punishment and those who instead understand it to be a right and a refuge. . . has its root in this ambiguity of the sovereign ban."

"we must learn to recognize this structure of the ban in the political relations and public spaces in which we still live. in the city, the banishment of sacred life is more internal than every interiority and more external than every extraneousness. the banishment of sacred life is the sovereign nomos that conditions every rule, the originary spatialization that governs and makes possible every localization and every territorialization."