Law of Friendship: Agamben and Derrida.

by Simon Morgan Wortham In December 2004, just two months after the death of Jacques Derrida, a special issue of the on-line journal Contretemps devoted itself to the work of Giorgio Agamben. The publication of such volumes reflects the fact that Agamben's reputation and influence as a philosopher of language and contemporary politics has risen sharply in recent years, particularly in terms of his reception in the Anglo-American world. For many, Agamben's spellbinding readings of Benjamin, Schmitt, Heidegger, Arendt, Foucault and others, as well as his distinctive reinterpretation of the biopolitical, the camp, sovereignty, law, and the potentiality of community, have helped renew the 'theoretical' project, amid widespread rumours of its irreversible demise. In short, Agamben has emerged as a leading European critical figure, seemingly able to rethink and reconfigure the entire terrain of twentieth-century critical thought in terms of an intellectual project that sets itself no less of a task than responding to the most pressing contemporary realities. Agamben himself chose to contribute an essay to this particular edition of Contretemps, titled simply 'Friendship'. (1) While the piece must surely have been written before news broke of Derrida's passing, the essay itself constituted another in a series of critical engagements on Agamben's part with Derrida's thought, this time via a number of references to Politics of Friendship. Going right back to some of his earliest publications, Agamben's critical 'relations' with deconstruction have proved themselves to be indispensable to the elaboration of his own philosophical project, both in the realms of Agamben's philosophy of language and his political thought. For example, he closes his early work Stanzas, first published in Italian in 1977, with a description of deconstruction as a 'grammatological project' which 'effects a salutary critique of the metaphysical inheritance that has crystallized in the notion of the sign' but which fails to succeed in 'accomplishing that "step-backwards-beyond" metaphysics' itself. (2) Here, in contrast to the apparently more prudent Heidegger, Derrida is presented as rash in his claims about what the deconstruction of metaphysics might achieve. Thus, if 'the origin of Western metaphysics' is, for Agamben, exposed in and by the fact 'that presence be always already caught in a signification' nevertheless 'placing writing and the trace in an initial position means putting the emphasis on this original experience, but not transcending it'. (3) 'The metaphysics of writing and of the signifier is but the reverse face of the metaphysics of the signified and the voice, and not, surely, its transcendence' Agamben writes, in the process reducing the deconstructive project to that of a simple reversal of the hierarchical binaries of Western metaphysics - doubtless, for many, a gesture on Agamben's part which remains far removed from any possibility of 'transcendence' over or unproblematic return to that very same metaphysics. In several other texts, meanwhile, one almost feels that the entire momentum of Agamben's critical reelaborations of virtually the whole field of post-Enlightenment thought, not to mention his fascinating reencounters with medieval texts and philosophy, builds ultimately towards a critique of deconstruction. Or, perhaps even more significantly, that the readings and arguments found in Agamben's writings aim to culminate in an insistence that the era of deconstruction ('the prestige of deconstruction in our time' (4) as Agamben puts it in Homo Sacer) must necessarily draw to a close. For instance, in Homo Sacer, perhaps the single best known text by him in terms of its reception in the Anglo-American world, Agamben dwells on the disputed reading of Kafka's 'Before the Law' found in the correspondence between Benjamin and Scholem. (We'll come back to Kafka's text and its contested critical reception a little later on.) This correspondence presents us with a question: On the cusp of our own modernity, does the tale endorse an image of power being in force without significance, a pure form of law beyond its own content, as Scholem would have it, or does it signal instead a state of exception turned into the rule, pointing towards, in Agamben's reading of Benjamin's interpretation of the story, 'law's fulfilment and its becoming indistinguishable from the life over which it ought to rule'? (5) (As we'll see, Agamben finds in his own interpretation of the Benjaminian position the greater potential for thinking the political today.) Whatever the outcome of this dispute, the evocation of Kafka's text provides the occasion for Agamben to read deconstruction itself in terms of this enigmatic little tale. (Derrida, of course, writes his own essay 'Before the Law' around Kafka's story, to which Agamben implicitly alludes in this particular passage from Homo Sacer.) Thus, deconstruction is presented as that which can only negotiate infinitely with the law, thereby becoming--or so Agamben hints--merely a symptom or exemplar of the ban-structure of sovereign power,

a power which neither exactly prohibits nor permits, but which offers an apparently absolute form of freedom or release from the law (the ban), only in order to capture or subjugate by more uncrossable means. For Agamben, then, it would seem that deconstruction itself dwells at--indeed, ceaselessly redraws-this threshold of indistinction characterised by the Kafkaesque figure of the 'open' door of the law. In the process, deconstruction effectively remains bound within precisely the same zone of indistinction that gives rise to the sovereign exception and to bare life, which conjointly form the 'originary political element', (6) an 'element' before which deconstruction therefore remains at once blind and powerless. (In reference to this assertion of such an 'originary political element' it is important to note that, in Homo Sacer, Agamben specifically rejects the friend/enemy relation as the decisive categorial pair of Western politics, a move that in some respects paves the way for his dissatisfaction with Derrida's Politics of Friendship while at the same time establishing a context for some of the remarks about friendship's political potentiality found in his contribution to the 2004 Contretemps issue.) Since Agamben has become more prominent as a contemporary critical thinker of real significance, notably in the wake of debates about 'the end of theory' which have so preoccupied