From: "Eubulides" <paraconsistent-AT-comcast.net>
Subject: Re: AUT: RE: More on Fascism (and Flows) (Agamben - Benjamin - Schmitt) (Deleuze& Guattari )
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 16:19:03 -0700



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lowe Laclau" <lowelaclau-AT-hotmail.com>




Martin,

Although I have yet to see State of Exception, if I understand Agamben
well enough I think your reading would be right. In this he is repeating
the lesson Deleuze struggled with and that Foucault in his latter seminars
would explore. Being "enemies" so to speak of transcendence,
transcendental ways of thinking, (social) laws, justice etc. are not to be
trapped in something higher than oneself. They are to be decided in the
reckoning of the case. Schmitt in noting that the State's sovereignty is
this ability to DECIDE at each moment the law of the case, to DECIDE what
is justice, notes something that the bourgeois liberals couldn't
articulate or accept.

============================
Heck, it was SC Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. - a man whose views on
power and the state were forged at Antietam, Chancellorsville and Balls
Bluff during the US [un]Civil War- who was more than happy to let go of
the myth of liberal neutrality with regards to the law and judicial
decision making, and he was deconstructing natural rights theories of the
law [especially common law] and the state before Schmitt was even born. In
a sense, he was the Nietzsche of the latter part of nineteenth century US
intellectual-cum-political life.

Ian





     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---