An Esoteric Dossier: Agamben and Derrida Read Saussure

Un vieux sphinx ignoré du monde insoucieux, Oublié sur la carte . . .

—Charles Baudelaire, Spleen II

I take the title of this essay from a phrase in the fourth chapter of Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception, "Gigantomachy Concerning a Void." The "esoteric dossier" to which Agamben refers in that work is the decades-long though frequently elliptical exchange (which he describes as a sort of obscure chess match) between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt concerning a set of key concepts including sovereignty, law, and violence (Gewalt)—an exchange that Agamben excavates and illuminates through a combination of subtle inference and careful reading of the writers' texts and footnotes.¹ Agamben's interpretation of the Benjamin-Schmitt dossier is, however, not what I intend to discuss in this essay; rather, I adopt his phrase as a description of another obscure chess match, another philosophical gigantomachy, whose moves have been only partially recorded: namely, that between Agamben and Jacques Derrida. In doing so, I do not mean to suggest that the relation between Agamben and Derrida is quite so vexed or scandalous as the one between Benjamin and Schmitt, not least because we do not tend to associate Agamben and Derrida with opposite ends of the political spectrum. Yet it is also clear enough that their relation is frequently a tense one, and as I hope to show in this essay, the debate between them, from its earliest moments, revolves around some fundamental differences in their thought.

I am, of course, not the first to notice that there is an odd relation of both proximity and distance between Agamben and deconstruction, and a number of penetrating texts have directly or indirectly addressed aspects of this question.² Much of this work, however, focuses on Agamben's and Derrida's later writings and has concentrated on the political and legal aspects of their thought. Indeed, it is as a contribution to the already widespread and growing interest in this later period of Agamben's work that I hope to indicate an important aspect of its philosophical-linguistic background as developed in his earlier texts, and in particular, the sharp distinction drawn there between Agamben's and Derrida's readings of Saussurian semiology. What I hope to suggest in this essay is how closely Agamben is responding to specific texts by Derrida as early as the 1970s and, furthermore, how important this engagement with deconstruction is for the development of Agamben's subsequent work. After briefly reviewing Agamben's relatively explicit response to Derrida in Homo Sacer, this essay will focus on several texts by Derrida from the late 1960s and on Agamben's critique of the grammatological project as it emerges in Agamben's 1977 book Stanzas (parts of which were published as early as 1972).³ In doing so, I hope to show how the terms of Agamben's early critique (the chess pieces he begins to move against Derrida) are ultimately the same as the ones involved in the later work.⁴

I. "Before the Law"

Perhaps the best-known instance of Agamben's disagreement with Derrida comes, not surprisingly, from what is surely his best-known and most frequently cited book, Homo Sacer. While references, both oblique and direct, to deconstruction are scattered throughout that work, it is in his chapter on Franz Kafka's parable "Before the Law" that Agamben explicitly challenges Derrida's reading of Kafka's iconic text, and with it some of the fundamental tenets of deconstructive thought.

As is well known, "Before the Law" tells the story of a "man from the country" who arrives one day at the gate of the Law, would like to gain admittance and enter, but is prevented from doing so by an enigmatic doorkeeper. The man is, however, never physically barred by the doorkeeper, but rather told by him that though there is nothing preventing him from entering he nevertheless cannot enter at the moment—a situation that proves to extend for days and years. The man waits before the door for what appears to be his entire lifetime, never succeeding in gaining access from the...