Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life

This first book-length study into the influence of Emmanuel Levinas on the thought and philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Law, Relationality and the Ethical Life, demonstrates how Agambens immanent thought can be read as presenting a compelling, albeit flawed, alternative to Levinass ethics of the Other. The publication of the English translation of The Use of Bodies in 2016 ended Giorgio Agambens 20-year multi-volume Homo Sacer study. Over this time, Agambens thought has greatly influenced scholarship in law, the wider humanities and social sciences. This book places Agambens figure of form-of-life in relation to Levinasian understandings of alterity, relationality and the law. Considering how Agamben and Levinas craft their respective forms of embodied existence that is, a fully-formed human that can live an ethical life the book considers Agambens attempt to move beyond Levinasian ethics through the liminal figures of the foetus and the patient in a persistent vegetative state. These figures, which Agamben uses as examples of bare life, call into question the limits of Agambens non-relational use and form of existence. As such, it is argued, they reveal the limitations of Agambens own ethics, whilst suggesting that his abandoned project can and must be taken further. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers, graduate students and anyone with an interest in the thought of Giorgio Agamben and Emmanuel Levinas in the fields of law, philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences.