Agamben's Critique of Derrida

adam thurschwell
cutting the br anches for akiba

Agambens Critique of Derrida
It is surprising to find that the first English-language anthol-

ogy devoted solely to Giorgio Agambens work should fall under the pub-
lishers rubric of political theory or political philosophy. This is not so
much because of the large and scintillating body of work in philology,
literary criticism, and first philosophy that Agamben composed before
coming to focus on issues of the political per se. Rather, it is because he him-
self so frequently says, in Homo Sacer and elsewhere, that politics is nothing
but philosophy: philosophy (sometimes intellectuality or thought)
is politics proper name. When philosophy takes politics as its object, it
finds only itself; and politics as suchto use one of Agambens privileged
qualifiersaccordingly disappears from the scene of the political. My over-
arching thesis is that Agamben, for all the acuity of his philosophical inter-
pretations of and insights into contemporary political phenomena, ulti-
mately loves philosophy a little too much, too much, at least, for the good of
his political philosophy and his politics (and perhaps for the good of the rest
of his philosophy as well).
My approach to these ironies in this essay is oblique, and passes by way of
Agambens critique of Jacques Derridas work. Rather than taking on the
dierence between Agambens and Derridas concepts of the political di-
rectly (something that I have attempted in much greater detail elsewhere),
here I focus more narrowly on the express terms of Agambens critical
commentary. I have taken this approach even though most of this commen-
tary addresses Derrida and deconstruction at the level of first philosophy
rather than in terms of politics per se. By way of justification, if one is
necessary, it ought to be said that Agamben makes it clear in Homo Sacer and
elsewhere that his political philosophy is perfectly continuous with his other
philosophy, and with his fundamental ontology in particular. Although most
of the attention garnered by Homo Sacer has focused on its biopolitical theses,
these, it seems to me, are entirely derivative (if not quite epiphenomenal) of
the first-philosophical discussion that constitutes the first section of the
173
From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

Duke University Press, 2005. All rights reserved. Downloaded 06 Jul 2016 18:23 at 128.95.32.111
bookan example of the dependence of his politics on his philosophy that I
attempt to call into question here.
Moreover, Agambens critique of Derrida has long provided a spring-
board for his own armative philosophical theses, and in Homo Sacer it
reappears again, at the crucial juncture in his argument in which the analogy
(which is more than just an analogy) between the structures of abandon-
ment shared by law and language converges with the fundamental critique
of laws being in force without significance as the original form of the
state of exception. Indeed, it emerges precisely at the moment in which
biopolitical modernity, confronting its final crisis, must choose between an
inauthentic and an authentic politics, the point at which two dierent
interpretations of the essential character of the state of exception oer
themselves: the interpretation that sees in the exception the Nothing of
Revelation, the maintenance of the pure form of law beyond its own
contenta being in force without significance, with which Agamben aligns
Derrida and deconstruction (the language is Gershom Scholems and comes
from his correspondence with Benjamin), and Walter Benjamins interpreta-
tion, in which even this pure form of law is nullified and law becomes
indistinguishable from the life over which it ought to rule. Since Agam-
ben also makes it clear that the choice between these two interpretations is at
the same time a choice between which of two purported Messiahs to follow
(and the Messiah, it should not be forgotten, is that figure whose arrival
signifies the fulfillment and the complete consummation of the Law), the
stakes of his debate with Derrida for his political thought ought to be clear.
Without saying so in quite so many words (although he comes very close
elsewhere), Agambens virtual charge here is the harshest that can be lev-
eled: that Derrida, or rather deconstruction (there is nothing personal in any
of this), is the false Messiah.
My goals in this essay are, first, to render intelligible as a unified cri-
tique the sometimes inconsistent-appearing things that Agamben has writ-
ten about Derrida over the past twenty years; second, to briefly indicate the
implications of the philosophical dierences revealed by this critique for
their respective concepts of the political (again, something that I attempt in
much greater detail elsewhere); third, to suggest what Agambens critique
might teach us about the relationship of philosophy to politics and ethics;
and finally, to try to bring these airy abstractions down to earth by demon-
strating their political traction in one of the arenas in which Agambens
174 adam thurschwell

analysis of sovereignty and bare life would seem to have the greatest force,
the American law of capital punishment.
Agamben states his fundamental objection to deconstruction with admi-
rable clarity in an early book on Hegel and Heidegger, Language and Death: The
Place of Negativity. There, while acknowledging the acuteness of Derridas
critique of metaphysics and honoring Derrida as the thinker who has iden-
tified with the greatest rigor . . . the original status of the gramma and of
meaning in our culture, he nevertheless goes on to say that Derrida be-
lieved he had opened a way to surpassing metaphysics, while in truth he
merely brought the fundamental problem of metaphysics to light. What
then is this fundamental problem of metaphysics that Derrida has ex-
posed without yet overcoming? In a condensed passage, Agamben turns
Derridas grammatology on its head:
[M]etaphysics is not simply the primacy of the voice over the gramma. If
metaphysics is that reflection that places the voice as origin, it is also true
that this voice is, from the beginning, conceived as removed. . . . To
identify the horizon of metaphysics simply in that supremacy of the phone
and then to believe in ones power to overcome this horizon through the
gramma, is to conceive of metaphysics without its coexistent negativity.
Metaphysics is always already grammatology and this is fundamentology in
the sense that the gramma . . . functions as the negative ontological
foundation.
Agambens charge against Derrida thus repeats Derridas similar charge

against Heideggerthat he has remained within the metaphysical tradition
that he thought to have identified and escaped. For Agamben, however, that
tradition is not defined by the value placed on presence, as it is for Der-
rida, but on a form of absencethe negative ontological foundation to
which Agamben refers in this passage.
Agambens countertraditional notion of metaphysics resting on a nega-
tive ontological foundation (although resting would seem to be precisely the
wrong word for the relationship to a negative foundation) is accompanied
and clarified by an equally countertraditional history of metaphysics, one
that resembles in form Heideggers history of the forgetting of Being but
with dierent players in dierent roles. Chief among these changes is a shift
from a history of metaphysics as the history of the occlusion of the Being of
beings to that history as the history of the occlusion of the essence, or
cutting the branches for akiba 175

