Disappearance of Literature by Hillyer Aaron;

Author:Hillyer, Aaron;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

If it is true that the Messiah will only be able to enter the gates once they have closed, after the law’s being in force without significance is over, then discerning the strategy of the youth or the man from the country becomes even more urgent. This figure would seem to be well schooled in Benjamin’s understanding of how the suspension of law, purported to be a temporary measure to quell the threat, in order to assure the law’s functioning in the normal situation, no longer refers back to such a “normal” situation because it has become the permanent state of affairs. Just as the officer from Kafka’s penal colony calls the bluff of the law by forcing it to its limit in the full light of exposure to the public, capturing its true nature in language via the journalist’s studious narration, so are the man from the country and the youth waiting at the gate involved in an attempt to force the law to signify, to reduce it from potentiality to actuality, to capture its essence so powerfully in language that it is held captive there, frozen in an image of supreme signification or documentation. This moment could be described as a collective recognition that extinguishes the law because it can no longer function under any signifying regime, its whole apparatus being entirely dependent on the suspension of law and of the signifying word of law, the dwelling in absolute potential that levels the torturer and the victim, the sovereign and the prisoner, on the same biopolitical plane. It is this absolute potency that the victims and the prisoners, every citizen, must seize, hold, and maintain, in a situation fraught with risk, lest another law springs up to rival them in its pure potentiality.

Kishik notes, therefore, that, despite Arendt’s critique of the confusion of violence with power, the sphere of the coming political power could therefore be ultimately indistinguishable from the sphere of pure violence, as long as both are conceived in their intellectual, linguistic, or educative manifestations. Linguistic, intellectual, or educative violence could properly be called “pure” only when it remains within a sphere of means that are not directed at a particular or ultimate end, only which it has nothing whatsoever to do with law, only when it merges with the life that Agamben calls “form-of-life,” for which, according to Kishik’s reading, “what is at stake in its way of living is living itself, and what is above all at stake in living itself is a way of life.”71 Such a form-of-life, in its insistence on a pure language, the new language that appears as it casts over the void, the unfolding of the world, is involved in the task of superimposition—the harmonization Blanchot sought between the inside and the outside of the novel—because of the ways this language cleaves an opening at the heart of the language of the ordinary and keeps it open for indeterminate periods in the lives of those who speak it. This,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.