foucault studies

foucault studies
© Michael Dillon, 2005

ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No 2, pp. 37-46, May 2005

ARTICLE

Cared to Death
The Biopoliticised Time of Your Life

Michael Dillon, Lancaster University

Substantially devoted to contesting Giorgio Agamben’s argument that there is
an intimate intersection between biopower and sovereign power, Mika
Ojakangas’ paper serves as testimony yet again to the continuing prescience
and productivity of Foucault’s account of biopolitics. Ojakangas’ argument
with Agamben’s betrayal of Foucault’s biopower thesis also provides an
opportunity to bring into play a wide variety of additional, fundamentally
important and related, questions. These are as much a tribute to Agamben,
however, as they are to Foucault, even if we agree with Ojakangas’ insistence
that Agamben’s intersection of sovereign and biopower is profoundly
inconsistent with Foucault’s account of biopolitics. There is much more going
on in Agamben, of course, than a revision of biopolitics, however much the
horror of biopolitics is a provocation to his thought. There is a wholesale
attempt in betraying Foucauldian biopolitics to rethink the political as such.1

I wish to highlight three of these broad questions. They are the related
questions of the nomological, the biological and the theological. Taken
together they triangulate a fourth. That fourth question is at the heart of
Ojakangas’ paper. It is not directly addressed in Ojakangas’ more faithful
rendition of Foucault, but it is central to Agamben’s betrayal of him. It is the
problematic that biopolitics poses to us and which I want to broach in reply to
Ojakangas’ paper. That problematic is the problematic of the ‘life’ of politics
itself. In so doing I take some issue with the account of biopolitics offered by
both Agamben and Ojakangas.

The nomological concerns the law, the biological concerns ‘life’ and the
theological concerns the relation of life to transcendence in the form of
divinity. At a philosophical level, the life of politics may be said to find its

1 All working within a tradition – all passing on and down - is necessarily tainted by

betrayal of the message. That is why for the early Christian Church traditio was a sin.
See Michael Dillon, “Paradosis,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 20,
No. 3, (1995): 229-240.

foucault studies, No 2, pp. 37-46

bearings in relation to the changing interpretations and correlations of force
that characterise the intimate relationality of this trinity of nomos, bios and
theos.2 Agamben takes Foucault’s account of biopolitics away from history and
relocates it back in the centre of these key determinants of political
philosophy. Whereas Agamben’s nomological account of biopolitical violence
threatens a certain kind of political paralysis, however, in as much as it
ontologises that violence, Ojakangas’ insistence on the productivity of
biopolitics threatens to elide the violent inner logic of biopolitics and to miss
what Agamben’s nomologically driven ontologisation nonetheless does
rigorously expose. Incomparably the most interesting thinker thinking today,
one of the things that Agamben is thinking in response to the provocations of
biopolitics is the question of life undetermined by the life of biopolitics, a life
elevated in addition by a refiguration of transcendence without a godhead, in
the form of the immanence of the messianic. He also thinks the facticity of a
corporeality beyond the reduction of the body to biology.3 It is in these moves,
among others, that he thinks beyond the initial provocation to political
thought that he takes from Foucault’s biopolitics. Like any such response, the
issue becomes less the degree of faithlessness than the worth of the betrayal.

Agamben engages in a nomological manoeuvre that conflates
sovereign with biopower. He also ontologises political modernity with that
manoeuvre. He then ‘iconicises’ this ontologisation in the compelling but, in
certain respects, politically debilitating figure of the Camp.4 In documenting
Agamben’s departure from Foucault, however, and insisting correctly, but
perhaps not insistently enough, on the historico-epistemological account of
biopolitics furnished by Foucault, Ojakangas fails to emphasise sufficiently
that, while recalling the Christian pastorate, Foucauldian biopolitics largely
derives instead from Foucault’s account of a complex epistemological
transformation in the interpretation and scientific study of life. Moreover,
neither Agamben nor Ojakangas acknowledge the historical and
epistemological significance of the manifold ways in which the event of
biology’s biologisation of life continues to mutate, driven by successive
changes in the character of the life sciences themselves. These have proceeded
throughout the latter half of the twentieth century to subvert key ontological

2 Agamben’s employment of the distinction between bios and zoe in Homo Sacer

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) seems problematic but I have no space to
explore the issue. For the moment I merely want bios (while crudely connoting the
biological) to signal the question of ‘life’.

