Stupidity and the Threshold of Life, Language and Law in Derrida and Agamben
| Autor: | Duy Lap Nguyen |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
Literature
Stupidity Sociology and Political Science business.industry Philosophy media_common.quotation_subject 05 social sciences 0507 social and economic geography 050801 communication & media studies 0508 media and communications Sovereignty Deconstruction business 050703 geography Biopower media_common |
| Zdroj: | Derrida Today. 12:41-58 |
| ISSN: | 1754-8519 1754-8500 |
| DOI: | 10.3366/drt.2019.0196 |
| Popis: | This paper examines Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Giorgio Agamben's account of the history of bio-politics in the Beast and the Sovereign. In this account, the ‘threshold of bio-political modernity’ is identified with the collapse of an allegedly immemorial distinction between life and the law. According to Derrida, however, this in-distinction between life and the law, which supposedly marks the historical emergence of the bio-political, is in fact an originary event. Agamben, therefore, announces a bio-political modernity that has always already existed. In this essay, I argue that Derrida, in the Beast and the Sovereign, fails to grasp the significance of one of the principal figures employed in Agamben's theory of the bio-political, the ‘threshold’. This figure, which Agamben opposes, elsewhere in his writings, to the Derridean notion of difference/deferral, does not refer to either an historical beginning or something that has always already existed. Rather, the threshold is defined as a particular moment in which an originary phenomenon becomes a decisive historical norm. In his ‘history’ of the bio-political, therefore, Agamben identifies the modernity of the latter in terms of the historical normalization of an in-distinction between law and life that has always already occurred. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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