Przemysław Tacik

The  paper attempts to grasp conceptually the nature of law application in zones of confined life. Drawing upon empirical research, it uses the example of closed centres for foreigners. Approaching the topic with methods of sociology of law and legal anthropology, as well as drawing on Agamben’s conceptualisations of law and life, I would like to propose a more general understanding of the role that law plays in total institutions such as detention centres. A great majority of legal provisions pertaining to them is stipulated with the intention of defending the detainees from abuses of power. Nonetheless, the positivist view of the law which translates noble principles, enshrined in constitutions and international law, into low-rank acts and then regulates the behaviour of officers, is at odds with the practice revealed by the sociological and anthropological research. The law remains a foreign body to officers: it is acknowledged as a body of rules which officially regulate all the actions of the institution, but in truth it functions rather as the Other’s gaze. It embodies external control and the possibility of intervention. As such, it never regulates the actions per se (it is too unfamiliar to do so), but rather constitutes an external foothold which stops officers from applying all the methods of discipline that they spontaneously invent. It also provides a free object of criticism which mediates between officers’ projected goals of border guards and their expected practice. Consequently, the vision of the law as a tool that ‘regulates’ detention centres is empirically contradicted. The paper addresses this relation with the use of Agambenian conceptuality, seeking points of contact between the law and life as well asking to what degree life is lawrepellent in confined zones.

The article reinterprets The Iron Tracks by Aharon Appelfeld as a work of Lurianic Kabbalah adapted to the world after the Shoah. It is a reality of collapsed transcendence in which no divinity or ethics hold universal validity. As in Lurianism, this world contains entrapped sparks of former transcendence: dispersed Jewish survivors, artefacts of Jewish life and a Jewish Communist organization. Appelfeld portrays a post-survival world based on permanent repetition and unrepented guilt. The gist of his novel, however, lies in the slim possibility of redemption which the main protagonist, Erwin Siegelbaum, opens up with an act of vengeance on a war criminal.

The paper addresses the work of an enfant terrible of the post-war Austrian culture, Thomas Bernhard, by posing questions about the relation between veridiction and a proper Nestbeschmuzung. Bernhard was frequently downplayed as a sarcastic and spiteful madman who drew sick pleasure from insulting his community. Nonetheless, as I demonstrate in the paper, the unveiling of systemic violence in Bernhard’s oeuvre reaches much deeper than just paresia. Bernhard’s prose has a structure of the fugue in which protagonists struggle with their own subjectification and objectification. It is precisely this structure of the fugue that possesses unmasking and paresiastic functions that go beyond the role of insults which make up a good part of the content this structure gives a form to. Ultimately, the fugue is a strategy to counter the overwhelming power and seek the subjectification outside of its realm.

Fragment

Deklarując wiarę w zadanie humanistyki w ramach bezwarunkowo otwartego uniwersytetu, Jacques Derrida1 zasugerował przedmiot, który powinien być zadaniem filozoficznej, ale i prawniczej dekonstrukcji: ideę suwerenności państwowej, we wszystkich jej powiązaniach z koncepcją obywatelstwa i praw człowieka. Nigdzie chyba władza nie przekłada się mocniej na kształtowanie definicji człowieczeństwa; nigdzie polityka nie znajduje się bliżej zsekularyzowanej teologii. Pojęcia filozoficzne przeplatają się tam z pojęciami prawnymi, zyskując walor performatywny dzięki działaniu władzy państwowej. Niniejszy artykuł stanowi próbę odpowiedzi na wezwanie, jakie rzuca filozofii idea suwerenności. By mu sprostać, filozofia musi sięgnąć nie tylko do własnych tekstów, lecz również do tekstów prawa, które w odróżnieniu od tych ostatnich – nie muszą zważać na prawdę, mają ją bowiem, wraz z władzą, po swojej stronie.