3 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,
1993).

4 Again there is no space to elaborate this point. In making it I do however want to
acknowledge that ontologisation may be a powerful politicising manoeuvre. But
there are others: historical ‘fictions’, liberation of subjugated knowledges, micro-
political analysis of the micro-practices of power relations are amongst some others
inspired by Foucault.

Dillon: Cared to Death

markers of certainty between the organic and the non-organic, the living and
the not living, which once determined the vital signs of what a living thing
was once said to be.5 They have also introduced many other newly emerging
changes in the governmental practices of biopower. In short, the terrain of
value across which the manifold circulations of biologised life is increasingly
being distributed is changing in response to the recombinatory possibilities
and prospects opened up, in particular, by techno-scientific developments
deriving from the complex confluence and correlations of the molecular and
the digital revolutions. As a result, we increasingly live in an age of
‘recombinant biopolitics’.6

Recombinant biopolitics poses political challenges of an order beyond
those posed through the figure of the Camp. Similarly, it poses biopolitical
investment challenges beyond the technical virtuosity demanded by the care
for all living that initially characterised Foucault’s original account of
biopolitics. Whatever life now is, it is no longer the original biologised life of
early biopolitics. For one thing, it has now long been a function of the
recombinant power of molecularised biology in complex alliance with
digitalised intelligence. Whatever life now is, Agamben’s work also re-
sanctifies as it seeks radically to re-theorise life politically in what I would
label the pure revolutionary terms of the messianic.7 At issue among other
things in evaluating that move is the question also of the violence peculiar to
the messianic, a trope now prominent among, if differently conceived by,
leading continental thinkers.8

The manifold technical challenges now posed to biopower are already
being met in detailed adjustments to the governing practices of biopolitics
which Agamben’s figure of the Camp and Ojakangas account of biopolitics
both fail to address. That may be said to be an unfair comment, since

5. See for example: Peter Beurton, et. al., The Concept of the Gene in Development and

Evolution. Historical and Epistemological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000); Katherine Hayles, Katherine, How We Became Posthuman:
Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999); Evelyn Fox-Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge Mass: Harvard
University Press, 2000). Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living. Rhetorical Transformations of
the Life Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Doyle, Wetwares.
Experiments in Postvital Living (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
Lily E. Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rise of
the New Biology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Kay, Who Wrote the
Book of Life. A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000);
Eugene Thacker, Biomedia (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2004).

6 Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, “Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and
War,” Millennium Journal of International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2001): 41-66.

7 Catherine Mills, “Agamben’s Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and
Happy Life,” Contretemps, Vol. 5 (December, 2004): 42-62.

8 Michael Dillon, “A Passion for the (Im)possible: Jacques Rancière, Equality Pedagogy
and the Messianic,” European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2005).

foucault studies, No 2, pp. 37-46

Ojakangas is concerned with an exegesis of Foucault in order to document
how Agamben’s nomological biopolitics differs from Foucault’s historico-
epistemic biopolitics, if it wasn’t for the fact that a hermeneutics of suspicion
central to Foucault’s account of biopolitics seems missing from Ojakangas’
account. The contemporary challenges now posed by recombinant biopolitics
re-invigorate Foucault’s hermeneutics of suspicion, a suspicion that led him to
observe how biopolitics penetrates and permeates sovereign politics:

I wouldn’t say exactly that sovereignty’s old right – to take life or let live –
was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not
erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it. This the right, or
rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power to make live and ‘let’ die.9

In a way directly contra to Agamben, Foucault insists, “I would in fact like to
trace the transformation not at the level of political theory, but rather at the
level of the mechanisms, techniques and technologies of power.”10 Put
positively, in a way directly contra Foucault, Agamben insists on re-theorising
politics.