Idea, of language by language itself. As the terminology of the Idea
suggests, Agambens story begins with Plato, whose theory of Ideas, in
Agambens interpretation, culminated with the discussion of the thing
itself (to pragma auto) in the Seventh Letter. With the notion of to pragma
auto, Plato had identified the very quiddity of the thing insofar as the thing
only is in language. Only in its being-in-language, where it not only meets up
with its infinity of uniquely identifying predicates but becomes subject to
predication in general, is the thing as that thing. Agamben thus analyzes
to pragma auto as the things purely linguistic being, which is not itself a
thing but the sayability of the thing, its pure taking-place in language.
This pure taking-place is, on one hand, what is necessarily presupposed by
every speech act (since the functioning of language necessarily presupposes
the sayability of its terms), but on the other, by virtue of that same presup-
position, is what is forgotten (or abandoned, in the parlance of Homo
Sacerincluded in language only by virtue of its exclusion) in each speech
act as well, since the sayability of the thing is not itself a thing and thus is not
itself sayable. As a result, that upon which language and Being depend
their pure and final presupposition, the taking-place of entities in and as
language, Agambens Idea of languageis occluded by language itself.
The task thus assigned to philosophy is to allow language finally to say,
or thematize, its own ultimate but unreachable presupposition, Platos arkhe
anypothetosas Agamben puts it, to come with speech to help speech,
so that, in speech, speech itself does not remain presupposed but instead
comes to speech. Moreover, this task ought to be eminently possible,
according to Agamben, because [l]anguage, which for human beings me-
diates all things, is itself immediate, and such an immediate mediation
constitutes the sole possibility of reaching a principle freed of every presup-
position, including self-presuppositionwhich is to say, of reaching the
arkhe anypothetos. It is the philosophers taskwhich Agamben will later
define as politics itselfto bring this immediate mediacy as such to language.
But philosophy, in Agambens view, has fallen away from this task
indeed, has been falling away from it since Aristotle. Leaving the details of
Agambens ingenious argument for an endnote, suce it to say that he
concludes that in Aristotles thought, which has had the decisive influence in
this area down to the present day, the letter and the written ( gramma and
graphomena) on one hand take on the pure form of presupposition itself,
and on the other, become the final interpreter, beyond which no hermeneia is
possible, and thus the limit of all interpretation. As a result, writing

becomes the negative ground of language and meaningground insofar
as it is the final interpreter, the very element of language beyond or behind
which there is nowhere to go, and negative insofar as this ground refers
not to itself as present, but as already in the unreachable pastthat is, as
presupposition. The privilege accorded to writing, in this view, thus perma-
nently consigns the thing itself (and its correlates, the entitys being-such
and being-thus) to an abyss of endless deferral.
It is only against the background of this history of metaphysics that the
full significance of the critique of Derrida comes into view. Referring to
Derrida obliquely in an early essay (The Idea of Language), Agamben
notes that [i]t is hardly an accident, therefore, that an authoritative current
of contemporary French thought posits language in the beginning and yet
conceives of this dwelling in the arkhe according to the negative structure of
writing and the gramma. . . . In other words, language, which is in the
beginning, is the nullification and deferral of itself, and the signifier is
nothing other than the irreducible cipher of this ungroundedness. To the
extent that the philosophical tradition (whether it has recognized this fact or
not) has rested on a negative structure of writing and the gramma, Derridas
grammatology cannot overcome it but only bring this tradition to fruition.
But if Derrida is positioned as the one who fulfills and consummates the
metaphysical tradition without surpassing it, what is Agambens position
vis--vis Derrida and this tradition? That question is answered implicitly in
Agambens one essay ostensibly devoted exclusively to Derridas thought,
Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality.
On first look, Pardes would seem to present diculties for the inter-
pretation of Agambens critique that I have been arguing up to now (di-
culties that exceed the fact that the essay is oblique, abstract, and exotically
erudite even by Agambens rather stringent standards). This is not because
of the tone of praise with which he refers to Derrida throughout; as we have
seen, Agambens critique is virtually always accompanied by paeans to the
acuteness and rigor of Derridas thinking. Rather, it is because in this
essay he seems to interpret Derrida as holding a philosophical position that
is identical to his ownas saying precisely what he himself says. Whether
that is in fact the case requires a closer look at the essay.
Pardes opens by quoting a Talmudic mishnah that concerns, inter alia,
certain limitations on the discussion and investigation of mystical and meta-
physical knowledge (knowledge of what is above; what is below; what is
first; and what is after). Without explanation or commentary, Agamben

then immediately provides a related aggadah that concerns the same subject:
a moral tale of the dangers of seeking mystical knowledge of the godhead,
which describes the attempts of four rabbisBen Azzai, Ben Zoma, Akiba,
and Elisha ben Abuya, known as Aher (the Other) after his apostasyto
obtain such knowledge. In its entirety, that story is as follows:
Four rabbis entered Pardes: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aher, and Rabbi Akiba.
Rabbi Akiba said, When you reach the stones of pure marble, do not say:
Water! Water! For it has been said that he who says what is false will not be
placed before My eyes. Ben Azzai cast a glance and died. Of him Scripture
says: precious to the eyes of the Lord is the death of his saints. Ben Zoma looked
and went mad. Of him Scripture says: have you found honey? Eat as much as
you can [other translations say Eat as much as is sucient, which makes
more sense of this scriptural lessonAT], otherwise you will be full and you
will vomit. Aher cut the branches. Rabbi Akiba left unharmed.
As its title suggests, Agambens essay can be read as an extended philo-

sophical-talmudic commentary on this aggadah.
In good talmudic fashion, Agamben begins by relating earlier interpreta-
tions and commentaries. In the Cabalistic tradition, he tells us, pardes,
which means garden or Paradise in its literal translation, signifies su-
preme knowledge. In particular, it signifies the Shechinah, the mystical
presence of God that is the highest of the ten Sefiroth, or divine emana-
tions, in the Cabalistic account of divinity. The entry of the four rabbis into
Pardes, Agamben thus explains, is therefore a figure for access to supreme
knowledge, and the aggadah contains a parable on the mortal risks inherent
in this access. Specifically with respect to the role of Aher, the Other
with whom Agamben identifies Derrida in this talethe Cabala provides
a highly suggestive interpretation: it identifies cutting the branches (a
phrase often translated as mutilating the shoots) with the gravest sin
that can be committed on the road to knowledge, the isolation of the
Shechinah [or] separation of the Shechinah from the other Sefiroth. Cut-
ting the branches is, moreover, associated in the Cabalistic literature with
the sin of Adam, who chose the forbidden tree of knowledge and thus was
separated from the tree of life. [L]ike Adam, Aher, the Other, represents
humanity insofar as he isolates knowledge, which is nothing other than the
fulfilled form of divine manifestation, from the other Sefiroth in which
divinity shows itself, making knowledge into his own destiny and specific

