Nomos in homo sacer

1.           on Page 19:

“… the validity of the juridical order possible. The “ordering of space” that is, according to Schmitt, constitutive of the sovereign nomos is therefore not only a “taking of land” (Landesnahme)-the determination of a juridical and a territorial ordering ( …”

2.          on Page 20:

“… The camp-and not the prison-is the space that corresponds to this originary structure of the nomos. This is shown, among other things, by the fact that while prison law only constitutes a particular sphere of penal …”

3.          on Page 26:

“… the will of a subject hierarchically superior to all others, but rather represents the inscription within the body of the nomos of the exteriority that animates it and gives it meaning. …”

4.          on Page 27:

“… sovereign decision traces and from time to time renews this threshold of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion, nomos and physic, in which life is originarily excepted in law. …”

Notable documents on my computer that reference nomos…

in order according to “last opened”:

lectures notes on lyotard

eugene thacker on nomos and biopolitics

empire

r bogue

homo sacer

murray – nome and law/ emergence deleuze

deleuze dictionary

kerslake on nomads

ranciere – who is the subject of the rights of man?

****Dean, Mitchell  A Political Mythology of World Order: Carl Schmitt’s Nomos: TCS

In Defense of Emnity – Dissertation

Foucault’s Berkeley lectures on parrhesia

comments on Agamben – Sovereignty and Life

‘the italian difference’ article about Agamben’s Time That Remains that deals with Katcheon and Anti-Christ (anomos) – a theme of Schmitt’s Nomos

Couple potentially throw-away lines in a Charles Taylor article

RBJ Walker Paper

Throwaway lines in the Lyotard reader about nomos regulating circulation of goods

**Excellent critique by Ken Surin published in SAQ

Foucault STP on shepherding (early ‘conduct’)

Tiqqun contribution to the ongoing war (recent fr repub) – p 32, 66, 76, 86

Janell Watson on D&G v Schmitt SAQ

Ranciere 10 Theses on Politics – Thesis 8

Difference and Repetition p36 & fn

Quick example in argument in Genosko’s Guattari, Aberrant Intro in misunderstandings of transversality p60

Schmitt – theory of the partisan

Catherine Malabou in Deleuze: Blackwell Reader — on relation to hegel and anomolie (also found in Agamben)

Rasch on Human Rights

Prozorov – on liberal enmity

Alexandre Lefebvre on nomadic nomos and Deleuzian jurisprudence

Dillon and Reid — “indistinction” of physis/nomos and IR

Additional ATP Nomos References

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Nomos Citations

Laroche, E	Histoire de la racine nem- en grec ancien		p140	n8 (schmitt)
Schaefer	“Patronomos”	in Paulys Realencyclopadie der Deutschen Altertumswissenschaft		n8 (schmitt)
Plato	Stateman	Collected Dialogues of Plato	274e-276e	n14
Aristotle	Politics		Book III, Chp 14, 1285, 29-30, also Chapter 10 34-5	n15
Rasch	review of Laroche’s book	Gnomon: Kritische Zeitaschrift fur die gesamte klassische Altertumswissenschaft
Pindar	Carmina cum Frangmentis
Pohlenz	“Nomos”	Philologus: Zeitschrfit fur…
Pryzwara	Humanitas
Heinimann	Nomos und Physis

**mitchell dean

platonic nomos = place in community (rockhill and ranciere)

**foucault STP 188

Derrida force of law – plato ref

walker – geo implications for state theory

lefebvre – juridical implications

dillon/reid – agamaben stuff (zone of indistinction)

watson – implications

Guattari on Subjectivity

Chaosmosis:6

The same movement towards a polyphonic and hetergenetic comprehension of subjectivity leads us to consider certain aspects of contemporary research into ethology and ecology.  Daniel Stern, in The Interpersonal World of the Infant, has notably explored the pre-verbal subjective formations of infants. He shows that these are not at all a matter of “stages” in the Freudian sense, but of levels of subjectivation which maintain themselves in parallel throughout life. He thus rejects the overrate psychogenesis of Freudian complexes, which have been presented as the structural “Universals” of subjectivity.  Furthermore, he emphasizes the inherently trans-subjective character of an infant’s early experiences, which do not dissociate the feeling of self from the feeling of the other.  A dialectic between “sharable affects” and “non-sharable affects” thus structures the emergent phases of subjectivity.  A nascent subjectivity, which we will continually find in dreams, délire, creative exaltation, or the feeling of love…

