Life under and beyond the Law: Biopolitics, Franciscanism, Liturgy

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Notes

1. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

2. Gershom Scholem, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932–1940, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 142.

3. These three first figures are examined in Agamben’s Homo Sacer.

4. Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

5. A being who happily inhabits “limbo” ever after and dwells on a perpetual state of indeterminacy between being and non-being, between language and muteness, beyond any category.

6. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

7. The main characters in Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Upon their messianic arrival, they halt the “machine” that produces the distinction between human and animal.

8. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Comment on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).

9. See, for instance, Agata Bielik-Robson, “A Broken Constellation: Agamben’s Theology between Tragedy and Messianism,” Telos. Religion and the Critique of Modernity 152 (2010): 103–26.

10. Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 82.

11. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993).

12. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 64.

13. Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 113.

14. Agamben, The Highest Poverty, 117.

15. See Michel Foucault, Du gouvernement des vivants. Cours au Collège de France, 1979–1980, ed. Michel Senellart (Paris: Ehess, Gallimard, Seuil, 2012). Foucault explains that in the Ancient Mediterranean world at least two different approaches to morality were at stake. The scheme of salvation, proper to the first Stoicism, for example, rested on the idea that he who has reached the perfection of wisdom, who has accessed truth, can no longer do any harm. In that case, Foucault stresses that “the quality of the subject is what is going to determine the quality of the action” (176, my translation). This scheme contrasts with the system of the law, particularly Hebrew law, according to which a good action is defined by the law and not by the quality of the person who performs it (176).

16. Agamben, The Time that Remains.

17. Agamben, The Time that Remains, 65–66.

18. Agamben, The Time that Remains, 72.

19. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).

20. Giorgio Agamben, “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 171.

21. See Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), xiii.

22. See Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, 77.

23. See note 14.

24. See Foucault, Du gouvernement, 191.