the Anglo-American academy, philosophical engagements with the Agamben-Derrida relation are already beginning to appear. To take just one example, in his essay 'Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agamben's Critique of Derrida' Adam Thurschwell has argued that Agamben's view of Derrida--that is, in Agamben's own terms, that Derrida ultimately 'endorses the notion of a "negative ontological foundation" of metaphysics' (7) so that deconstruction itself represents, in Thurschwell's gloss, a continuation rather than a rupture of the metaphysical tradition as a whole, whereas Agamben's philosophy of language understood in terms of potentiality overcomes such 'negative' foundation--is itself predicated on a disastrous misconstrual of deconstruction. For Thurschwell, this is because deconstruction moves towards the point at which it is 'ethics in the Levinasian sense' rather than 'fundamental ontology' that is taken as 'first philosophy'. (8) Whether or not deconstruction is properly construed as, at bottom, ethical or, rather, compelled by 'ethics in the Levinasian sense' is of course open to debate: admittedly, Thurschwell is himself quick to distinguish an ethics of the other from 'properly' philosophical thought or discourse, so as to complicate any simpleminded conception of its foundational standing in place of any ontology. One could of course multiply such 'philosophical' readings and counter-readings of the Derrida-Agamben 'relation', and undoubtedly (and perhaps necessarily) there will be many more of these to come. However, since in his essay on 'Friendship' Agamben begins by noting the close proximity of the very name 'philosophy' to a concept of friendship, my approach in this essay will be to explore--and to read--the possible connections and undoubted tensions between Derrida and Agamben in terms of the significance friendship acquires in their various references (or non-references) to one another, or in other words amid their correspondences or non-correspondences. In the first stages of his essay, Agamben envisages that research into the question of friendship (the latter so closely linked to the very possibility of philosophy) might best be undertaken alongside performative acts of friendship--hence he alludes to a correspondence conducted with his 'friend' Jean-Luc Nancy on this very subject which, we are told, was intended to double the question of friendship as a research topic with the performative dimensions of a friendly correspondence. The question of friendship as a (perhaps the) philosophical question, then, was thought by Agamben to be best encountered through a self-reflexively performative exercise or operation, rather than by the dry and somewhat context-less formulation of propositional statements. That the posing of this question of friendship in the realm of philosophy was in fact blocked or forestalled by an abrupt end to the correspondence (signalling either the incompatibility of the topic with a friendly exchange, or the end or diminution of friendship itself) hardly alters the fact of an irreducible, though not necessarily harmonious, bind between the 'staging' and the articulation or expression of philosophy/friendship--though it may of course shed new light on what is in fact entailed by the friendship that Agamben wants to place near the heart of philosophy itself. Philosophy as a question of friendship, friendship as a (the?) philosophical question: the failed correspondence between Nancy and Agamben to which the latter refers in his essay on 'Friendship' almost unwittingly offers the possibility of a transformative reconfiguration, an 'othering' one might say, of these questions and connections. It is in this light, then, that I want here to pursue the Derrida-Agamben relation less in terms of a 'philosophical' assessment of their relative positions and differences in relation to each other, and indeed in regard to the entire field or tradition of Western thought, than by tracing out what joins and separates these two 'philosophers' (though Agamben hesitates to use this name in reference to Derrida) in terms of the enactment of a certain correspondence or noncorrespondence between them. In other words, I want to ask what exactly is going on between Agamben and Derrida by pursuing ways in which, between the two of them, friendship as a question is taken up and

performed, whether this occurs in a friendly or unfriendly fashion (if indeed it proves possible to distinguish between the two). 'FRIENDSHIP' Agamben begins his essay 'Friendship', then, by asserting that friendship and philosophy are intimately linked according to a longstanding and essential affinity. This association finds its most obvious expression and archaeology in the philos of philosophy, by which the friend--or the concept of the friend-is included or implied in philosophy's very name. Friendship and philosophy are almost one, and are seemingly unthinkable without the other, since they nearly share names (and, tellingly, Agamben will have more to say later in his paper about what friendship, philosophy and indeed insults--as common terms-actually come to name): Friendship ... is so closely linked to the very definition of philosophy that one can say that without it, philosophy would in fact not be possible. The intimacy of friendship and philosophy is so deep that philosophy includes the philos, the friend, in its very name and, as is often the case with all excessive proximities, one risks not being able to get to the bottom of it. In the classical world, this promiscuity ... of the friend and the philosopher was taken for granted ... Today the relation between friendship and philosophy has actually fallen into discredit, and it is with a sort of embarrassment and uneasy conscience that professional philosophers try to come to terms with such an uncomfortable and, so to speak, clandestine partner of their thought. However, while philosophy and friendship share a deep and even promiscuous intimacy, it is also true that the very recourse to a language of proximity or closeness at the same time in part differentiates, distinguishes or divides friendship and philosophy. (In fact, Agamben himself uses the term 'con-divides' later in the essay, although here the term is taken to imply an original fold or alterity in existence, something like a pure, undeconstructible potentiality that transcends individual subjects or subjectivities.) Friendship, then, isn't quite philosophy--nearly, but not quite. Instead, one might say that philosophy shares a