Vol. 6 No. 1 (2025): Limiares destituintes: política, direito, teologia e linguagem (jan/jun 2025)
Special Dossier

Rethinking law: from community to form-of-life as destituent power

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Adrian Bene
University of Pecs
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Published 2025-04-19

Keywords

  • biopolitics,
  • community,
  • form-of-life,
  • justice,
  • philosophy of law

Copyright (c) 2025 Adrian Bene

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

BENE, Adrian. Rethinking law: from community to form-of-life as destituent power. (Des)troços: revista de pensamento radical, Belo Horizonte, v. 6, n. 1, p. e57582, 2025. DOI: 10.53981/destrocos.v6i1.57582. Disponível em: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/article/view/57582. Acesso em: 25 dec. 2025.
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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to consider legal and political theories and, more broadly, social theoretical concepts that might in practice be consistent with the aims of Agamben's critique of power. As a first step, we will recall the importance of biopolitics and such fundamental concepts as community, bare life, form-of-life, state of exception, destituent power in Agamben’s Homo Sacer project and in the context of his oeuvre from The Coming Community. Then, instead of looking for sites of resistance, we will consider the possibility of socio-political-legal relations that can ensure justice and equity based on human dignity, autonomy, mutual recognition and solidarity instead of domination and biopolitical governance. In relation to law, politics and power, Agamben pays particular attention to the ideas of Schmitt and Benjamin, but it is worth disrupting the system of thought based on the sovereign and the exceptional state, allowing the emergence and accentuation of different points of view, with the help of local justice, deliberative democracy, restorative justice, the insights of the community ethos, the philosophy of ubuntu, affective social theory, instead of neoliberal individualism.

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