power. And this isolation renders the Shechinah maleficentit sucks
the milk of evil, in the vivid Cabalistic expression.
But Agamben oers another Cabalistic interpretation of this passage as
well (taken from the Zohar) which casts the storyand the Aher/Derrida
pairingin another light. In this interpretation, each of the four rabbis
represents a mode of interpretationBen Azzai, who enters and dies, is the
literal sense; Ben Zoma is the talmudic sense; Aher is the allegorical sense;
and Akiba, who enters and leaves unharmed, is the mystical sense. From
this perspective, Agamben suggests, we can see another moral risk in
Ahers cutting of the branches: The risk is that speech, which is nothing
other than the manifestation and the unconcealment of something, may be
separated from what it reveals and acquire an autonomous consistency.
This is indeed the allegorical attitude, since in allegory any intrinsic or
organic connection between sign and signified is self-consciously broken,
leaving language in an arbitrary and autonomous relationship to reference
and meaning. According to Agamben, it is in this autonomous realm of
language as such, separat[ed] . . . both from the voice and pronunciation
and from its reference, with its semantic value indefinitely suspended that
Aher/the Other/Derrida finds his home: this is the dwelling of Aher, the
Other, in Paradise. But this pure dwelling in human language as such is
at the same time an exile, insofar as the experience sought in this dwell-
ing, the experience of the Shechinah, the presence of God, is at the same
time a separation from the manifestation of the divinity in its totality in the
nine other Sefirothwhich is to say, from human life.
I do not have the time or space to follow Agamben in detail on the rich
road that leads from this striking introduction to his equally striking conclu-
sion. Suce it to say for my purposes that, after posing a question that
echoes with his prior critiques of Derridawhy does [Derridas] attempt to
name the name now take the form of a writing without presence and without
absence, without history, without cause, without arkhe, without telos, abso-
lutely dislocating all dialectics, all theology, all teleology, all ontology?
he answers not by criticizing the privilege granted to writing, but by identify-
ing Derridas criture (or more precisely, his notion of the trace) with the
supreme exemplar of writing in his own thought, one to which Agamben
returns constantlythe figure of an absolute writing that no one writes: a
potential to be written, which is written by its own potential not to be
written, a tabula rasa that suers its own receptivity and can therefore not not-

write itself. The trace, Agamben tells us, is nothing other than the most
rigorous attempt to reconsideragainst the primacy of actuality and form
the Aristotelian paradox of potentiality, the gesture of the scribe who dips
his pen in thought and writes solely with his potentiality (not to write).
Thus, in a daring move, Agamben attributes to Derrida the fundamental
philosophical intention animating his own oeuvre of the past twenty years.
Two questions naturally present themselves. The first is, is he right about
Derrida? Ones suspicions are aroused on this front by the essays conclud-
ing section, which equates the trace with pure matterand not only
pure matter, but pure matter that is the result of a process of materializa-
tion, a materialization that is itself nothing other than thoughts experi-
ence of its own potentiality not to think. The simultaneous echoes of the
philosophy of substance and subjective idealism that resonate in these char-
acterizations are more than sucient to give one pause, particularly when
they are attributed to Derrida and deconstruction. The second question is, if
he is right about Derridathat is, that Derrida/Aher/the Other is the one
who has most rigorously attempted to reconsider . . . the Aristotelian
paradox of potentialitythen who, or what, is Akiba, who leaves Paradise
unharmed?
The latter question is more than a matter of talmudic game-playing;
indeed, it is forced upon the reader by Agambens own text, which ends:
Thanks to Ahers obstinate dwelling in the exile of the Shechinah, Rabbi
Akiba can enter the Paradise of language and leave unharmed. If Derrida
has delved deepest into the fundamental problem of the relationship of
potentiality to language (and a fortiori to politics as well, let us not forget)
and yet still lives in exile from supreme knowledge of the godhead, then who
is it who has obtained such knowledge and yet (unlike Ben Azzai) not only
lived, but (unlike Ben Zoma, who was driven mad by this knowledge) lived to
tell the tale?
The answer ultimately provided by Agambens discourse, of course, is
Agamben himself, just because the position that he attributes to Derrida is
not in fact Derridas at all, but his own. The parable of Agambens Pardes is
thus ultimately entirely consistent with the lesson of his earlier critique of
Derrida: that Derrida brought to light the negative ontological foundation
of metaphysics more clearly than any thinker before himand thus opened
the possibility of identifying and surpassing itwithout, however, surpass-
ing it himself. In short, by cutting the branches of pardes, Derrida/Aher
made a safe passage for Agamben/Akiba into the realm of divine knowledge.

Before turning to the question of what, if anything, these talmudisms and
speculative philosophemes (negative ontological foundation, etc.) have to
do with politics in either the philosophical or practical sense, I will try to
sharpen up the significance of this parable of metaphysical gardening. I do
this not only because it is important in its own right to establish that Derridas
position is in fact not at all what Agamben attributes to him, but also because
it will provide one avenue into the even more important question of what
Derridas position actually iswhether, as Agamben claims in his earlier
critiques, he in fact endorses the notion of a negative ontological founda-
tion of metaphysics, and if so, whether this endorsement constitutes a
continuation rather than a rupture of the metaphysical tradition as a whole.
Let me return then to Agambens understanding of Derridas trace in
terms of a pure matter materialized by thoughts relationship to itself as
pure potentiality. Agamben says that [t]he potential to think, experiencing
itself and being capable of itself as a potential not to think, makes itself into
the trace of its own formlessness, a trace that no one has tracedpure
matter. I have already noted the simultaneous and paradoxical resonance of
this description with two philosophical positions that are at polar extremes
both from each other, and, at the same time, from deconstructionthat is,
the philosophies of substance and subjective idealism. Indeed, combining
all of these contraries into a single phrase, Agamben says of the trace that it
is truly something like the experience of an intelligible matter.
More important for my purposes, at the end of Pardes, Agamben equates
this notion of the trace as a materialized, intelligible matter with the
khora of Platos Timaeus. What is revealing about these descriptions of the
khora/trace (even without, fortunately, entering into the debates over this
much-debated Platonic term) is that, in an essay titled simply Khora, Der-
rida says precisely the oppositeor rather, as we will see shortly, almost
precisely the opposite. To take only the clearest examples, he says flatly that
khora is neither sensible nor intelligible, and identifies Aristotles treat-
ment of khora as matter as a problem (whereas Agamben, for his part,
endorses Aristotles understanding wholeheartedly). The evidence could
be multiplied (khora is not, is above all not, is anything but a support or
subject which would give place by receiving or conceiving, or letting itself
be conceivedand therefore, presumably, letting itself be materialized by
thought, either, etc.), but the point ought to be clear that, whatever Derrida
thinks khora is, he doesnt think that it is something like the experience of
an intelligible matter.