friendship with friendship. Here, from a point of view that is undoubtedly other than Agamben's, friendship might be seen to function in terms of what Derrida elsewhere calls a 'transcendental excrescence' (9) or in other words a supplement in relation to philosophy. It is neither simply inside nor outside philosophy, neither merely an exemplary example nor a master term, but instead gets located or, rather, dislocated, somewhere between the two, therefore strangely redoubling its own divisible trait. Hence, the relationship of philosophy to friendship includes a measure both of distance and proximity, inordinately difficult to stabilize or enumerate (in other words, a somewhat immeasurable measure), which is nevertheless in constant need of reckoning. This situation recalls Derrida's retranslation of Ent-fernung from Being and Time in Parages, where Ent-fernung is the distancing or withdrawing that creates proximity or closeness for Dasein. Heidegger's insight is that proximity can only begin with distance, but a distance that can only hope to find its measure (however impossibly) through proximity as, therefore, the non-oppositional 'other' of itself. (10) Thus, while--in the very next move of his essay--Agamben tries to postulate the falling into discredit of the relation between philosophy and friendship in modern times, which he suggests begins with Nietzsche but finds perhaps its most recent echo in Derrida's Politics of Friendship (the strategy of which, Agamben tells us, is both to affirm and 'distrustfully revoke' friendship), nevertheless the intimacy to which Agamben points between friendship and philosophy--precisely because it is of the nature of a friendship, that is to say, unstably or incalculably split between distance and proximity, origin and supplement--is surely always able to potentialise a falling out. Thus it is no easy matter to simply oppose (following Agamben) the ancient or classical conception of philosophy's friendship with friendship to a more recent (postNietzschean) situation characterised by philosophy's uneasiness and ambivalence about friendship itself. Rather, the remarks about philosophy and friendship with which Agamben begins his essay in Contretemps actually destine the same problem--that of a dislocating supplementarity, a divisible trait, rather than an oppositional difference--to inhabit and define not only the relationship between 'classical' and 'modern' conceptions of friendship but also, by necessary implication, Agamben's own (un-friendly) relations, here, with Derrida and deconstruction.

Nonetheless, Agamben moves ahead with his essay on 'Friendship' by referring to his own friendship with Nancy: Many years ago, my friend Jean-Luc Nancy and I decided to exchange letters on the subject of friendship. We were convinced this was the best way of approaching and almost 'staging' a problem which otherwise seemed to elude analytical treatment. I wrote the first letter and waited, not without trepidation, for the reply. This is not the place to try to understand the reasons--or, perhaps, misunderstandings--that caused the arrival of Jean-Luc's letter to signify the end of our project. But it is certain that our friendship--which, according to our plans, should have given us privileged access to the problem--was instead an obstacle for us and was consequently, in a way, at least temporarily obscured. Here, Agamben's friendship with Nancy is therefore 'staged' in terms of a certain correspondence: the exchange of letters. Agamben foresees that an exploration of the question of friendship is best conducted by way of performative acts of friendship associated with the epistolary intercourse between two philosophers. But, in fact, despite the expected doubling (or redoubling) of the very question with the act of friendship, in the movement between the concept and its exercise friendship proves not to be the same as itself. Once more, even as it attempts to draw closer to its classical ideal (and thus away from its discredited standing 'today'), friendship proves an unfriendly friend of philosophy, or indeed vice versa. Agamben tells us that the question of friendship is inhibited or blocked by its own performative staging, via acts of friendship or the exchange of letters, precisely at the moment the other (Nancy) writes back. And Agamben seems to choose his words carefully here, so that it remains a little unclear whether it is Nancy who, in his reply to Agamben, writes of his decision to end the project, or whether indeed it is Agamben, upon reading Nancy's letter (whatever its contents might have been), who concludes that the exchange cannot continue. Clearly, the strongest hint is that Agamben is the injured party and it is Nancy who decides against friendship in at least a double sense. (There is a troubling mixture here of a strongly paraded modicum of professional discretion on Agamben's part and, at the same time, the irrefutably 'clandestine' insinuation of blame lying elsewhere.) However, the lack of clarity on this point in Agamben's own text perhaps unwittingly points to a deeper truth: that it is Agamben, finally, who decides to end the correspondence or break the circuitry (of or between friendship/philosophy) by refusing, in his own essay, to circulate or communicate the precise reasons why the arrival of Jean-Luc's letter signifies the end of the project. Agamben, in other words, 'goes public' with this apparently otherwise private correspondence, while keeping its secret (or telling of its secret) in a way which, precisely in its interlinear evasiveness, can only reduce the possibility of 'writing back'--not least on the part of the reader. At this level, then, the decision to end the correspondence (and to decide, more or less clandestinely, against friendship in at least a double sense) would not, finally, be that of the other. However, the Agamben-Nancy correspondence mentioned at the beginning of the essay 'Friendship'-howsoever it is 'staged'--does set the scene for a somewhat different exchange with Derrida. From the beginning, at least, the Nancy example seems to follow the original or originary theme of an essential linkage between friendship and philosophy or, indeed, philosophers. Thus, as philosophers the two (and this is more or less naturalised in Agamben's paper) correspond as friends. At the beginning, at any rate. In this context, there are two very telling features about the Agamben-Derrida correspondence as it is presented in the essay. Let us quote the passage in question at some length before attempting to analyse its salient characteristics: Jacques Derrida chose as the Leitmotiv of his book on friendship a sibylline motto, traditionally attributed to Aristotle, that negates friendship in the very gesture with which it seems to invoke it: o philo, oudeis philos, 'o friends, there are no friends'... While Derrida was still working on the seminar which gave birth to the book, we had discussed together a curious philological problem that concerned precisely the motto or witticism in question ... if we open a modern edition of the Lives of the Philosophers, we do not find in the chapter dedicated to the