Emphasising the biologisation of life taking place in biopolitics, “the
new non-disciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living
man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately to man-as-species.”11 Foucault
continues this theme in Naissance de la Biopolitique.12 Here, it is ‘circulation’
that begins to specify the terrain of value across which “man-as-living-being”
begins to be ordered. Circulation becomes a matter of, “taking control of life
and the biological process of man-as-species and of ensuring that they are not
disciplined but regularised.”13

Biopolitically, it is also contingency that characterises this new
biopolitical field of governmental formation: “The phenomena addressed by
biopolitics are, essentially, aleatory events.”14 Here we might argue against
Agamben that the nomos of political modernity is not the Camp. In as much as
political modernity has gone thoroughly biopolitical, in Foucault’s sense of
the term, the nomos of political modernity is ‘circulation’.15

Moreover, in the biopolitical context of the circulation of life as species
being, Foucault says death is not so much disqualified, but, “something to be

9 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976

(New York: Picador, 2003), 241.
10 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 241.
11 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 242.
12 Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978-79 (Paris:

Gallimard/Seuil, 2004).
13 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 246-247.
14 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 246.
15 Michel Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France, 1977-78

(Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004); Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique.

Dillon: Cared to Death

hidden away.”16 It loses that spectacular ritual character it once had, marking
the move from one power, that of secular sovereignty, to another power, that
of a sovereign God. Death does not disappear from biopolitics. Neither is it
attenuated beyond political concern, quite the contrary. It changes its
character, undergoing political transformation as biopolitics re-inscribes death
in the process of ‘recuperating the death function’. Whereas no power can
ultimately exercise power over death, biopower can and does exercise power
over life. One of the means by which it does so is via the biopolitical
preoccupations with mortality, morbidity, pathology and mutation.
Concerned with death in terms of the vital signs of life, biopolitics is also
increasingly concerned these days with the re-inscription of the vital signs of
life in terms of code, both molecular and digital.17

Contra Ojakangas, then, biopolitics does reclaim the death function, for
a number of reasons and in a variety of changing ways. It must do so.
Reclaiming the death function is integral to its logic. It also reflects the
changing operational dynamics of biopolitics. In relation to biopolitical logic:
“In the biopower system… killing, or the imperative to kill, is acceptable only
if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of
the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race.”18 It is
acceptable and biopolitically necessary to kill, if not necessarily in the
nomological sense of being exposed to death formulated in Agamben’s thesis
of bare life. In relation to the operationalisation of biopolitics: if biopolitics is
to promote, protect and invest life, it must engage in a continuous assay of
life. This continuous biopolitical assaying of life proceeds through the
epistemically driven and continuously changing interrogation of the worth
and eligibility of the living across a terrain of value that is constantly
changing. It is changing now, for example, in response to what the life
sciences are teaching about what it is to be a living thing. It is changing as
biopolitical investment analysts (politicians, risk analysts, governmental
technologisers) also interrogate where the best returns on life investment
happen to be located in the manifold circulation and transformation of life
locally and globally. Life itself mutates in and through these very circuits, not
least in relation to molecular biology and electronic communication. We can
broadly interpret life science now to range from molecularised biology,
through digitalization, to the new social and managerial sciences of
development now prominent in the fields of global governmentality, global

16 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 247.
17 Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, eds., Remaking Life and Death, Towards an Anthropology

of the Life Sciences, Santa Fé: School of American Research Press, 2003.
18 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 256.

foucault studies, No 2, pp. 37-46

development policies, human security and even military strategic discourse
including, for example, ‘Operations Other than War”.19

One might say in Heideggerian fashion that life is the stuff of
biopolitics. In the process of reducing life to stuff, biopolitics must determine
the quality of the stuff so that investment in its extraction, promotion and
refinement may itself be continuously assessed. It follows that some life will
be found to be worth investment, some life less worth investment, while other
life may prove intractable to the powers of investment and the demands it
makes on life. Here, assaying morphs into evaluating the eligibility and not
simply the expected utility of life forms. Ultimately, some life may turn out to
be positively inimical to the circulation of life in which this investment driven
process of biopolitics continuously trades, and have to be removed from life if
its antipathy to biopoliticised life cannot otherwise be adapted, correctedor
contained. Behind the life-charged rhetoric of biopolitics, lies the biologisation
of life to which biopolitics is committed, the violence of that biologisation and
the reduction of the classical political question concerning the good life (and
the good death) to that of the endlessly extendable, fit and adaptable life.20
The good life Agamben refigures in terms of the pure – he also says ‘profane’
but note that there is no profanity without sanctity - immanence of ‘happy
life’.21

