Law and compassion: between ethics and economy, philosophical speculation and archeology

This paper examines the relationship between law and compassion from the perspective of two diverse scholars. For philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, rejecting the idea homo homini lupus, there can simply be no organized society but for a primordial, unauthorized, human vocation for compassion (egoism and violence, for him, are nothing but attempts to repress this). Levinas, however, must be understood, as speaking of compassion not in the usual sense, that is as involving a human capacity for, and cultures of, empathy; he defines it, rather, in phenomenological terms, as an irreducible excess of affectivity for the ultimately meaningless suffering of another, beyond all theodicy and causality, whom one is ethically commanded to offer succour to as if s/he is a ‘higher’ and absolutely unique Other, prior to any comparison and judgement. General legal principles and rigorous rules, Natural Justice and positive law are equally ‘born’ of such an-archic, individuated, compassion for which one can only retroactively account. Justice is ‘born’ as one attempts to justify to third parties why one’s care benefits some but not others; the paper argues that this perspective is preferable to prioritizing empathic compassion over law for it binds compassion with responsibility. Turning to Giorgio Agamben, the role of compassion takes on a darker character; his historicized investigations of the ‘western-Christian’ paradigm shows how the Greek and Roman legal principles of epieikeia, and aequitas merged with the Christian postulates of God-dictated philanthropy and ‘divine economy’ (Gr: oikonomia), leading –instead of ethical anarchy followed by with infinite responsibility (Levinas) – to anomie, legal exceptionalism and social control via patronage and other bio-political practices to spectacles of compassion. This suggests that what Levinas calls ‘ethical anarchy’ has been captured by economic rationality and endless processes of anomic management that are equally free of ethical constraints as they are from legal and political decision. With reference to contemporary examples from the ‘law and emotion’ debates, medical laws and humanitarianism, the paper asks the reader to ponder upon the importance, if any, of Levinas’ thesis in a world where the expediency of managerial rationality, the secular heir of divine oikonomia, prevails over moral, legal and political principle

Towards a western-Islamic conceptions of legalism

Book synopsis: Designed to acknowledge the contribution of the philologist, psychoanalyst and Romanist jurist Pierre Legendre, this collection of essays deals with the study of legal institutions and juridical practices. It discusses developing the themes of text and terror, law and territory, that Legendre either introduced or made peculiarly his own

Constitutional theory and its limits - reflections on comparative political theologies

This article first argues that the thinking behind different theories of collective self-constitution – normative political and reflexive – is commonly restricted by the particularly occidental metaphysics of medieval natural theology which rendered transcendence immanent and domesticated and absolutized God’s unlimited power. The article then shows how this ‘‘defective immanence’’ of constitutional thinking functions ideologically through retroactively colonizing other forms of ‘‘theo-politics’’ in non-occidental monotheistic socio-political organizations

On and out of revolution: between public law and religion

While advocates and critics of liberal republics disagree on whether “pure politics” requires ultimate authorization both call upon theories that explain all revolutions as attempts to transcend political theology for the sake of a purely immanent political realm. Their secularist, “political”/programmatic views and hopes on revolution are here contrasted with a reading of Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy’s Out of Revolution whereby “revolution” is read as the autobiography of western man written through a series of great European Revolutions. As products of changes in the vocabulary of occidental Christian political theology these revolutions were structurally unable to transcend authority; but they were able to project western power around the world. Lacking in awareness of its religious vocabulary the late-modern subject inherits this global western power but can no longer rebel as before. The article summarizes Rosenstock-Huessy’s genealogy of revolution in Section II; in Sections I and 3 his insights are brought to bear on theories of revolution-qua-secularization be it in the form of the utopian overcoming of “religion” (Arendt) or in the form of overcoming Christianity’s fabulous and real history – its political theology – while retaining its universality for the sake of emancipation of a “universal” – not western – victim

The subject may have disappeared but its sufferings remain

Today there is no sophisticated theory, which continues to rely on subjectivist premises. It is important, however, that anti-humanism theory's disinterestedness in the (imaginary) subject of voluntarism does not lead to an indifference towards being's constitutive non-essence and passivity in the manner of the worst kind of humanism. Emmanuel Levinas' places ‘absurd’ suffering in the place of essence as the knot of subjectivity; his view of the quiddity of suffering as mode of being passively rather than as psychological content and of the modality of disinterested compassion are used in order to formulate the question `who comes after the subject' in ways which allow us to continue thinking of what it means to be affected in an individuated manner without returning us to the subject of self-presence and autonomy