biography of Aristotle (V, 21) the phrase in question, but rather one almost identical in appearance, the meaning of which is nonetheless different and far less enigmatic: oi (omega with subscript iota) philoi, oudeis philos, 'he who has many friends has no friend'. A library visit was enough to clarify the mystery. In 1616 the great Genevan philologist Isaac Casaubon decided to publish a new edition of the Lives. Arriving at the passage in question--which still read ... o philoi (o friends)--he corrected the enigmatic version of the manuscripts without hesitation. It became perfectly intelligible and for this reason accepted by modern editors. Since I had immediately informed Derrida of the results of my research, I was astonished, when his book was published ... not to find there any trace of the problem. If the motto--apocryphal according to modern philologists--appeared there in original form, it was certainly not out of forgetfulness: it was essential to the book's strategy that friendship be, at the same time, both affirmed and distrustfully revoked. Before one even attempts to tackle the contents of this extraordinary passage, then, there are some noteworthy features surrounding its very 'staging' in the essay. First of all, given that Agamben is not prepared to divulge the contents of the Nancy-Agamben letters--and, remember, this was an exchange presented as one undertaken with a friend--it is telling indeed that Agamben has no scruples, just a few lines on, in revealing what he wrote to Derrida. Tellingly, also, while Derrida is positioned here primarily as the recipient of letters letters on the subject of friendship--he is noticeably, by contrast, not called a friend. Recall the essay's opening gambit: 'Friendship ... is so closely linked to the very definition of philosophy ...' That one can correspond with a fellow philosopher who is not called a friend acquires a heightened significance here, even the implication that in comparison to 'my friend Jean-Luc Nancy' Derrida is no philosopher.Through library research, Agamben--as is his wont--clarifies the mystery of a double translation of ancient sources and, in the process, effectively delegitimates the motto which provides the leitmotiv for Derrida's Politics of Friendship. Or so he thinks. For--whatever the rights and wrongs of Agamben's decision to present a certain interpretation, tradition or translation as authoritative, and regardless of whether he is correct in asserting the complete absence of any trace of the so-called corrected version from the published book by Derrida--surely there is a further supplementary twist here, another dislocating graft of the performative on to the constative of friendship? In the very act of refuting as authoritative the central motto of Politics of Friendship, Agamben actually confirms its persistence as an apt description of what is happening in this correspondence (or 'open' non-correspondence) between the two philosophers: namely, that while Derrida is the object of Agamben's address, the intended recipient of a letter from a philosopher (and philosophy is from the outset bound up with friendship, Agamben says), he is with some deliberateness (that is to say, in pointed contrast to Nancy) not called a friend. In the very structure of this address, then, what better 'staging' of the motto 'o my friend, there is no friend' could one imagine? By extension, what better 'staging' might one imagine of the so-called post-Nietzschean mixture of affirmation and distrustful revocation of friendship--the very same ambivalent combination from which, precisely, Agamben wishes to distance himself? (Distance, as Heidegger suggests, has proximity as its other name.) Agamben continues his essay by seeking to locate and define the word 'friend' in terms of its linguistic class or category: I believe that 'friend' belongs to that class of terms which linguists define as non-predicative--terms, that is, on the basis of which it is not possible to construct a class of objects in which one might group the things to which one applies the predicate in question ... Strange as it may seem, 'friend' shares this

characteristic with another species of non-predicative terms: insults. Linguists have demonstrated that an insult does not offend the person who receives it because it places him in a particular category (for example, that of excrement, or of male or female genitalia) which would simply be impossible or, in any case, false ... What offends in the insult is, to be precise, a pure experience of language, and not a reference to the world. If this is true, 'friend' would share this condition not only with insults, but with philosophical terms: terms which, as is well known, do not have an objective denotation ... Given the highly ambivalent relations Agamben forges, albeit in different ways, with both Nancy and Derrida in this essay (one an unfriendly friend, the other no friend at all), perhaps it comes as no surprise that the quality or standing of friendship as a non-predicative term is shared not only with philosophy but also with insults. What offends in insults, says Agamben, is 'not a reference to the world' for, in these terms, the insult--which places the recipient in an impossible or false category--cannot be identified with, and therefore cannot cause genuine offence. Instead, Agamben tells us, the insult consists simply in 'a pure experience of language'. We might note in passing that this formulation decisively shifts the territory or field of discussion to a place near the heart of Agamben's own philosophical project, construed as an enquiry into the ramifications of the potentiality of language as pure fact. Thus insults, and by association philosophy and friendship as similarly nonpredicative terms, are drawn into a deep correspondence with Agamben's thought, at the expense of Derrida ... who could only be insulted, not least since--as Agamben himself asserts--the insult given here names nothing or no-one, and certainly not the friend or philosopher (Derrida, remember, is named as neither). What an insult!