Encounters in Law & Philosophy

A rigorous reading of Agamben’s concept of form-of-life

• Discusses Agamben’s political thought and the question of anarchy
• Re-evaluates Agamben’s thought in light of his later works and the recent completion of the Homo Sacer series
• Considers Agamben’s related works on use, praxis, inoperativity, and destitutio
• Outlines a theoretical framework through which to think of a non-state and non-legal politics
• Explores underappreciated influences of Agamben’s philosophy

The concept of a form-of-life is the centre of gravity around which Agamben has advanced his attempts to think of an alternative politics. It refers to a living dimension that has overthrown the structures of power in which humans are supposedly destined to live, disclosing the possibility of a new understanding of political and legal life. By placing ‘form-of-life’ in the context of contemporary philosophy, this book re-imagines anew some of the basic categories of human socialities – such as work, rights, obligation, property, and use. It explores the ways in which Agamben’s philosophy might be a strategic resource for developing political and legal strategies that leave behind a situation dominated by pervasive sovereign violence.

At a moment of history in which the fundamental promises of Western modernity are undergoing a decisive crisis, to look beyond the basic categories of human social institutions becomes an urgency. Through a close engagement with Agamben’s concept of form-of-life, this book seeks to challenge the current crisis of juridical, political and economic reality.

The first English-language anthology of Yan Thomas, whose contributions to Roman law revolutionised legal scholarship

• Collects and translates 10 essays by Yan Thomas (1943–2008), the most renowned French jurist of the 20th century
• Provides a juridical perspective on the genealogy of the Western subject and the elementary conditions for the exercise of power
• Builds on the growing interest in Thomas’ work generated by recent engagements, such as in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series
• Demonstrates the formal continuity of socio-legal techniques that have defined Western legal culture

Western legal professionals habitually rely on a version of legal history that bolsters their own sway over the present. The legal mythologies undergirding these self-serving proposals are divided between doctrines of law’s immemorial nature, and of its sacred (Roman) origins. Thomas’s de-mythicised jurisprudence, presented in this collection of essays, dismisses these sagas. His work sent seismic waves across the humanities and social sciences, with claims including:

• Law is not a set of rules, but the operation of legal arguments; lawyers are the agents of the legal denaturalisation of the world
• Rome is misread as an essentially political entity; the effect exercised on Roman society by its jurists ranks before that of its politicians
• Despite a widely accepted opposition between modern labour law and the Roman renting-out of a slave's workforce, there exist unexpected commonalities
• ‘Legal order’ and ‘responsibility’ are among the inventions of modern law; they are not part of the timeless inventory of the world

A critical reading of Leibniz’s legal theory, linking law, space and power

• Critically links Leibniz to legal theory and situates him with respect to thinkers such as Spinoza, Hobbes, Husserl, Deleuze, Foucault and Badiou
• Builds on the French archaeology of power research programme of Agamben collaborator Gwenaëlle Aubry
• Excavates a theory of law and space
• Provides an account of key tenets of medieval philosophy, such as power, reality, subjective activity, being-in-common, that inform the thought of continental philosophers

The concept of power has been a major feature of natural law theories. It evolved over the course of several centuries and was arguably the defining notion in both Hobbes’ and Spinoza’s doctrines of natural right. Yet Leibniz appears to effect a reversal in this millennium-long trajectory and demotes power to a derivative term of his philosophy.

What was the rationale behind this radical change? And what does this reversal mean for the philosophy that follows?

Connelly demonstrates how Leibniz’s rearticulation of power and its associated concepts is motivated at least in part by the struggles that marked the terrain in which his ideas were rooted – the struggle between Reformed and Scholastic theology, between natural law and natural right, and between mechanistic natural philosophy and human freedom. He locates Leibniz within power’s wider evolution, and shows how the universal jurisprudence which Leibniz developed between the 1660s and 1690s can be considered as a transformative encounter between power, activity and modality.

Drawing on thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Grotius, Husserl and Deleuze, Connelly traces Leibniz’s conceptualisation of power through its applications in his legal texts, revealing that Leibniz in fact reconceptualises power under a new name: the state space. The move amounts to an internalisation of power as a moral world within each individual, submitting each practical agent to a universal set of obligations and prohibitions defined by that world. What though is at stake in bringing the objective world within each individual and submitting it to a public legal order? And what is the significance of this surgical intervention for any archaeology of power?

Delves into the history of the ancient Greek word nomos (and related words) to reveal the interdisciplinary depth of this term beyond its later meaning of 'law' or 'law-making'

• Assembles a genealogical history of the ancient Greek work nomos, showing how it contains a richness that is not reflected in its classical and modern usage as simply 'law' or 'law-making'
• Draws on works by ancient Greek philosophers, poets and tragedians including Homer, Hesiod, Alcman, Pindar, Archilochos, Theognis, Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Plato
• Includes extracts from ancient primary sources, in both the original and in English translation, to analyse how nomos has been used in the literary evidence and in context
• Considers how nomos has been used by contemporary philosophers, including Agamben, Foucault, Heidegger, Schmitt, Deleuze and Axelos, and re-examines their interpretations

This is a highly original, interdisciplinary study of the archaic Greek word nomos and its family of words. Thanos Zartaloudis draws out the richness of this fundamental term by exploring its many uses over the centuries.

The Birth of Nomos includes extracts from a wide range of ancient sources, in both the original and English translation, including material from legal history, philosophy, philology, linguistics, ancient history, poetry, archaeology, ancient musicology and anthropology. Through a thorough analysis of these extracts, we gain a new understanding of nomos and its foundational place in the Western legal tradition.

Find out more

• Read 'On Nomos and the Meaning of Philosophy in Law: an interview with Thanos Zartaloudis' by Gian Giacomo Fusco in Exceptions
• Read 'Thinking between words and traditions: An interview with Thanos Zartaloudis on The Birth of Nomos by Tristan Webb in Countercurrents

Can secularisation in the legal and political domains settle modernity’s scores with religion?

Anton Schütz and Marinos Diamantides provide a genealogical mapping of the universalisation/secularisation thesis that is both widely saluted and mistrusted as master narrative of modern political and normative history.

• Questions the outdated suggestions of Carl Schmitt’s political theology
• Builds upon a refined version of Giorgio Agamben’s close-reading of Christian government as management
• Identifies Western-Christian tensions within jurisprudence
• Concludes that what the West’s secular universality is passing off as 'politics' or 'law' is really an attempt to manage its own dwindling primacy

A critique of the metaphysical concept of power and potency in the history of Western jurisprudence

Sweeping through the history of Western philosophy of law, Emanuele Castrucci deals with the metaphysical idea of potency as defined by Spinoza and Nietzsche, upsetting entrenched theories of jurisprudence.

Castrucci first addresses how the idea of potency can change the meaning of the power ascribed to an omnipotent God. This brings together classical Greek philosophy with Jewish biblical exegesis, which Castrucci links through the juncture of Christianity. He then relates potency to the classical philosophical tradition in Aristotle's Metaphysics and its Arabic interpretations, particularly Ibn Rushd's (Averroës). This leads us to the genesis of natural law theory in Western philosophy, from Augustine to Aquinas and from Duns Scotus to Ockham.

Moving on, Castrucci examines the inherently problematic concept of political theology, pitting Spinozan–Nietzschean potency against Kant and Enlightenment natural law to reveal the weaknesses inherent in the Enlightenment system. Finally, Castrucci applies the theories of Carl Schmitt to the philosophical rationalism of the Western tradition, showing us how it has failed to contain absolute power in a juridical sense.