In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben suggests that Herman’s Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ offers the ‘strongest objection against the principle of sovereignty’. Bartleby, a legal scribe who does not write, is best known for the formula with which he responds to all his employer’s requests, ‘I would prefer not to.’ This paper examines this formula, asking what it would mean to ‘prefer not to’ when the law is in question. By reading Melville’s story alongside Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and Walter Benjamin’s (...) theses on history, it suggests that Bartleby’s interest, for Agamben, lies in his challenge to dominant conceptions of the relation between potentiality and actuality, which, he believes, are rendered indistinct in sovereignty. By reflecting critically on Agamben’s depiction of Bartleby as a ‘new Messiah’, this paper examines Agamben’s understanding of what it would mean to fulfil the law, and what form of political task this would entail. (shrink)

This article discusses the background to Walter Benjamin's famous 'letter to an unknown correspondent', which was part of a series of letters between Benjamin and Norbert Elias. Elias had just finished writing the first volume of The Civilizing Process, and he wrote to Ben jamin asking him to review it, but Benjamin declined. The reasons for his reluctance are discussed. The letters themselves are reproduced at the end of the article.

‘Disastrologies’ explores Derrida's fascination with dates and how that fascination reveals a secret correspondence, in every sense of the word, with Walter Benjamin – a man who has the same birth-date as Derrida. It is, though, the date of Benjamin's death and indeed its infamous mise-en-scène, the cheap hotel on the Franco-Spanish border, that dominates this text which takes the form of a dramatic monologue delivered by the hotel manager, Juan Suñer, a man known to be both a manipulator of (...) dates and, indeed, close to the Gestapo. As the monologue unfolds, Suñer advances an elaborate calendrical re-reading of a host of Derrida texts which probes at the mystery not only of Benjamin's last night but also of living with both Jewish and Christian calendars. Finally, we see how this last of nights puts under unbearable pressure the infinite promise of both the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday. (shrink)

Recent thinking on human rights, at least among the left, has divided along lines that have become familiar from other contemporary political debates. There are those who ground the discourse of rights in an ethical responsibility to fellow human beings in situations of suffering and oppression; for others, suspicion with respect to just such an ethical stance is their point of departure. They see in the ethical perspective at best a radical depoliticization of the struggle for human rights—its biopolitical reduction (...) to humanitarian aid to suffering others who are thereby accorded the status of ‘bare life’—and at worst a cover for a quasi-imperialist imposition of neo-liberal values according to which what ultimately deserves political protection and preservation is the right to entrepreneurial initiative and aspiration. Yet another form of leftist critique of the ostensibly post-political, ethical inflection of rights discourse takes aim at a line of thought most often linked to a series of mostly French philosophers—above all Emmanuel Levinas, but also Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and more recently Judith Butler—who in various ways have sought to ground philosophy in an ‘ethics of the Other’. The essay explores these positions and proposes a new thinking about human rights oriented by what Hannah Arendt referred to as the ‘dark background’ of human life. (shrink)

I seek to interpret the work of Walter Benjamin in light of the "system programme" of German Idealism, in order to confront an antinomy of contemporary radical thought. Benjamin has been regarded as an anti-Hegelian thinker of the exception. Reading him against the grain, I draw out a concept of counter-tradition that eschews the opposition of intra-historical progress and extra-historical exception. The philological inspiration is a book by Franz Joseph Molitor, student of Schelling and "teacher" of Benjamin: The Philosophy of (...) History, or, On Tradition. (shrink)

Commentaries on Eichmann in Jerusalem are of two kinds. The first confronts the historical relevance of Arendt's `report' and attempts to ascertain whether her ironical presentation of Eichmann's trial matches reality, namely, the incommensurable suffering of the Jewish people. The second focuses on the meaning of her expression `the banality of evil', and places Arendt in a long tradition of moral and political philosophy concerned with the problem of evil and, accordingly, of judging evil. The argument of this paper is (...) that both paths of research miss Arendt's intention, and that her `report' has to be read in light of Walter Benjamin's conceptions of history and storytelling. On the one hand, Eichmann in Jerusalem was not intended to reflect reality objectively because, as Arendt claimed, the objectivity of scientific historiography may serve only to condone the genocide. Throughout her entire work, Arendt aimed at avoiding the neutrality of historicism, the `tradition of sine ira et studio', which, according to her, represents a renunciation of responsibility. On the other hand, Arendt emphasized that she did not attempt to write about the nature of evil but to faithfully describe a phenomenon. Therefore the questions to be answered are: What did Arendt mean by a `report'? What does it mean to describe Eichmann's trial non-objectively but faithfully? In this paper, I show that her report should be understood in the light of a new methodological experiment inherited from Benjamin, which can be broken down into two steps: 1. To reveal the truth of history in stories rather than seek historical `objectivity' through theories; and 2. To look at events from forgotten standpoints, which are assumed to represent the experienced `inside' of history. (shrink)

The absolute relation of name to knowledge-recognition [Erkenntnis] exists only in God; only there is name, because it is inwardly identical with the creative word, the pure medium of knowledge-recognition [Erkenntnis]. This means that God made things knowable-recognizable [erkennbar] in their names. Man, however, names them according to knowledge-recognition [Erkenntnis]. An act is—in connection with the perfected state of the world—not what happens now or “soon”: a demand cannot demand, or command anything now. They enter disjointedly, in symbolic concepts, into (...) the now of knowability-recognizability [das Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit], for this now is filled and governed exclusively by.. (shrink)

A careful reading of Harvey C. Mansfield's Manlines s and the recent translation of Daniel Tanguay's Leo Strauss; une biographie intellectuelle reveals that neither text supports the view that Leo Strauss was a harmless if qualified friend of liberal democracy. Key Words: Leo Strauss • Straussians • Nietzsche • Carl Schmitt • Heidegger • National Socialism • Liberalism • Redlichkeit • Hobbes • Hegel • Viktor Trivas.