--the non-content (or non-referential content) rather than the (referential) content of which is responsible for the offence! Yet perhaps the insult backfires. For, precisely in sharing (becoming friends) with these other terms-friendship, philosophy--according to a non-oppositional and promiscuous divisibility of a common trait, the insult does indeed seem to re-enact and partake of the ambivalence, duplicity and untrustworthiness that Agamben wants to reject in post-Nietzschean philosophies of friendship. In giving insult, then, Agamben's triumph is short-lived in that his elaborate (though necessarily unelaborated) insult unavoidably comes to share in the conception of friendship that Agamben himself sets out to repudiate or supersede. Derrida doesn't write back, of course--how could he? Although, maybe, just maybe (and in an unintentionally parodic reconfiguration of the interrupted exchange with Nancy), Agamben's text unwittingly reveals itself as doing just that for him. Agamben's own text, perhaps, writes back for Derrida. BEFORE THE LAW In 'Friendship' Agamben writes the following: [In] the eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics [Aristotle tells us] one cannot live without friends ... Friendship belongs to the prote philosophia, because that which is in question in it concerns the very experience, the very 'perception' of existing ... 'Friend' cannot be a real predicate ... In modern terms, one might say that 'friend' is an existential and not a categorical. But this existential--which, as such, is unable to be conceptualised--is nonetheless intersected by an intensity that charges it with something like a political potency. This intensity is the 'syn', the 'con-' which divides, disseminates and renders con-divisible--in fact, already con-divided--the very perception, the very pleasantness of existing ... It is essential ... that human community should here be defined ... through a cohabitation ... which is not defined by participating in a common substance but by a purely existential con-division and, so to speak, one without an object: friendship, as concurrent perception of the pure fact of existence. How this originary political synaesthesia could become, in the course of time, the consensus to which democracies entrust

their fates in this latest extreme and exhausted phase of their evolution is, as they say, another story ... In Homo Sacer, Agamben specifically rejects the friend/enemy relation as the 'fundamental categorial pair of Western politics', (11) giving rise to a position which, if correct, seems to devastate the very project of Derrida's Politics of Friendship as a deconstructive archaeology of precisely such a 'relation' or 'pair'. Here, then, friendship is decisively rejected as a point of departure for rethinking the political, and for Agamben--the Agamben of Homo Sacer--Derrida's Politics of Friendship would therefore presumably constitute nothing more than a misconstrual of the grounds of the political. In Homo Sacer, we are told, these 'grounds' should instead be understood in terms of the interplay between the sovereign decision and the production of bare life as the fundamental political element. However, in the passage quoted above from Agamben's more recent essay on friendship, it is the existential rather than categorical dimension or disposition of friendship which allows it to become 'intersected by an intensity that charges it with something like a political potency': that of the con-divided nature of existence expressed as the pure fact and potentiality of language--in other words, perhaps, the coming community (as a conception not reducible to the concept, or as a name for something one cannot name--a nonpredicate, to put it another way). Thus, friendship--excluded on the one hand from the very definition of the political--returns here as the figure of a certain messianic salvation or fulfilment, charged with the potential for redeeming democracies 'in the latest extreme and exhausted phase of their evolution'. (It must be left to the reader to decide whether the (un-friendly) friendship 'staged' in Agamben's own text on 'Friendship' establishes an 'existential' that might be considered redemptive for any politics, any communities, any sharing, any correspondences or relations. This messianism of Agambenesque friendship, staged in performative or non-predicative terms in the essay 'Friendship'--what does it redeem exactly? Friendship?) In Homo Sacer, however, the friend/enemy relation appears to be discarded since, as we've just noted, it gives rise only to a misrecognition of the basis of the political; and yet the question of friendship or of 'correspondence'/'noncorrespondence' is nevertheless unavoidably raised or implied--put at stake--at the moment Agamben seeks, in Homo Sacer, to critique deconstruction on the strength of Derrida's interpretation of Kafka's 'Before the Law'. As previously mentioned, Agamben sidles up to this text by way of revisiting its disputed reading in the correspondence between Scholem and Benjamin. Thus, it is precisely in the vicinity of a friendship or 'friendly' dispute that the question of the political is supposedly reshaped or refined (and thus differentiated from that of 'friendship') by Agamben himself. Furthermore, as we shall see, the tale in question--Kafka's 'Before the Law'--not only establishes complex relations of rapport/non-rapport, as Derrida himself notes, but acquires exemplary status in Homo Sacer only on the strength of Agamben's own rapport/non-rapport with both the story itself and, by implication, Derrida's reading of it. The ambivalent 'friend' uncannily returns, therefore, precisely where he is attemptedly set aside. In Agamben's reading of the disputed reading of the tale, Benjamin wholly rejects Scholem's interpretation of the text as one which concerns the idea of a power being in force without significance, a 'pure' law divested of meaningful reference to its actual content. For Agamben, the Benjaminian position, in which he detects the greater potential for reconceptualising contemporary political realities, signals instead a state of exception turned into the rule, which achieves at once 'law's fulfillment' and, perhaps more promisingly, 'its becoming indistinguishable from the life over which it ought to rule'. To understand better the possible promise of this 'Benjaminian' interpretation--and