Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: The Figure of This World
- 1 The Question of Political Ontology
- 2 The Poetic Experience of the World
- 3 The Myth of the Earth
- 4 The Unbearable
- 5 The Creature before the Law
- 6 The Animal for which Animality is an Issue
- 7 Understanding the Happy
- 8 The Picture and its Captives
- 9 The Passing of the Figure of This World
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Creature before the Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: The Figure of This World
- 1 The Question of Political Ontology
- 2 The Poetic Experience of the World
- 3 The Myth of the Earth
- 4 The Unbearable
- 5 The Creature before the Law
- 6 The Animal for which Animality is an Issue
- 7 Understanding the Happy
- 8 The Picture and its Captives
- 9 The Passing of the Figure of This World
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.
The previous analyses of the problem of foundation have important implications for how we understand the question of law in Agambenian political ontology. As I show in this chapter, this is because the problem of foundation goes to the heart of the concept of legitimation, throwing light on the secret connection established in modernity between life, authority and violence. I achieve this by carrying out an extended analysis of an essay that is pivotal for Agamben's own engagements with these issues: Benjamin's early essay ‘Critique of Violence’. A key thesis of Benjamin's piece is that there is no stable opposition between lawmaking and law-preserving violence (or in more recent terms between constituting and constituent power): that every legal order, and indeed every judgement passed within a legal order, always contains within it something of the original founding violence that occasioned the positing of the order as a whole. Legitimation is not just something achieved in the past, say with the writing of a constitution - rather, every legal order is always already engaged in a process of re-legitimation, such that the original lawmaking moment is renewed with every decision.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Figure of This WorldAgamben and the Question of Political Ontology, pp. 106 - 122Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014