What then does Derrida think khora is? By approaching this question, we
may be able to turn Agambens critique itself on its head. First, and most
essentially, Derrida thinks that it is nothe says that khora does not have the
characteristics of an existent, by which we mean an existent that would be
receivable in the ontologic, that is, those of an intelligible or sensible exis-
tent. But neither is khora the sheer opposite of the Being of beings (sen-
sible or intelligible), either. Derrida says of khora that it would perhaps not
only be the abyss between the sensible and the intelligible, between being
and nothingness, . . . nor even perhaps between being and the existent, . . .
but between all these couples and another which would not even be their
other. Khora would thus not only receive and give space to the binary oppo-
sitions that define the ontological existence of beings (sensible/intelligible,
essence/existence, potential/act, etc.), but would give space to that which
falls without these binary oppositions entirely, so much so that it (I will use
it although any pronoun will be misleading in this context) would not
even be their other.
Such a beyond Being complicates any conceptual schema or argument,
and in particular renders any attempt to argue on behalf of opposed posi-
tions intended to mark clear places within that schemaas I have begun to
do with Derrida and Agambensuspect from the outset. By the same token,
it complicates any attempt to philosophize about khora itself, since phi-
losophy depends on a language of binary opposition for its logic and expres-
sion, even when (as it always should) it ends up struggling to surmount or
surpass those binaries. As we have seen (and as I have attempted to show in
greater detail in other work), Agamben addresses this problem by re-
maining within an essentially ontological framework, albeit displacing that
framework from the question of the Being of beings to the question of the
linguistic being of beings, the thing itself of language that (like Being in
the late Heidegger) constitutes the being of beings in its very withdrawal.
And thus his philosophy (including his political philosophy) remains domi-
nated by traditional ontological categoriesnecessity, contingency, poten-
tiality, and actualityeven in those moments (as in his accounts of the
fundamental ethical meaning of the Nazi death camps) where ontology
might appear to be utterly beside the point.
How then does Derrida handle this diculty in the relationship of philos-
ophy to that which is so far beyond Being that it cannot even be described as
the other of ontology and its binary oppositions? By giving it a name, a
female namekhora. In his essay, in a passage that also distinguishes khora

from the ontologic and therefore any proper existence as such, Derrida
declines the usual usage of the khora in favor of one that treats the word as
a proper, female name. In a certain sense, this gesture is entirely true to
indeed almost repeatsPlatos own struggle to name (the) khora, since he
famously compares it/her to a nurse and mother (true to Derridas gesture,
at a certain point in the English translation the translator begins to preserve
the personal/impersonal ambiguity of the gendered French pronoun elle as
it/her). In another sense, however, it disrupts the entire tradition of Pla-
tonic interpretation, insofar as (the) khora has always been conceived as the
least personal, most neutral groundneither (or both) active and passive,
giving and receiving, etc.of Being and beings.
By naming, and then opposing khora to the ontologic of ontology,
Derrida asks, in fine, what if the truth of the Being of beings were a woman?
And not just truth in general, but the truth (and the necessity) of phi-
losophy; and not just a woman in the sense of any woman or some
woman, but a particular woman, a singular woman with her own proper
name (khora)? Not, that is, the other (lautre) of philosophy and its binary
oppositions, but the personal Other (lAutrui) of Levinasian ethics, or the alter
ego of Husserlian phenomenology (the one being not analyzable in terms of
the subjects intentional stance). Or to be more precise yet, what if it/she
were a figure that wavers indeterminately between lautre and lAutrui, be-
tween a what and a who, a figure with a proper name but without
further determination or property of any kind, so that these questions, in
eect, would remain unanswerable in principle? We are already much closer
to the political than it might appear: Such a figure would share a great deal
with the specter of Derridas Specters of Marx, which similarly wavers indeter-
minately between something and someone, anyone and anything, some
thing [and] this thing (and indeed, like the specter, would constitute the
very anachrony of being).
With a performative strokecalling philosophys most formless, ab-
stract, material, and therefore impersonal substratum, the khora, by name
(khora)Derrida implicates philosophy (qua ontology) in its ethical cri-
tique at (or rather before) its very origin, through a faith in language alone
(the proper name as such, separat[ed] . . . both from the voice and pro-
nunciation and from its reference, with its semantic value indefinitely sus-
pended, as Agamben puts it in Pardes). By virtue of its dependence on
the name, then, philosophy would always already also be not-philosophy; it
would always stake its claim to truth and necessity too late, already tainted

by an Otherness that it cannot subsume. Most important from the perspec-
tive of Agambens critique, this Otherness would come from language itself.
Derridas essay begins, khora reaches us, and as the name. And when a
name comes, it immediately says more than the name: the other of the name
and quite simply the other, whose irruption the name announces.
Thus, since it comes from language itself, this immediate saying of the
other would beto return now to the terms of Agambens critiquethe
only immediate mediation that could be brought to language by philoso-
phy, or that the thought of the entitys being-in-language could return to
philosophy. And by the same token, far from constituting the sole pos-
sibility of reaching a principle freed of every presupposition, including self-
presupposition, this immediate mediation would only confirm that
philosophy is indelibly presuppositional.
Referring to Socratess continuing insistence in the Timaeus that the dis-
cussants begin again, return again to new and prior origins (in the form of
earlier discussions, more basic premises, more original cosmogonic causes,
and so on), Derrida says: Let us take things up again from farther back,
which can be translated thus: let us go back behind and below the assured
discourse of philosophy, which proceeds by oppositions of principle and
counts on the origin as a normal couple. We must go back toward a preorigin
which deprives us of this assurance and requires at the same time an impure
philosophical discourse, threatened, bastard, hybrid. But why? Why must
wethat is, Socrates and we other philosophers and lovers of knowl-
edgego ever backward toward that preorigin (for example, khora)that
forever recedes and eludes our (philosophical) grasp, and that thus gives
philosophy its bastardized, presuppositional form? Is it the love of knowl-
edge that drives us onward? Or is it the love of khora it/herselfthat is, that
metaphysical desire for the Other (lAutrui) identified by Levinas that ex-
ceeds the grasp of any knowledge?
Either way, this love is doomedat least if one measures success in love
by the capture of ones objectbut a great deal still turns on which of these
questions determines ones understanding of the philosophical project. If,
like Derrida, one interprets philosophys desire for the origin (or rather for
the preorigin) as love of the Other, then one will conclude with him that
[t]hese traitsphilosophys threatened, bastard, hybrid statusare
not negative. Indeed, on this view they are what gives philosophy its origi-
nal relationship to lived life itself, the Other of thought, the vita activa dis-
tinct from the vita contemplativa, even while stripping philosophy of any claim