to see why, in Homo Sacer, the Benjamin-Scholem dispute actually presages the Agamben-Derrida relation--it is perhaps worth situating this section of the text in terms of its broader 'political' concerns, arguments and ideas. Through a variety of readings running from the classical period right up to the present day, Agamben seeks to demonstrate the paradox that it is exception that gives rise to the law in all its force. Following Schmitt, he argues that the power to decide exceptions to the law is in fact what defines sovereign power, which therefore realises itself in the capacity both to exclude and capture human 'life' precisely within the sovereign exception. The most recent example of this might be the detention without legal status of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, although tellingly--and controversially--Agamben traces out a near identical structure of what he terms 'biopolitical' power in the very form of the Nazi concentration camp, which he sees much less as the absolute outer limit of possibility of human endeavour within the history and traditions of the West, than a more or less inevitable consequence of its specific political formation since ancient times. As a consequence of his analysis, then, Agamben sees sovereignty--construed as the right to decide exceptions to the law--as far from waning: a perspective

which runs somewhat counter to Foucault's conception of sovereignty's epochal demise amid the modern reconfiguration of power in terms of governmentality, administration and discipline. Sovereignty, as that which is the innermost centre of the juridical order and yet also above or outside (or out of reach of) the law, thus constitutes itself through the ability to decide exception to the law as the law, and therefore to wield its power--in a state of 'emergency'--against bare or 'sacred' life: a category Agamben derives from Roman criminal law, one which indicates the enigmatic figure of the sacred man, homo sacer, who can be killed but not sacrificed, a 'banished' individual who as such becomes the object of a purely profane violence (outside any tragic paradigm) that enacts itself to the complete exclusion of all categories or contexts of moral or ethical responsibility, and in total absence of legal rituals or rights. Sovereign power, that is, resides precisely in a ban-structure, whereby it acquires its force paradoxically by abandoning life to its barest condition; casting out or, in a certain sense, freeing biological existence from the politico-ideological reach of the law, in order to exercise power over 'life' all the more unremittingly, precisely in its excluded 'bareness'. From this perspective, Agamben casts a new and unsettling light on debates concerning basic human rights, eugenics, euthanasia, medical intervention, organ donation, brain death, ethnic cleansing and the concentration camp itself, by insisting that the power derived from the sovereign exception is ultimately biopolitical power, the 'fundamental activity' of which is none other than 'the production of bare life as originary political element'. (12) Thus, Agamben detects a hidden complicity between discourses and practices devoted to the preservation of bare life (that is, those discourses which seek its 'liberation' from ideological, political or religious determination in order to assert the basic, inalienable value of 'life' itself), and the biopolitical or thanatopolitical death machines associated with the worst horrors of the last century. As Agamben therefore tells us, today it is not in the city but rather through the camp that we might find the fundamental political paradigm of the West. Both sovereign power and bare life thus dwell at the threshold of indistinction between law and violence, states of emergency or exception and the permanent condition of rule, exclusion and inclusion, inside and outside, the human and the non-human. And since, for Agamben, the state of exception can be found at the very origin of political and juridical formations, this very same 'state'--as precisely an unstable threshold of indistinction--increasingly becomes a permanent condition of the politico-juridical order, and, without a profound reconceptualisation of the political being put into effect, appears likely to extend itself in planetary terms. Thus the sovereign decision as exception is today exercised along a biopolitical horizon that includes the physician and scientist as much as the political leader; while the figure of the sacred man remains obscure to us nowadays, Agamben insists, only inasmuch as we are all virtually homines sacri. Meanwhile, as Benjamin Noys, following Agamben, has put it, '"bare life" gains confirmation in the "humanitarian interventions" that confront us with the images of that "bare life" on our television screens and, at the same time, maintain that "bare life" as the support for sovereign power'. (13) In other words, in exceptional circumstances or states of emergency, such examples of 'bare life' in fact maintain the power to decide beyond the law. It is in the context of this broader interpretation of the political, then, that Agamben chooses to side with what he sees as the Benjaminian view of Kafka's 'Before the Law', rejecting the idea of a more intractable 'political' end-game found in the notion of power 'being in force without significance' through the pure form of the law, in favour of the potentiality of law's non-transcendence--at the threshold of indistinction--over life itself. Whatever the 'political' or 'philosophical' gains that might follow from this position (or, indeed, whatever its limits might be), what interests me here is the way in which this revisitation of a disputed reading--and indeed of a certain correspondence that is apparently based, once again, on a degree of misunderstanding--sets the scene for another of Agamben's critiques of deconstruction. By rereading (in a chapter called 'Form of Law') Kafka's 'Before the Law', then, Agamben stages a critical encounter with Derrida's own essay 'Before the Law' and indeed his other seminal text 'Force of Law'. In a compelling and difficult paragraph, Agamben writes: The experience of being in force without significance lies at the basis of a current of contemporary thought that is not irrelevant here. The prestige of deconstruction in our time lies precisely in its having conceived of the entire text of tradition as being in force without significance, a being in force whose strength lies essentially in its undecidability and in having shown that such a being in force is, like the door of the Law in Kafka's parable,