At the level of its micro-practices, biopolitical techniques of rule are
thus adjusting technically to changing understandings of the vital signs of life.
Life Assurance provides one example. It is now beginning actuarially to
accommodate the ways in which the genetic revolution impacts on the ‘life’ to
be assured. Whereas the statistical analysis of risk populations once relied
upon the behavioural techniques of probability, actuarial expertise must now
adjust to what the molecular as well as the behavioural sciences now teach
about the terrain of value (and risk) across which the life of recombinatory
biopolitics is beginning to be distributed.22

The key point of dispute with Agamben is then ontologisation versus
historicisation. In effect that dispute restages the age old dispute between the

19 Wendy Larner and William Walters, eds., Global Governmentality. Governing

International Spaces (New York: Routledge, 2004); Dillon, and Reid, “Global Liberal
Governance.”; Michael Dillon, “Virtual Security: A New Science of (Dis)order,”
Millennium Journal of International Studies, vol. 32, no. 3 May, (2004).

20 For a stimulating reflection on time and death in the entanglement of biopower and
historiography, see Paolo Palladino, “Caveat Emptor: On Time, Death and History in Late
Modernity,” Rethinking History, vol. 8, no. 3 (2004): 402-416.

21 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,
1993); Agamben, Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999; Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 2000); Mills, “Agamben’s Messianic Politics.”

22 James Mittra, and Sir John Sulston, “Genetics and Life Assurance. Should We
legislate?” News Letter of the ESRC Genomics Network, ESRC: Swindon:, 2004.

Dillon: Cared to Death

thinker who thinks philosophically and the thinker who thinks politically –
the conflict between philosophia and politeia. As first philosopher, Agamben
equates politics with thinking as such.23 I wonder whether first philosophy
comes first, which is why, acknowledging the vital question of conditions of
possibility, I nonetheless remain attracted to Foucault’s insistence on history
and the micro-practices of power relations.

The key point of dispute with Ojakangas concerns the self-immolating
logic of biopolitics. “Not bare life that is exposed to an unconditional threat of
death,” he says in the introduction to his paper, “but the care of ‘all living’ is
the foundation of biopower.” (emphasis in the original). Ojakangas says:
“Foucault’s biopower has nothing to do with that [Agamben] kind of bare
life.” I agree. Foucault’s biopolitics concerns an historically biologised life
whose biologisation continues to mutate as the life sciences themselves offer
changing interpretations and technical determinations of life. This biologised
life of biopolitics nonetheless also raises the stake for Foucault of a life that is
not a biologised life. So it does for Agamben, but differently and in a different
way.24 For Foucault, the biologised life of biopolitics also raises the issue of a
life threatened in supremely violent and novel ways. So it does for Agamben,
but again differently and for the same complex of reasons. 25

In contesting Agamben in the ways that he does, Ojakangas marks an
important difference, then, between Foucault and Agamben. That done,
perhaps the difference needs however to be both marked differently and
interrogated differently. I have argued that there is a certain betrayal in the
way Agamben reworks Foucault. There is however much more going on in
this ‘betrayal’ than misconstruction and misinterpretation. There is a value in
it. Exploring that value requires another ethic of reading in addition to that of
the exegesis required to mark it out. For Agamben’s loathing of biopolitics is I
think more ‘true’ to the burgeoning suspicion and fear that progressively
marked Foucault’s reflections on it than Ojakangas’ account can give credit
for, since he concentrates on providing the exegetical audit required to mark it
out rather than evaluate it.

23 Agamben, Potentialities; Agamben, Means Without Ends.
24 Moreira and Palladino site a related discussion of Foucault and Agamben in the

context of a detailed account of contemporary bio-medical change. See, Tiago Moreira
and Paolo Palladino, “Between Truth and Hope: On Parkinson’s Disease,
Neurotransplantation and the Production of the Self,” History of the Human Sciences,
forthcoming 2005.

