Three important notes about this file

***Agamben Exclusion K***

Politics of identity is necessarily founded in exclusion- turns case

McLoughlin 09- PhD in philosophy from the University of New South Wales, lecturer at Adelaide Law School (Daniel, April, “The Politics of Caesura: Giorgio Agamben on Language and the Law,” Law Critique (2009) 20:163–176//MGD)

The traditional determination of political identity is one of inclusion and exclusion, that is, of belonging to a class or set by virtue of common features. This logic is common to a range of formulations of political community, from that of the nation state, with its division between citizens and aliens, to the politics of gender, sexuality, or race. In this paper, I will refer to this political logic as the ‘politics of identity’, because all of these approaches to politics ground community in an identity unified by a particular shared characteristic. While this logic is central to the tradition of political philosophy, Agamben is not, however, known for his engagement with it. The politics of identity appears in Homo Sacer only as something whose traditional logic has ceased functioning, having unravelled in modernity through the generalisation of the sovereign exception. Further, Agamben’s best known work on community, The Coming Community, is explicitly directed against the politics of identity. For Agamben the future of political thought rests not in an attempt to revive traditional concepts of community, but the attempt to overcome it through a politics of radical singularity, a ‘whatever being’ that is neither being with this or that characteristic, nor being deprived of all characteristics, but rather ‘being such that it always matters’ (Agamben 1993, p. 1). However, as we can observe from these two examples, the understanding of political community as determined by identity and belonging is an abiding, if submerged, concern of Agamben’s, for it is the political tradition over and against which his analysis emerges. The problem I face in this section then is Agamben’s understanding of the politics of belonging, and its relationship to both law and language. This analysis will establish the frame within which Agamben’s account of the limits of language and politics should be understood in the remainder of this essay. It is Agamben’s recent text, The Time That Remains, that offers a key to understanding this problem, as it contains two important treatments of the issue of political identity and its relationship to law. The first is the idea of ‘nation’ that features in his discussion of the relationship between Israel and the Torah. The second is the concept of ‘calling’ or vocation, which appears in Paul’s discussion of the relationship between the messianic community and political status. The former appears to be an immediately juridical problem, while the latter reflects what we might call a ‘profession’—that is, a social–economic category pertaining to someone’s public persona, and which does not appear to have any immediate juridical significance. Despite the seeming differences between these two articulations of the logic of belonging, Agamben posits an originary unity between them, and the argument for their unity casts light on the sense in which Agamben uses the term ‘law’, and will enable us to observe its relationship to the nature and structure of language. In the Jewish tradition the Torah is understood as a ‘dividing wall’ or ‘fence’ that separates Jews from non-Jews (Agamben 2005a, p. 47). As a consequence, Agamben argues ‘the principle of the law is thus division. The fundamental partition of Jewish law is the one between Jews and non-Jews, or in Paul’s words, between Iudaioi and ethne’ (Agamben, 2005a, p. 47). Iudaioi are members of the nation of Israel, the elected people, and this status as being-Jewish is defined by the common characteristic of being a party to this pact, that is, being subject to God’s law. To generalise this logic, to be part of the political community of ‘the nation’ is to be subject to the same law, the juridical order marking common belonging to the set. While it is the Torah that defines the Jewish community, modernity thinks this belonging in the conjunction between state, law and people, and membership as a citizen in the political community is defined through the rights and obligations of positive law. Further, as we observe in the distinction between iudaioi and ethne, the definition of political identity and community through inclusion in a law, necessarily articulates a simultaneous exclusion of those who are outside or indifferent to it.1 In Paul, this is the division between Jew and non-Jew, and in the modern nation-state the division between citizens and aliens.2 To produce political community through law is thus to produce a shared identity through common belonging to a legal order, and this generates a division between inclusion or membership in the political group ‘nation’, and exclusion from it.
Calls for ‘belonging’ are appeals to a common identity which asserts a law-like regime of exclusionary politics

McLoughlin 09- PhD in philosophy from the University of New South Wales, lecturer at Adelaide Law School (Daniel, April, “The Politics of Caesura: Giorgio Agamben on Language and the Law,” Law Critique (2009) 20:163–176//MGD)

Agamben’s discussion of the logic of political division in The Time That Remains appears to locate it as operating in two different spheres—first, the juridical problem of nation; second, the politico-economic problem of calling. Apropos the latter, Agamben identifies a shift from a ‘calling’ that pertains to one’s total identity, to the narrower modern notion of vocation. However, all of these forms of political and economic determination are possible only on the basis of a more originary sense in which Agamben, drawing on Paul, deploys the term klesis. It is this notion of klesis that gives us the key to both the broad determination of the concept ‘law’ at operation in Agamben’s work, and its relationship to language. Paul uses the term both to describe being ‘called’ as an apostle, and also to state that those called by the messiah should ‘remain in their calling’ (Agamben 2005a, p. 19). Paul thus writes that ‘circumcision is nothing, and the foreskin is nothing… Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art though being called a slave? Care not for it’ (Paul, I Corinthians 7:19–20). For Paul, undergoing the former, messianic klesis, being called by the messiah, does not entail abandoning the latter, one’s ‘worldly calling’. What is important about this passage for our discussion is that Paul uses klesis to describe both the fundamental division of the juridical order (circumcision/foreskin, Jew/goy), and the socio-political and economic division of class (slave/free man). Klesis here is simply a matter of ‘being called’, and while being called a slave, or being called a Jew, are social, political and economic problems, to be called is also a problem of language. Thus, while modernity limits the notion of calling to the economic sphere, there is a more fundamental politico-linguistic logic at operation here, that unites the seemingly disparate spheres of the political, juridical and economic. ‘To be called’, is to be subject to the law in the broadest sense—as Agamben puts it elsewhere, it is to be in a ‘worldly’ or ‘juridical-factical’ condition. This is related to the signifying function of language because, for Agamben, law is, in a fundamental way, like language. To use signifying language is to determine categorically an entity as being-x, and this determination groups an entity together with others designated by a general name. Likewise, law produces determinate identities through the application of abstract normative categories to entities, or in the language that Agamben uses in Homo Sacer, applying ‘law’ to ‘life’. Thus being-Jewish is determined by the application of the juridical categories of the Jewish Law to an individual, while being-a-slave is determined by the application of the laws of property to people. Law and language both operate by grouping entities through the name on the basis of a common identity, and they achieve this by bringing words into relation with things, designating particularities as belonging to certain sets on the basis of shared characteristics. The most fundamental of these borders is that designated by the law of the political community—in Paul, this is the division between the iudaioi and the ethne, but in the language of the modern nation-state, it is the split between citizens and aliens, the parties to the social contract and those who fall outside it. Within the wall demarcated by the national law there are further divisions, such as those of class, gender, family, and race, all of which are legal phenomenon, understood in its broadest sense as a mechanism that regulates and produces sociopolitical identities. Law and language are machines for producing determinate identities. To be politically determined as the member of a group is to be subject to a law of naming, that is, ‘to be called’ and hence divided through the performative power of language. Law and politics are thus to be thought for Agamben in relation to language, and the ability of law to generate political identity is grounded in the linguistic logic of the name.