Nomos and Helen

If money (nomisma), as we are taught in the _Politics_, is “spurious” as an object in itws own right, it is, on the other hand, essential as an instrument of exchange.  This last notion is revised in the _Nicomachean Ethics_, and in the conext of a discussion on social justice.  Aristotle asks at 5.5.17-20: what is it that holds the city together? and answers: the equitable exchange of disparate goods. That means, in essence, setting up equivalences between them: “all things that are exchanged must be somehow comparable. It is for this end that money had been introduced and… becomes… an intermediate[meson]; for it meaures all things.” (1133al5-20; trans. W.D.Ross 1941; bracketed term is mine).7  Money, which permits comparison, makes evaluation possible.  Exchange, then, is not entirely devorced from need, and thus money has its utility and its place in culture; money “has become by convention a sort of representative of demand; and this is why it has the name money [nomisma] – because it exists not bey nature but by law [nomos]” E. Laroche, in “Histoire de la racine nem- en grec ancien” notes that in the earlest instances of nemesis, conventionally defined as blame, the term is always used to make a “value judgment” (1949:93), in both an ethical and economic sense. Both are central to the act of assessment at the walls of Troy, as the elders gaze upon the face of Helen (3.156) ou nemesis Troas (“Surely there is no blame if Trojans…”). Helen is, indeed, a form of vomos [typo?], a powerful generator of equivalences, but ruthlessly pursued – like money – as a possession in her own right.  This is chrematistics, not oiknomia, at work, an economy of the metaphor.  Paraphrasing Aristotle, Marc Shell writes in The Economy of Literature, “To men such as Midas gold becomes everything, just as to some poets metaphor appears to be all” (1978:92).  Helen is the golden metaphor.

Helen as nemesis suggests the financial abuses described by Aristotle in the Politics: she provokes an economy fueled entirely by _desire_, as opposed to _demand_. And the face of Helen is, to use Aristotle’s definition of nomos, a “representative” of desire, as opposed to demand.  It is worthwhile recalling at this point the long history of mythic traditions linking Hlen to the figure of Nemesis.  Thus Fr. 8 of the Cypria asserts: “Nemesis gave her birth when she had been joined in love with Zeus … by harsh violence.”  Born in violence, brought in violence from Greece to Troy, making them distinct, defining them in relation to each other, drawing them into violent conflict and comparison, Helen is the archetypal intermediary of desire.(Grafting Helen: the abduction of the classical past By Matthew Gumpert 2001:61)

D&R Nomos fn

Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (Repetition in Itself)

n6. See E. Laroche, Histoire de la racine nem- en grec ancien, Paris Klicksieck, 1949.  Laroche shows that the idea of distribution in nomos-nemo does not stand in a simple relation to that of allocation [temno, diao, diaireo].  The pastoral sense of nemo (to pasture) only belatedly implied an allocation of the land.  Homeric society ad neither enclosures nor property in pastures: it was not a question of distributing the land among the beasts but, on the contrary, of distributing the beasts themselves and dividing them up here and there across an unlimited space, forest or mountainside.  The nomos designated first of all an occupied space, but one without precise limits (for example, the expanse around a town) – whence, too, the theme of the ‘nomad’.

From Nemsis to Autonomy: Nomos in Schmitt and Deleuze & Guattari

E Laroche wrote a philological study of the family of terms nem- nom- in Greek thought.  This document serves as a common reference for studies of distribution, common law, politics, and economics (think NUMerals, NUMbers, ecoNOMy, NEMesis, autoNOMy…).  For example, Marc Shell’s book The Economy of Literature use of the study is then picked up by Matthew Gumpert’s study when discussing Helen a figure of the libidinal economy of desire in classicism.

D&G generally use the Homeric sense of nomos (there’s a great footnoted in D&R on ‘nomadic distribution’ and Laroche’s philological study – developed in depth by a few, most notably R Bogue), which is generally contrasted with physis.  The nomos/physis opposition is a common reference in secondary literature but is usually in a laundry list with other terms and is never given an in depth treatment.  In Logic of Sense in the first appendix on simulacrum in ancient philosophy, there’s some great stuff on law/nature that could easily hook in.  The result payoff would be “autonomy”.

Schmitt’s use of nomos is post-Homeric [though he says it’s homeric in Nomos of the Earth – I’d like to be able to settle this without reading the laroche] and therefore deals with enclosure and property.  It’s meant to create a distribution of forces that results in the existential opposition of friend/enemy.  Some of Derrida’s work in “Politics of Friendship” deals with Schmitt and I could probably lean on it.  Additionally, there seems to be a JL Nancy connection that comes out the other end.

I’ve found one potentially useful direction to take the Schmitt that I haven’t read up on yet (the best article on the topic wasn’t available, so I had to ILL it).  J Herder, father of modern nationalism wrote an article in the 1780s on “Nemesis.”  I found a copy of Heder’s political letters that use the term nemesis, but only a scant 3 times.

In the middle of both D&G/Schmitt is a strange reading done by Agamben that I’ve had a hard time working through.  It’s mostly in Homo Sacer but is also in State of Exception.  From what I gather, it’s a veiled rejoinder to JLN’s “Cosmos Basileus” in Being Singular Plural.  Thanos Zartaloudis’ article “Without Negative Origins and Aboslute Ends: A Jurisprudence of the Singularity” looks like it will fruitfully bear on the topic.

In the end, I could probably link this all back up to Tiqqun’s notion of “civil war”.  I’m not sure about the tension between Schmitt’s notion of depoliticization and Deleuzian vitalism/capture, however.  One hint might be the argument I heard last weekend, which was that ‘attack is necessary to bring about an opening for communisation’.  This bears extended consideration.  I think the heart of the question is the connection between nemesis and autonomy (hence the working title of the paper).