absolutely impassable. But it is precisely concerning the sense of this being in force (and of the state of exception that it inaugurates) that our position distinguishes itself from that of deconstruction. Our age does indeed stand in front of language just as the man from the country in the parable stands in front of the door of the Law. What threatens thinking here is the possibility that thinking might find itself condemned to infinite negotiations with the doorkeeper or, even worse, that it might end by itself assuming the role of the doorkeeper who, without really blocking the entry, shelters the Nothing onto which the door opens. As the evangelical warning cited by Origen concerning the interpretation of Scripture has it: 'Woe to you, men of the Law, for you have taken away the key to knowledge: you yourselves have not entered, and you have not let the others who approached enter either' (which ought to be reformulated as follows: 'Woe to you, who have not wanted to enter into the door of the Law but have not permitted it to be closed either'). (14) Here, as already noted, it is as if deconstruction destines itself to 'negotiate infinitely' with the law only in the form of becoming a further example of the ban-structure of sovereign power, which neither simply prohibits nor grants, but which offers an apparently total form of release or freedom from the law only in order to then overpower by more irresistible means. Thus, for Agamben, it would seem that deconstruction itself resides at and, indeed, endlessly redraws this threshold of indistinction such as it is characterised by Kafka's 'open' door of the law. Deconstruction, in other words, remains caught within the same zone of indistinction that gives rise to the sovereign exception and to bare life, which together constitute the 'originary political element'. And this originary element remains unseen and unchanged by deconstruction. Many of those more sympathetic to Derrida might seek to challenge this critique of deconstruction along 'philosophical' lines--an undertaking which could very well involve at once a massive re-reading of the canonical and non-canonical texts of deconstruction, and more particularly a serious reconsideration of whether Derrida's thinking of undecidability (or of 'force') really gives rise merely to an infinite negotiation which remains ultimately impotent or inaccessible. However, my own preference is to respond to this critique first of all by examining the way in which it is performatively enacted or 'theatricalised' around Kafka's text, remembering once again that for Agamben philosophy itself essentially implies a friendship or correspondence with philosophy or between philosophers, albeit one which (as the Nancy episode demonstrates) 'stages' itself in a way that dislocates the very same relation or correspondence--and thus, the very same 'position' of philosophy--that it implies. In the staging of this critique, in its 'theatricalisation' around the Kafka text, then, does Agamben in fact unwittingly dislocate just the 'position' he hopes to secure in relation to deconstruction? Before undertaking the hugely daunting task of exploring the philosophical foundations of Agamben's critique of Derrida (or, indeed, before assessing the extent to which Derrida's 'Before the Law' or 'Force of Law' might 'write back' in answer to this critique, which in itself would take more space than is available here), might one instead begin by asking whether the text--and, indeed, the scene of reading or nonreading--that Agamben chooses as the battleground upon which to engage with deconstruction in fact provides stable and reliable grounds for the critique that Agamben wishes to venture? Will Kafka's 'Before the Law' do the job Agamben wants it to do? Let's begin by quoting Kafka's text in its entirety, as it is cited in Derrida's essay: Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a countryman and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. 'It is possible,' says the doorkeeper, 'but not at the moment'. Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: 'If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers.

From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him'. These are difficulties the countryman has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. The doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. That official accepts everything, but always with the remark: 'I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything'. During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly, later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his years-long contemplation of the doorkeeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and change the doorkeeper's mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low towards him, for the difference in height between them has already altered much to the countryman's disadvantage. 'What do you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper. 'You are insatiable'. 'Everyone strives to reach the Law,' says the man, 'so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?' The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and to let his failing senses catch the words roars in his ear: 'No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it'. Franz Kafka, 'Before the Law' (15) It would be an easy enough matter to read this text along standard literary-critical lines in order to identify in Kafka's story a paradoxical interplay of the hospitable and the inhospitable, the open and the closed, welcome and cruelty, violence and kindness, animosity and friendship, all of which--not least on Agamben's view--might be seen to inhabit the deconstructive account of friendship's 'politics'; and therefore to redeploy the Kafka text, contra Agamben, in order to show that the literary example he chooses to place centre-stage in this elaborately theatricalised dismissal of deconstruction forms part of a basis or foundation for the argument that remains far from secure. But, in advance of any such reading, it seems important to note a perhaps more fundamental fact. First of all, while Agamben alludes to Kafka's story in the midst of a series of references to Benjamin, Scholem and deconstruction, he does not read it,

