This collection of articles brings together a selection of previously published work on Agamben’s thought in relation to law and gathered from within the legal field and theory in particular. The volume offers an exemplary range of varied readings, reflections and approaches which are of interest to readers, students and researchers of Agamben’s law-related work.

    Contents: Introduction. Part I Life and Sovereignty: The fading memory of homo non sacer, Anton Schütz; Homo sacer and the politics of indifference, William Watkin; The rule of the norm and the political theology of ‘real life’ in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Kirk Wetters; No life is bare, the ordinary is exceptional: Giorgio Agamben and the question of political ontology, Mathew Abbott. Part II State of Exception and Government: Boundary stones: Giorgio Agamben and the field of sovereignty, Steven DeCaroli; Giorgio Agamben on security, government and the crisis of law, Daniel McLoughlin; The ontology and politics of exception: reflections on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Gullì; ‘The king reigns but he doesn’t govern’: thinking sovereignty and government with Agamben, Foucault and Rousseau, Jessica Whyte; Imperatives without imperator, Anton Schütz. Part III Law, Violence and Justice: On justice, Thanos Zartaloudis; The creature before the law, Mathew Abbott; Playing with law: Agamben and Derrida on postjuridical justice, Catherine Mills; The hyper-hermeneutic gesture of a subtle revolution, Tom Frost; The threshold and the topos of the remnant: Giorgio Agamben, Paolo Bartoloni. Part IV Fulfilling the Law: the Power of Experience: Passivity at work: a conversation on an element in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Alice Lagaay and Juliane Schiffers; Resistance, potentiality and the law: Deleuze and Agamben on ‘Bartleby’, Alexander Cooke; In a messianic gesture: Agamben’s Kafka, Carlo Salzani; The curse of the law and the coming politics: on Agamben, Paul and the Jewish alternative, Adam Kotsko; The ungovernable, Nicholas Heron. Part V Studying the Law: Thinking the law with and against Luhmann, Legendre, Agamben, Anton Schütz; In force without significance: Kantian nihilism and Agamben’s critique of law, Daniel McLoughlin; Agamben, Arendt and human rights: bearing witness to the human, John Lechte and Saul Newman; The mask and Agamben: the transitional juridical technics of legal relation, Connal Parsley; Political life: Giorgio Agamben and the idea of authority, Steven DeCaroli; Kafka’s land surveyor K.: Agamben’s anti-Muselmann, Boštjan Nedoh; What is a destituent power?, Giorgio Agamben (translated by Stephanie Wakefield). Name index.

    Biography

    Thanos Zartaloudis is Senior Lecturer in the Law School at the University of Kent, UK and a Lecturer at the Architectural Association, School of Architecture, History and Theory Studies, London, UK.