LAW n+daemon

O crippled, crook'd humanity! the straight path is neither ahead, above or under, only K's door, always closing, the LAW is always waiting like a shoe horn next to the always too tight shoe, instead of a way out, the way in. Law thy name is daemon:

He believed that he perceived something in nature (whether living or lifeless, animate or inanimate) that manifested itself only in contradictions and therefore could not be expressed in any concept, much less in any word. It was not divine, for it seemed irrational;  not human, for it had no intelligence; not diabolical, for it was beneficent; and not angelic, for it often betrayed malice. It was like chance, for it lacked continuity, and like Providence, for it suggested context. Everything that limits us seemed penetrable by it, and it appeared to do as it pleased with the
elements necessary to our existence, to contract time and expand space. It seemed only to accept the impossible and scornfully to reject the possible. This essence, which appeared to infiltrate all the others, separating and combining them, I called “daemonic,” after the example of the ancients and others who had perceived something similar. I tried to save myself from this fearful thing.

                           Goethe quoted in Agamben, the Adventure

LAW n+mystic and it's non-other

" The conflicts of mystically oriented individuals cannot
be resolved juridically and they do not find in law a place where
they can debate their differences or find an agreement. Instead
Cacciari turns to Simone Weil’s attack on theology’s dependence
upon Roman law and to Benjamin’s notion of the messianic in
order to align mysticism with a non- juridical view of justice.
The mystical view of justice as an uncontainable break with the
course of the world is irreconcilably opposed to any political
theological attempt juridically to compose the differences
between the transcendent and the mundane, with Cacciari
insisting upon the ‘antidialectical nature of mysticism’ and its
affinity to ‘everything that exceeds the norm, the linearizing violence of the law’ (Cacciari 2009"

from howard cagill's introduction to m. caccari, The Withholding Powler, on political theology and specifically on the concept of the katechon.

also this, glossing  previous article by cacciari:
'On the Theological and Mystical Dimensions of the Modern Political’

"Cacciari’s essay seemed to arrive at a revolutionary gnosticism whose paradoxes
resembled those already diagnosed by Jacob Taubes, while
remaining aware that this made its own oppositions very
vulnerable to dialectical capture. After a further decade of work,
Cacciari’s Dell’Inizio emerged as the extended effort to lessen if
not avoid entirely the risk of dialectical capture facing the
opposition of political theology and mystical, gnostic revolution
embodied in the oppositions of ‘Law and Justice’. This entailed a break with the progressive philosophy of the ages of the Father, Son and spirit originating in the philosophy of history of the
Calabrian Abbot and mystic Joachin di Fiore that would prove
a powerful current in the radical philosophy of the twentieth
century."

LAW n+state of exception

" Agamben calls the originary relation of exception ban [bando]: he who has been banned is not simply outside the law, but is rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed to the threshold of indifference in which exterior and interior, life and law become indistinguishable, and this is law’s originary relation to life.

In The Time that Remains (2000), Agamben recaps the argument in 3 points:

1) The relation of exception presents an absolute indeterminacy of inside and outside. In the state of exception, the law is in force in the form of its suspension, it applies in withdrawing itself, and thus includes what it rejects; this means that there is  no outside of the law, that the law, by including its outside in the form of exception, coincides with reality itself.

2) This means that in the state of exception it is impossible to distinguish between compliance and transgression. In this sense, the law, since it coincides purely and simply with reality, is absolutely unenforceable: unenforceability is thus the originary figure of the norm.

3) Therefore, in the state of exception, the law is absolutely nonformulable, it no longer – or not yet – presents the form of a prescription or a prohibition. In the state of exception the law acts uniquely through its non-formulability.

Schmitt’s account of the exception, by isolating the decisionistic and thus anomic core of all juridical and political systems, tells the truth about the political and the nature of law. We live today, even in Western so-called democracies, in a Schmittian world."

    from  carlo Salzani, The sentence is the goal:agamben's notion of law

LAW n+sources

" the three main sources from which Agamben construes his notion of law: Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Kafka. Whereas Schmitt unveils the true nature of the law in the exception, Benjamin shows its intimate connection to violence, and Kafka describes its emptiness and self-referentiality; from these three sources Agamben construes the picture of a law that ‘presupposes itself, retrospectively legitimating its own, non-legal, foundation and establishing a circle in which law’s authority stems from law itself’.12 This circular structure is what must be de-activated and rendered inoperative, and Benjamin and Kafka also offer a redemptive route in their profane messianism."

‘The Sentence is the Goal’: Agamben’s Notion of Law
Carlo Salzani
              

LAW n+play

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.
G. Agamben

LAW-n+existence

(We could also say: “existence is law,” but if law, in general, essentially traces a limit, the law of existence does not impose a limit on existence, it traces existence as the limit that it is and on which it resolves. Thus existence as “essence” withdraws into the law, but the law itself withdraws into the fact of existing. It is no longer a law that could be respected or transgressed: in a sense, it is impossible to transgress; in another sense, it is nothing other than the inscription of the transgressive/transcendent possibility of existence. Existence can only transgress itself.) jl nancy Experience of Freedom  30