Agamben

Departure from the rule of law as the consolidation of biopower. Example of Polish legislation justified by fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dr hab. Arkadiusz Barut

University of Wrocław

English abstract: Throughout this article the author interprets the crisis of the rule law in Poland in 2020 caused by the phenomenon described as Covid-19 pandemic as the solidification and consolidation of biopower – the contribution of ideas and practices justified by the findings of natural sciences to the disestablishment of paradigms hitherto recognized as fundamental to the creation and application of law, that is the due process of law or its formal justice.

I proceed from the assumption that the creation and application of law must be grounded in phronesis — the Aristotelian prudence, that is the intellectual process of assessment of not only the means but also the goals. Thanks to the discernment of both the goals and the means in the same cognitive act, one gains the opportunity to distinguish individual cases and insight into specific situations. I assume the phronetics of law to justify and at once enable its acquisition of the property referred to as justice in its formal sense — predictability, non-retroactivity, generality of regulation, and so on. If, on the other hand, the law becomes subordinated to paradigms justified with the use of natural sciences, it ceases to fulfil its function. Biopower invades the legal sphere as a discourse of necessity, such a necessity is in itself the very opposite of the fine art of balancing the various competing interests, appreciating the importance of form and ritual, distinguishing the various individual cases.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the impact of the crisis referred to as the Covid-19 pandemic on law and in no way to pronounce on the medical aspects of its proliferation or express a moral or political judgement of the actions justified by the need to contain it.

Keywords: Covid – 19, pandemic, biopower, rule of law, Foucault, Legendre, Agamben

Language: English

Published: Number 3(28)/2021, pp.5-21

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2021.3.5

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This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s ‘Leviathan’: The Unbearable State of Nature

Mgr Katarzyna Krzyżanowska

European University Institute, Florence

Abstract: Leviathan by Andrey Zvyagintsev is a movie that depicts the world in a state of nature, with no prospects for creating a Hobbesian social contract. Set in the Russian peripheries, the film depicts a respected and caring family man who is gradually deprived of everything because of lack of political order with enforceable law and justice. The movie is a depiction of a contemporary “failed state”, equalized with the state of nature, where there is no legitimate power and violence remains the only tool to achieve goals both in private and public spheres. Religion consists of empty rituals that serve corrupt officials to maintain power. This world cannot last without innocent victims, scapegoats of the society, one of whom is the protagonist of the movie. This paper offers a legal and philosophical inquiry into the film, as it draws especially on the theory of the social contract proposed by Hobbes. It depicts a Russian town as a symbol of the state of nature as envisioned by Hobbes and describes the reasons why the social contract has not been made. According to Hobbes’s theory, in the state of nature concepts like justice and injustice do not convey any meaning; therefore, this paper investigates other: theological and anthropological concepts, to explore the meaning of Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan.

Keywords: Leviathan, Hobbes, Legendre, Agamben, crisis, ritual, religion, law

Language: English

Published: Number 1(26)/2021, s. 62-75.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2021.1.62

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Application of the Transmission Easement Regulations as an Example of the ‘State of Exception’ Law

Dr hab. Arkadiusz Barut

University of Wroclaw

Abstract: The subject of the article is an analysis of civil courts’ case law in terms formulated by Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler, that is, in terms of law as a ‘state of exception’, a purely arbitrary practice that appears to be a parody of law. The author indicates aspects of such ‘law’: the blurring of the boundaries between the law and purely factual activities (in Agamben’s terminology: ‘life’), which may take the form of violence that no longer cares for its legitimacy or which reduces the law to ‘pure form’, that is, the creation and application of rules completely in abstract from their ethical evaluation and social consequences. In Foucault’s terminology, both these processes can be represented as a rebirth of sovereignty in the field of governmentality, the parody of the law being justified by the needs of population management, but in reality it is the result of a power’s strive for self-preservation. There are, as Butler defines, petty sovereigns who allegedly only quasi-technically apply the law articulated in full in the statute, and in fact act fully arbitrarily. One of their methods is to simulate the creation or application of law by taking away a particular meaning from words, in particular from legal concepts. The result is a departure from the idea of separation of powers and the postulate of empowerment of the addressee of legal norms, sometimes preserving the fiction of the latter’s agency as a kind of Agamben’s ‘pure form of law’. The author states that an example of such a process is the case law of the Polish Supreme Court and general courts regarding the possibility of acquisitive prescription of transmission easement by transmission companies. He indicates that the position that won in this case law completely deviates from the contents of the statute and the well-established understanding of civil law concepts, with the result of depriving property owners of their legal rights.

Keywords: state of exception, Agamben, Butler, transmission easement

Language: Polish

Received: 31.10.2018
Accepted: 23.03.2019

Published: Number 1(19)/2019, pp. 5-14

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2019.1.5

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Number of downloads: 185