to priority over that life. But if, like Agamben, one fails or declines to recog-
nize the ethical (in the Levinasian sense) origin of philosophys presupposi-
tional drive toward its own (pre)origins, then these traitsphilosophys
preoriginary taint by its Otherwill indeed appear as negative, as a failure
of philosophys and thoughts own original project of obtaining supreme
knowledge, of entering the Garden and leaving unharmed. And when die
Sprache spricht, all one will hear is the saying of the negative ontological
foundation, the abyss of a language separat[ed] . . . both from the voice
and pronunciation and from its reference, with its semantic value indefi-
nitely suspended, rather than the naming of the name that immediately
says more than the name: the other of the name and quite simply the other,
whose irruption the name announces. Philosophy, in the form of thought
(thought thinking itself, as Agamben regularly expresses it), will retain
its priority over life, even while its relationship to lived life will appear as
Agamben presents the relationship of sovereignty (which, it must be re-
called, stands ontologically in the place of both metaphysics and language)
to life in Homo Sacer, that is, as a parasitism in which law (philosophy)
nourishes itself on [life] and is a dead letter without it.
The implications of these two interpretations for political philosophy are
significant. This is not only a matter of deciding between politics as roman-
tic eschatology and politics as a grasping of practical opportunities for
action in the here and now. It is about whator, in the abstract sense of the
personal Other, whodetermines our politics. Is politics in its essence a
matter of ontology or of ethics?
The distinction between these interpretations is between one that takes
fundamental ontology as first philosophy and one that takes ethics in the
Levinasian sense as first philosophywhich is to say, paradoxically, non-
philosophy as first philosophy. That Agamben is deaf to Levinass claim of
ethics as first philosophy is apparent wherever his thought comes in contact
with it. To take one small but telling example, in a discussion arguing that
Levinass critique of ontology . . . really only brings to light the funda-
mental negative structure of metaphysics (the same claim that he makes
about Derrida), one reads with bemusement the concluding caveat that,
[h]owever, the accent that Levinas placed on ethics was not treated in the
context of this seminar. A clearer example of a failure to comprehend that
the accent that Levinas placed upon ethics in fact constituted his critique of
ontology can hardly be imagined. Similarly, Agambens claim in Remnants of
Auschwitz that [t]he gesture of assuming responsibility [in Levinass sense]

is . . . genuinely juridical and not ethical rests on the same failure to
recognize in Levinasian ethics per se a critique of ontology.
How can one account for such an apparent failure of understanding in a
thinker of Agambens brilliance? It ought to be said in this regard that
Agamben is hardly alone in being deaf to the philosophical implications of
Levinass discourse on the otherness of the Other. Whatever the characteris-
tic that governs the distinction between those who find Levinass thought
attractive and those who do not, philosophical astuteness does not appear to
be it. Rather, it is precisely the fact that Levinass (and Derridas) properly
philosophical point is essentially improper from the perspective of philoso-
phy that renders it invisible; indeed, it renders Levinass thematization of
philosophy as ethics indefensible, at least in the vocabulary of properly
philosophical discourse. But since the Derridian/Levinasian point is pre-
cisely that there is no such thing as properly philosophical discourse, how
is one to decide the issue between philosophy and its (ethical) other?
The answer is that one cannot, at least in the definitive form of answer
presupposed by philosophical knowledge. But that is not to say that no
answer is available. If philosophy is indeed indelibly tainted by its Other,
then traces of this Other ought to be found wherever philosophy makes its
claims, and perhaps especially where it makes its strongest claims. Thus if
one can detect in Agambens own thought traces of its ostensible Other in
the form of a Levinasian ethics of responsibilityas I (and others, in dif-
ferent ways) have tried to suggest is possible then this provides some
evidence (as Derrida points out, quoting Plato, outside the realm of philoso-
phy proper one can no longer speak with certitude about what is necessary
but only in probable armations) that philosophys presuppositional
form is in fact not negative, but instead generative of the very philosophi-
cal discourse that then turns upon it and dismisses it as (philosophically)
inadequate.
At the same time, one must keep in mind Agambens essential identifica-
tions of philosophy and politics on one hand and Being and sovereignty on
the other. More importantly, then (more importantly, at least, if the raison
dtre of political philosophy is politics and not philosophy), if I am correct,
traces of ethical priority and responsibility in the Levinasian-Derridian sense
ought also to be discernible, however ambiguously, wherever sovereignty
stakes its strongest claims to the bare life of homo sacer within the sphere of
properly juridico-political discourse as well.
One such sphere is the American law of capital punishment. The prisoner

condemned to die is among Agambens prime examples of a contemporary
homo sacer, and one might think that the legal process through which a
person attains this status ought therefore to be distinguished by that deci-
sion on the exception that is the hallmark of sovereignty within Agambens
schema. And indeed, the consensus view within the legal academy is that the
ostensibly heightened procedural protections for capital defendants that the
United States Supreme Court has imposed since reinstituting capital punish-
ment in 1976 amount to little more than a smoke screen for the same,
unfettered discretion to kill that characterized the administration of the
death penalty before it was temporarily outlawed in 1972a combination of
extreme procedural and doctrinal complexity in theory and absolute ar-
bitrariness in practice that could very aptly be described as a law that is in
force without significance in precisely Agambens sense.
Yet, at the same time, there remain within the corpus of the Supreme
Courts capital jurisprudence doctrines that suggest a very dierent under-
standing of capital punishmentan understanding that can only be called
ethical (in Levinass sense) rather than legal. To cite the most obvious
example, in Caldwell v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court confronted a situation
in which the prosecutor had told the capital sentencing jury that it was not
ultimately responsible for the sentencing decision because its decision was
subject to review by an appellate court. The prosecutor thus urged in eect
that the jury could sentence the defendant to die in good conscience, resting
in the knowledge that someone elsejudges with technical expertise in this
complex area of law that far outstripped the understanding of any lay juror
would correct their mistake if the jurors got it wrong. Citing the truly
awesome responsibility of decreeing death for a fellow human, the Su-
preme Court reversed the death sentence and held that displacing the sen-
tencing jurys responsibility to determine for itself a capital defendants
individual deserts to live or die onto the technical legalities of appellate
reviewability violated the United States Constitution.
Caldwell is in one sense an astonishing case: a formal legal recognition
of the inadequacy of formal law (the conceded technical-legal superiority
of the appellate court) to answer the most fundamental question of life or
death that the law must confront, combined with an insistence that the
jurors shoulder a responsibility that resembles nothing so much as ethics in
Levinass sensea responsibility placed upon each one of them singularly
and alone, to confront the singularity of the defendants life and weigh it
against the heinousness of the crime, without the benefit of any normative