as Derrida does in great detail in his own 'Before the Law'. Instead, Agamben builds his own 'position' on a view of the text, and of its possible relationship to various strands of critical thought, that proceeds with a degree of haste which echoes the confidence he displays in a brief 'library visit'--the one that for Agamben proves 'enough' to undermine the entire project of Derrida's Politics of Friendship. Thus, through an allusion which falls short of a reading, Agamben enters into a somewhat enigmatic or perhaps even ambivalent relationship of correspondence/non-correspondence or rapport/non-rapport with Kafka's text (not to mention with Derrida's). This in fact resonates, not only with the double structure of rapport/non-rapport that for Derrida in his own 'Before the Law' accompanies the Freudian story of prohibition, the father and the law (a story Agamben would want to repudiate--not least in Derrida's apparently 'Scholemesque' retelling of it--in favour of his own 'Benjaminian' interpretation of the law), but also with what might be called the opening move of this very same text by Derrida (though his 'Before the Law' itself asks the question: where does a text open or begin?). At the most obvious level, at least, Derrida's text commences by replicating Kafka's own title, taking it as its own. But is a title--whether or not it functions as a citation--ever a beginning? Is it indeed part of the text, or outside it? This more or less undecidable question, one that recalls the parergonal effects discussed in The Truth in Painting, is of course repeatedly raised by Derrida himself. Derrida's 'borrowed' or 'stolen' title, then, re-plays as it repeats the original, putting it back into play, just as the incipit in Kafka's tale--in the very act of replicating the title--redoubles and divides the proprietorial or territorial space of the heading, and indeed of the 'work'. This not only shows the borders of a text to be radically unstable at precisely the moment it plays with a notion of self-identity (i.e. between 'work' and title)--thus calling into question an authoritative or masterful description of a text of precisely the kind ventured by Agamben. It also reenacts the very question or effect of iterability, to which Derrida draws our attention on many occasions, whereby the mark repeats itself so as to become legible only according to an irreducibly doubled and divided structure of sameness and difference. In other words, from the outset Derrida's text reperforms the problem of a text's relationship to itself (and indeed to others) as inextricably one of correspondence/noncorrespondence, or rapport/non-rapport. If such an effect of rapport/non-rapport is also apparent from the outset in Agamben's gesture of allusion without reading, then the uneasy (yet intractable) mixture of proximity and distance, affirmation and distrustful revocation, that would seem for Agamben to accompany post-Nietzschean philosophies of friendship, also comes to inhabit the very relation of Homo Sacer to Kafka's 'Before the Law' (and perhaps, by extension, to Derrida's text of the same name), substituting for a supposedly masterful critique of deconstruction the stealthy reintroduction of a tenacious problematic which Agamben wants to project elsewhere in order to differentiate and define his own 'position'. Needless to say, the complex relationship of Agamben to Derrida calls for much more extensive thinking and reading than is possible here, and undoubtedly--given the changing climate of contemporary critical thought--a painstaking excavation of the philosophical terrain upon which the two meet and disagree has only just begun within the academy. The preliminary gesture of this essay has been to question whether the propositions, formulations and conclusions about language, politics and philosophy found in Agamben's work--often masterful in tone and spellbinding in nature--are always matched or supported by his own critical procedures. Here, the critique of deconstruction acquires special significance since, on several occasions, it is what ostensibly allows Agamben to clarify and develop his 'position' or to embark on different pathways. However, on close reading, the (non-) correspondence with Derrida may re-establish a supposedly 'deconstructive' problematics of friendship which, for all the undoubted merit of Agamben's writings, casts a somewhat different light on certain aspects of his way of doing philosophy ('friendship ... is so closely linked to the very definition of philosophy' ...) (1.) Giorgio Agamben, 'Friendship', Contretemps 5, December 2004, (special issue on Giorgio Agamben), available on-line at For a further comment on the DerridaAgamben relation, see Lorenzo Fabbri's interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, 'Philosophy as Chance', Critical Inquiry, 33, 2 (2007): 427-440. Also, Samuel Weber has recently written on Agamben's 'Friendship' essay, in an as yet unpublished paper, '"And When is Now?" (On Some Limits of Perfect Intelligibility)', scheduled to appear in MLN in the Fall issue of 2007. Here, Weber isolates in Politics of Friendship a passage which he reads as Derrida's response to the letter from Agamben mentioned in 'Friendship'. See Politics of Friendship, George Collins (trans), Verso, London and New York, 2005, p208. (2.) Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1993, pp155-6. (3.) Ibid.

(4.) Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1998, p54. (5.) Ibid., p53. (6.) Ibid., p181. (7.) Adam Thurschwell, 'Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agamben's Critique of Derrida', Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer, Andrew Norris (ed), Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2005, pp173-197. See p181. (8.) Ibid., p185. (9.) Jacques Derrida, Glas, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 1990, 15b. (10.) I am grateful to my friend Sean Gaston for this reference to Derrida's retranslation of Heidegger and for the point it allows me to make here. See Jacques Derrida, Parages, Galilee, Paris, 1986. (11.) Agamben, Homo Sacer, p8. (12.) Ibid., p181. (13.) Benjamin Noys, 'Time of Death', Angelaki 7, 2 (2002): 51-59. See p59. (14.) Agamben, Homo Sacer, p54. (15.) Cited in Jacques Derrida, 'Before the Law', Acts of Literature, Derek Attridge (ed), Routledge, New York and London, 1992, pp197-204. Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com Publication Information: Article Title: Law of Friendship: Agamben and Derrida. Contributors: Simon Morgan Wortham - author. Journal Title: New Formations. Issue: 62. Publication Year: 2007. Page Number: 89+. COPYRIGHT 2007 Lawrence & Wishart Ltd.; COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning