Teisė Gorgio Agambeno išimtinės padėties teorijoje: tarp aporiškumo ir grynumo

Abstract

Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, which has received much attention in recent years, being very diversified in themes is wantonly rarely understood as legal philosophy. A usual classification note, found at the back-covers of his books, is “political science”, “critical theory”, etc. However, it is already impossible to pass over the abundance of the thoughts about law in the latest works by Agamben, of course, keeping in mind, that it remains the part of the whole, where ideas on politics and, especially, language are of fundamental importance.
Responding to this situation, the first part of the article presents a short survey analysis of the theory of the state of exception formulated by Agamben and its influence on the concept of law. The second and the third parts of the article concentrate on two independent interpretations of the issues that arise on the basis of this theory, which may also be regarded as proposals to the solution of the problems concerned.
Speaking more exactly, these are the interpretations of the homogeneous problematic field, which evolves as Agamben, in a rather broad sense of his thought, hesitates on aporical qualities and purity. The article gives much attention to one of the newest books by Agamben “State of Exception”, and also to his earlier works on political and legal philosophy and philosophy of language, including probably one of his magnum opus “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”, where the state of exception and law in this state are broadly discussed as well.
Fist of all, the analysis in the article reveals that Agamben constructs his conception of the state of exception in a clearly postmodern way, i. e. by highlighting and emphasizing the aporical quality of the basic concepts that characterize West (as law, politics, language, man), and also by pointing to its negative global consequences – biopolitical today of the planet. However, the investigation in this article focuses on Agamben’s occasional concern with the idea of the reciprocal purification of law and violence. This concern is far from being critical (in the negative sense), leading to the incoherence with the general aforementioned tendency of constructing the conception of the state of exception or, in any way, the coherence in this case is not clear.
The first interpretation of this concern in the article explains it by anti-political and usually indirectly liberal approaches of Agamben. These indirect links with liberalism are also derived from the remaining problem in the Foucaultian tradition of thought – the declaration of the death of man by Foucault is neither factually evident, nor theoretically proven, therefore, as of today, we can speak only about the conflict of hypotheses about man.
The second interpretation of the concern with the idea of the reciprocal purification of law and violence shows, how it emerges because of the remaining issues in the Aristotelianaporical conception of dynamis-energeia, which is extrapolated by Agamben into other spheres, including legal philosophy.
Rethinking of this conception on the basis of the approaches of Paolo Virno and neutralization of the fundamental aporia leads to the neutralization of many of the Agambenian issues, and also of any confrontation, discussion, etc., between the two great “players” in legal philosophy – positivism and realism.