Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism by Thanos Zartaloudis
| Published date | 01 May 2011 |
| Author | Daniel McLoughlin |
| Date | 01 May 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2011.856-3.x |
showing that French law o¡ers a consistent and valid alternative to the prevalent
American legal hegemony. He deals well toowith the dynamism of the model,
presenting a rounded picture of internal debates surrounding reform. Finally,
Lasser is always readable; his is indeed the most enjoyable full-length study of
comparative law that this reviewer has read fora long time.
Carol Harlow
n
Thanos Zartaloudis, Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and theUses of Criticism,
Abingdon and NewYork: Routledge, 333 pp, hb d80.00.
GiorgioAgamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University
Press,1998) has been central to theorising twenty ¢rst-century security politics in
the world of Anglophone continental philosophy and critical legal studies. Much
of the literature around Agamben has, however, tended to treat his politico-
juridicaltheses in isolation from the broaderspan of his thought, leading to some
problematic and partial reading s of Homo Sacer.There has, however, been a recent
and welcome criticalturn that seeks toremedy this,and Thanos Zartaloudis’s Gior-
gioAgamben:Power,LawandtheUsesofCriticismnow joins a short list of books that
survey Agamben’s thought from his early work on language, subjectivity and
metaphysics through to his most recent on messianism and the art of government.
Zartaloudis’s work is, however, distinguished from previous studiesby its focus on
Agamben as a legal thinker. Indeed, many of those elements of Homo Sacer that
have garnered the greatest critical attention, such as his witheringcritique of the
contemporary biopolitical state, or the claim that the concentration camp is the
‘nomos of the modern’, occupy a marginal position in Zartaloudis’s analysis.
Instead, Zartaloudis treats Homo Sacer as a radical engagement with the central
questions of juridical ontology, one that opens out a new way of approaching
the task of legal criticism.
In one of his earliest books, Stanzas:Word and Phantasm inWestern Culture (Uni-
versityof Min nesota Press,1977) Agamben writes:‘It is common to expectresults
of a work of criticism, or at least arguable positions and, as they say, working
hypotheses. Yet, when the term ‘‘criticism’’ appears in the vocabulary of western
philosophy, it signi¢es rather an inquiry at the limits of knowledge about pre-
cisely that which can neither be posed nor grasped’ (xv). For Zartaloudis, what
Agamben’s legal criticism illustrates is the possibility of rethinking the limit (and
hence the existence) of the legal order. According to Zartaloudis, legal theory has
always understood the limit of the legal order through the schema of a ‘Law of
law’.That is, the juridical tradition grounds and uni¢es the existence of the juri-
dical order through a relationship to an‘essence,’ a transcendent entityor principle
that gives the juridical order its being as law, but itself lacks any positive juridical
existence. Modern lawhas i nherited this conceptual structure from the theologi-
cal and metaphysical traditions. Although the reference to a theological ‘natural
n
Law Department,London Schoolof Economics& Political Science
Reviews
487
r2011The Authors.The Modern Law Review r2011 The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2011) 74(3) 479^501
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