guidance (in legal or any other form) whatsoever. Its holding is simulta-
neously inarguable (who could seriously propose that a capital sentencer
who felt no ultimate responsibility for her decision was legitimate?) and
inexplicable, or at least legally inexplicable, insofar as the case implic-
itly repudiates the ecacy of law alone to answer the ultimate question of
sovereign power. To that extent it represents a recognition of an ethical
responsibility to the Other presupposed even by law in its ultimate moment,
inscribed at the heart of the sovereigns discourse about its sovereign right
to kill.
Of course, there is also another reading of the case that brings it back into
alignment with Agambens understanding of sovereignty. Just because Cald-
well repudiates the ecacy of normative law to answer the question of the
sovereigns right to kill in a particular case, it can also be seen as rearming
the fundamental connection between the state of exception and the states
power over the life of the personthat is, the doctrine of homo sacer. On this
reading, Caldwell can be understood as saying that, at the limit, sovereignty
cannot be constrained by normative law in any form, and necessarily makes
its ultimate decisionon the human and the inhuman, on making live or
letting die in a state of exception.
All that divides these two readings from each other is the paradoxical
notion that law needs to presuppose a responsibility so singular that it
cannot subsume it within its own general discourse without its instantly
losing all of its legitimacy. Yet by the same token, this presupposition must
remain permanently suspect, or even invisible, from the perspective of law
and the rationality that otherwise subtends it. And thus nothing prevents the
suspicious or the rational personincluding especially those whose suspi-
cion and insistence on rationality, reason, argumentative validity, etc., arise
from the noblest of political motivesfrom dismissing this apparent need
for law to cite a supra-legal and pre-legal responsibility as cynicism, pre-
tense, and ideology. Who indeed could or would argue against the force of
such an accusation, in the face of a capital jurisprudence that is undeniably
and overwhelmingly characterized by just these attributes?
What then are we to make of this fragile, virtually invisible supplement of
ethical responsibility, so fragile that it can hardly be named, discussed, or
characterized without losing its essential character, and thus remains, fun-
damentally, without force of any kind, whether legal, normative, or other-
wise? Can any of this possibly matter, down on the ground where concrete
political decisions and legal arguments have to be made?

In fact a great deal turns on how or whether one incorporates this fragile
supplementthis arkhe-origin of the law, to use Derridian terminology
into ones political and legal practice. At fundamental stake here is the
question of whether the law must be viewed as politically irredeemable, and
therefore something to be overcome in its entirety (be rendered indistin-
guishable from the life over which it ought to rule, in one of Agambens
formulations), or rather whether one will agree with Derrida that a legiti-
mate political praxis need not suspect the juridical idea in itself. If the
law itself incorporates its ethical Other, then there remain politically valid
resources within the law to use against the law. To stay with the example of
capital punishment, one will be able to believe in good faith that legal argu-
ments aimed at the reform of capital punishmentthat is, short of full aboli-
tion, aimed at making death sentences and executions more dicult to ob-
tain and so onis a legitimate political goal and not simply and necessarily a
faulty political strategy that only serves to legitimate and entrench a politi-
cally illegitimate practice. The aective importance of this belief ought not
be underestimated, since, for the practicing capital defense lawyer, aban-
doning it means in eect abandoning any good-faith belief in the legal
arguments one musters to try to save the life of ones clientnever an
eective attitude for a lawyer to adopt.
But is there any reason to think that this attitude is anything more than
self-willed naivet, even if a strategically and professionally necessary one?
Again, there is not, if reason requires something like the conclusive argu-
ments of philosophy. Nevertheless, there are traces of an armative answer
within the law itself. Caldwell is hardly the only case that speaks of the legal
decision to kill in terms of responsibility or morality or terms that
otherwise contravene an interpretation that sees the pure form of law in
the state of exception. The Supreme Court has even acknowledgedin a
case overturning another death sentencethat [f ]rom the point of view of
society, the action of the sovereign in taking the life of one of its citizens
diers dramatically from any other legitimate state action. Like the lan-
guage and holding of Caldwell, this quote represents a formal invitation to
the creative capital defense lawyer to call the sovereign to ethical account
even in the supreme moment of its sovereign prerogative, where normative
law has otherwise been left far behind, as a matter of legal right.
Of course, like the language of responsibility of Caldwell, this quote can
also always be given another, more sinister and more Schmittian interpreta-
tion. No appeal to the ethical (in the Levinasian sense) can ever be authorita-

tive in a manner that will exclude its abuse, whether theoretical or practical;
its characteristic formindeed its pure formis to be both without
significance and without force. It is for that reason that Agamben is quite
right in identifying Derrida with a figure, Aher, the Other, who lives in
exile from supreme knowledge. No knowledge can ever guarantee the
ecacy of a genuinely ethical appeal (which is also why so much of Derridas
political writing turns around the category of the perhaps). Rather, su-
preme knowledge of the godhead (or rather, its illusion) is reserved for
those who believe that philosophy can exclude the Other from its domain
or in Agambens terminology, can eliminate its own presuppositional form
by appropriating its final and ultimate presupposition. If the endless attempt
to retrieve this final end appears as a failure from the perspective of philoso-
phy, however, from the perspective of ethics it is the good itselfa sign of
the alterity inscribed in the here-and-now of Being that allows for hope, and
therefore motivates action. Or to put it another way, philosophys presuppo-
sitional form might even beagain, no guarantees outside of philosophy
the sign of a salutary independence of politics from its philosophical master.
notes
1 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 85; see also Giorgio Agam-
ben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casa-
rino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 11, 12.
2 See Adam Thurschwell, Specters of Nietzsche: Potential Futures for the Concept
of the Political in Agamben and Derrida (abbreviated version), Cardozo Law
Review 24 (2003): 1193, full version available at www.law.csuohio.edu/faculty/
thurschwell/nietzsche.pdf.
3 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 4950, 54.
4 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 53.
6 In the essay The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter
Benjamin, from which this section of Homo Sacer is largely extracted, Agamben
describes deconstruction as a petrified or paralyzed messianism, that, like all
messianisms, nullifies the law, but then maintains it as the Nothing of Revelation
in a perpetual and interminable state of exception, the state of exception in
which we live (in Potentialities, 171).
7 Indeed, as is discussed in the text infra, Agamben has devoted an admiring essay

to Derridas work (Agamben, Potentialities, 20819), as well as dedicating sev-
eral essays and fragments to him. Potentialities, 27; Giorgio Agamben, Idea of
Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (New York: State University of
New York Press, 1995), 103. Derrida, for his part, has included Agamben in a list
of friends. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London:
Verso, 1997), 225, n. 10.
8 I have examined this charge elsewhere in a broader context (Thurschwell, Spec-
ters), where I argue that the ultimate significance of Agambens critique lies in
what it reveals about the two very dierent conceptions of the ethical that under-
gird the two writers respective concepts of the political. Very schematically, I try
to show there that Agambens political philosophy retains the Heideggerian
understanding of ethics as ethos, dwelling (albeit transposed ingeniously into
the sphere of pure language, language as such, in place of Being), and, as a
result, issues in a concept of the political whose structure is determined by the
form of fundamental ontology, up to and including an insistent eschatological
motif (for example, the necessity of thinking the end of the state and the end of
history together and . . . mobilizing the one against the other, as he puts it in
Homo Sacer, 60) whose closest model (albeit still insucient, Agamben says) is
Heideggers notion of Ereignis, the final event or appropriation . . . in which what
is appropriated is Being itself (Homo Sacer, 60).
Derridas political writings of the past fifteen years, by contrast, depart not
from Heideggers notion of ethos as dwelling, but from Emmanuel Levinass
ethics of responsibilityethics not as authentic dwelling but rather as the
impossible relationship with the Other who disturbs the being at home with
oneself [le chez soi] (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority,
trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969])and re-
sult in a political stance that takes its bearings not from ontology, but from
hauntology (the French hantologie being a characteristically Derridian pun on
its homonym ontologie): a logic of haunting [that] would not be merely larger
and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being . . . [but] would
harbor within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular eects, eschatol-
ogy and teleology themselves (Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the
Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf [New York:
Routledge, 1994]). What issues from Agambens philosophical framework is a
messianic concept of the political that posits as its historical goal the end tout
court of law and the state form (and indeed every authoritative historical tradi-
tion, if not history itself ). Derridas political messianic without messianism,
by contrast, does not bring an end to law, the state, or (political) history, but

comprises a structural openness inscribed in every historical moment of the
(legal, political, etc.) tradition that opens onto what is beyond that tradition, and
thus constitutes an ever-available opportunity for the traditions radical revision,
whether in the form of new interpretations or new actions of a more material
kind that transform the traditions institutions, practices, and so on. In short,
rather than a messianic demand in the eschatological sense, Derridas political
philosophy issues in an identification of an existing crack or rupture in the edifice
in question . . . , a flaw that represents, one might say, not a messianic future task
so much as an opportunity for thought and for politics in the here-and-now
(Thurschwell, Specters, 73 [on-line version] and 1234 [print version]). The
present essay to a certain extent supplements and presupposes this prior work.
I should note that in subsequent work on the Pauline letters not addressed in
my earlier paper, Agamben has insisted on a distinction between eschatological
time and messianic time, between the end of time and what he calls the
time of the end or the time that remains (il tempo che resta) (Giorgio Agam-
ben, Il tempo che resta: un commento alla Lettera ai Romani [Turin: Bollati Boringhieri,
2000]; translated in part in Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Is Left, Epoch 7,
no. 1 [2002]: 114). It seems to me that if brought to bear on the political writings,
this elaboration and clarification of his earlier esoteric-theological work would
significantly complicate and amend the political-eschatological drift that remains
prevalent in Homo Sacer, and indeed would bring him very close to Derridas
understanding of the political import of messianism. I cannot, alas, address this
new work here, however.
9 Thurschwell, Specters.
10 Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pin-
kus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 39.
11 Agamben, Language and Death, 39.
12 See Agamben, Potentialities, 39.
13 See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 50.
14 See Agamben, Potentialities, 47.
15 Agamben, Potentialities, 35.
17 Agambens argument is that in philosophical thought since Aristotle, writing
has, on one hand, been deemed to signify only in the form of an explicit reference
to something that is pastas a record of a voice once spoken, a thought once
formed, the motion of a hand that once moved across a paper, and so on. Thus
since any given writing takes on meaning only by this attribution of a past
something to it, writing itself is the preeminent signifier of something else

past, that is, of presupposition. Yet, on the other hand and at the same time,
writingin the form of the letterhas also been interpreted as the immediate
stu of linguistic signification itself, not only in its own form (writing), but in
the spoken voice as well, since the letter, in its immediacy as an articulated
sound, also constitutes the individual phonematic element of the voice, insofar
as the voice is itself construed to be made up of such articulated sounds. As the
letter both signifies and constitutes the basic element of the voice, then, Agam-
ben says that the letter is the element of that which it is the sign. As such,
moreover, it becomes the privileged sign, the index sui, the self-demonstrating
signifier that simultaneously says and shows itself. But what this privileged
signifier says and shows is itself (as element) always in the past; it shows itself,
but only insofar as it was in the voice, that insofar as it already belongs to the
past (Agamben, Potentialities, 37). Agamben devotes an astonishing (and regret-
tably out of print in its English edition) book, Language and Death, to tracing the
philosophical legacy and consequences of this interpretation of the voice, most
notably in Hegel and Heidegger, as always already past.
26 Agamben, Potentialities, 216; for the parallel reference in Homo Sacer, see 45.
27 See in this regard, for example, the title and individual essays in Agambens
Potentialities, as well as the critical role played by potentiality and impoten-
tiality in his Homo Sacer, 3948.
30 See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 46.
32 Jacques Derrida, Khora, trans. Ian McLeod, in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 96.
33 Derrida, Khora, 127; see Agamben, Potentialities, 218.
34 Derrida, Khora, 95 (my emphasis).
36 Derrida, Khora, 97.

37 Derrida, Khora, 104 (emphasis original).
38 Thurschwell, Specters.
39 See, e.g., Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (Homo
Sacer III), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 14648.
41 See Derrida, Khora, 126.
43 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 6; Derrida, Khora, 94; compare Specters of Marx, 22.
49 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 34.
52 See Thurschwell, Specters, note 8.
53 Agamben, Language and Death, 40.
54 Agamben, Remnants, 22.
55 See Thurschwell, Specters, 100110; see also Peter Fitzpatrick, Bare Sover-
eignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law, in this volume (discussion of
constitution of homo sacer by law), and Catherine Mills, An Ethics of Bare Life:
Agamben on Witnessing, Borderlands 2, no. 1 (2003), which discusses traces of
the Levinasian ethics of responsibility in Remnants of Auschwitz.
57 And they remain discernible, it seems to me, in Agambens more recent work in
the Homo Sacer vein as well. Here I can cite only one indication of such a trace, in
his contribution to the present volume, The State of Exception. In this essay,
Agamben demonstrates the topological contortions seemingly inherent in the
very notion of the state of exception illustrated by Benjamin and Schmitts ex-
changes. At the same timealthough I think this is less clearly the focus of his
attentionhe also demonstrates the paradoxical relationship of this paradoxical
topology to the possibility of knowledge, philosophical or political. The state of
exception can either be recognized and analyzed as the defining exercise of
sovereign violencein which case it cannot be located either within or without
the legal order, but only as a threshold of sorts that is both and neither inside nor
outside (Schmitt). Or, the real state of exception (the wirkliches Ausnahmezustand
of the eighth of Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History, which may

also be identified with the pure, divine violence, reine Gewalt, of his Zur Kritik
der Gewalt) can be definitively located outside of the locus of sovereign power
(rechsetzende and rechtserhaltende Gewalt)in which case, however, it is an undecid-
able question in any particular case whether what one is looking at is an occur-
rence of reine Gewalt or mere profane, sovereign violence (Benjamin). In either
case (and the undecidables that Agamben documents in this essay extend beyond
these schemas), what appears to be decisive is a bar on the possibility of a
supreme knowledge that would allow one to determine either in the general or
in the particular case the relationship of law to violence or politics to violence,
and whether the end of politics ought to be the final and absolute overcoming of
violence or the final and absolute manifestation of violence (as reine Gewalt). As a
result of these multiple undecidabilities, Agamben can only conclude his essay
with a series of questions going to the very heart of the concept of the political
in the Western traditionin particular, the persistent questions of the puzzling
yet apparently inextricable linkage of the nomos with anomic violence, and ulti-
mately of what it means to act politically at all.
The urgency with which Agamben poses these questions seems to me entirely
warranted, and his essay discloses in an exceptionally clear way the high stakes of
the oblique debate between Benjamin and Schmitt. Yet, without disagreeing, I
would put a dierent gloss on his exposition. What if the key to the political did
not lie, as Agamben here suggests, in finding answers to these concluding ques-
tions, but instead in that very urgency with which these questions impose them-
selves, an urgencyshall we call it responsibility?which precedes and calls
forth these questions in the first instance? What I have in mind is that pre-
originary pledge ( gage) that Derrida identifies in Heideggers later texts on
language, in which, reversing field from his consistent formulations in Being and
Time through The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger declares that
the authentic attitude of thinking is not a putting of questionsrather, it is a
listening to the grant [Zusage], the promise of what is to be put in question
(Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Georey Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989], 130; Martin
Heidegger, The Nature of Language, in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D.
Hertz [New York: HarperCollins, 1971], 71). Those undecidabilities and peren-
nially unanswered questions that Agamben so thoroughly documents would be
the trace in language and in politics of what cannot be decided or answered in
language or politics (and thus made the subject of philosophical or political
knowledge), but which first calls us to respondto speak, to act, to question.
The essence of politics, in other words, would not lie in the answers called for by

Agambens political questions and question of the political, but in the fact that
these questions are themselves always already responses, and thus signs of a
responsibility anterior to every (political) question.
There is a political ideal of sorts implicit in this strange fact that whenever we
speak, even to raise the most originary of questions, we are always already
responding or acquiescing to an anterior call or demand. (See Derrida, Of Spirit,
129.) In his first essay on Levinas, Derrida alludes to this quasi-political quasi-
ideal in the course of a meditation onsignificantly for my purposesthe death
or death-agony of philosophy, the violent way that it opens history by opposing
itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and its concern (Jacques Derrida,
Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas, in
Writing and Dierence, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978], 79). There he calls it the community of the question about the possibil-
ity of the question, the community constituted and maintained within that
fragile moment when the question is not yet determined enough for the hypoc-
risy of an answer to have already initiated itself beneath the mask of the question
(Derrida, Writing and Dierence, 80). It is the fragile, threatenedindeed, impos-
sible in principlepossibility of such a community which, Derrida says, poses an
unbreachable responsibility that authorizes every ethical law in general:
unbreachable because we know that despite its impossibility, this impossible
has already occurred. There is in fact a realized tradition of the question re-
maining a question that testifies to the antecedent responsibility enclosed and
dissimulated within the questioning language of philosophy (Derrida, Writing
and Dierence, 80). It seems to me that in an exemplary manner, by revealing the
undecidable oppositions that structure our basic concepts of politics, by inter-
rogating in an original way the relationship between the question of fundamental
ontology and the question of the political, and above all by the urgency with
which it pursues this thinking, Agambens work stands firmly in this realized
tradition, even if the Levinasian notion of an always-anterior ethical respon-
sibility at the heart of the political is otherwise anathema to its express thematics.
58 For the most comprehensive and articulate defense of this view, see Carol Steiker
and Jordan Steiker, Sober Second Thoughts: Reflections on Two Decades of
Constitutional Regulation of Capital Punishment, Harvard Law Review 105 (1995):
355.
59 472 U.S. 320 (1985).
60 Caldwell, 472 U.S. at 32930.
61 Caldwell, 472 U.S. at 322; see also 32829 ([I]t is constitutionally impermissible

to rest a death sentence on a determination made by a sentencer who has been led
to believe that the responsibility for determining the appropriateness of the
defendants death rests elsewhere).
62 Agamben, Remnants, 147.
64 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 84.
66 Gardner v. Florida, 430 U.S. 349, 35758 (1977).
67 See generally Derrida, Politics of Friendship.


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adam thurschwell

cutting the br anches for akiba

It is surprising to find that the first English-language anthol-

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

174 adam thurschwell

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

Agambens charge against Derrida thus repeats Derridas similar charge

cutting the branches for akiba 175

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

176 adam thurschwell

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

cutting the branches for akiba 177

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

As its title suggests, Agambens essay can be read as an extended philo-

178 adam thurschwell

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

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From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

180 adam thurschwell

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

cutting the branches for akiba 181

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

182 adam thurschwell

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

cutting the branches for akiba 183

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

184 adam thurschwell

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

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From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

186 adam thurschwell

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

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From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

188 adam thurschwell

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

cutting the branches for akiba 189

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

190 adam thurschwell

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

cutting the branches for akiba 191

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

192 adam thurschwell

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

cutting the branches for akiba 193

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

194 adam thurschwell

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

cutting the branches for akiba 195

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

196 adam thurschwell

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

cutting the branches for akiba 197

From Politics, Metaphysics, and Death by Norris, Andrew. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386735

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