25 Mills, “Agamben’s Messianic Politics.”; Adam Thurschwell, “Specters of Nietzsche:
Potential Futures for the Concept of the Political in Agamben and Derrida,” Cardozo
Law Review, Vol. 24, 2003; and Thurschwell, “Cutting the Branches for Akiba:
Agamben’s Critique of Derrida,” in Andrew Norris, ed., Politics, Metaphysics, and
Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
forthcoming, 2005).

foucault studies, No 2, pp. 37-46

In posing an intrinsic and unique threat to life through the very ways
in which it promotes, protects and invests life, ‘care for all living’ threatens
life in its own distinctive ways. Massacres have become vital. The threshold of
modernity is reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own (bio)
political strategies. Biopolitics must and does recuperate the death function. It
does teach us how to punish and who to kill.26

Power over life must adjudicate punishment and death as it distributes
live across terrains of value that the life sciences constantly revise in the cause
of life’s very promotion. It has to. That is also why we now have a biopolitics
gone geopolitically global in humanitarian wars of intervention and martial
doctrines of virtuous war.27 Here, also, is the reason why the modernising
developmental politics of biopolitics go racist: “So you can understand the
importance – I almost said the vital importance – of racism to such an exercise
of power.”28 In racism, Foucault insists: “We are dealing with a mechanism
that allows biopower to work.”29 But: “The specificity of modern racism, or
what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies or the
lies of power. It is bound up with the techniques of power, with the
technology of power.”30

In thus threatening life, biopolitics prompts a revision of the question
of life and especially of the life of a politics that is not exhaustively biologised;
comprehensively subject to biopolitical governance in such a way that life
shows up as nothing but the material required for biopolitical governance,
whether in terms posed by Foucault or Agamben. Emphasising care for all
living - the promotion, protection and investment of the life of individuals
and populations – elides the issue of being cared to death. Being cared to
death poses the issue of the life that is presupposed, nomologically for
Agamben and biologically for Foucault, in biopolitics. Each foregrounds the
self-immolating logic that ineluctably applies in a politics of life that
understands life biologically, in the way that Foucault documents for us, or
nomologically, in the way that Agamben’s bare life contends. When recalling
the significance of the Christian pastorate to biopolitics, Ojakangas seems to
emphasize a line of succession rather than of radical dissociation. One,
moreover, which threatens to elide the intrinsic violence of biopolitics and its
essential relation with correction and death.

26. Mitchell Dean, ‘Liberal government and authoritarianism’, Economy and Society, Vol.

31, No. 1 (2002): 37-61; and Dean, ‘Powers of life and death beyond governmentality,”
Journal of Cultural Research, Vol. 6 Nos. 1-2, (2002).

27 Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars. The Merging of Development and
Security, London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001; James Der Derian, Virtuous War.
Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Oxford: Perseus, 2001).

28 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 256.
29 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 258.
30 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 258.

Dillon: Cared to Death

Something also happens to the theos as ‘care of all living’ is propelled
by its vocation to distribute mortality and death, newly inscribed, across the
terrain of value that it remorselessly constructs for life. This re-marking of
theos nonetheless also marks a kind of threshold effect or phase change.
Thriving on correction and death, albeit biopolitically transfiguring them in
the process through the micro-practices of its continuously changing
technologies of care, biopolitics effects some curious transformation of that
vexed issue of transcendence for which the theos of onto-theology once stood.
As if the exclusive emphasis on life should exclude the question of the not life,
of the other of life and of the beyond of living, biopolitics nonetheless finds
itself ensnared at every level in precisely these issues. New, biopoliticised,
vocabularies emerge to address them. Note, for example, the proliferation of
ethics committees in relation to genetic science and the allied recruitment of
philosophy into the task of forming a new molecular clerisy for the liturgical
governance of it.31

Caring to death, reinvigorated by the emergent powers of
recombination, contemporary biopolitics poses novel dangers, however, to
which continental philosophy is now responding in the voice of the messianic.
Despite my disputing, Agamben’s figure of the Camp is no hyperbolic
response then to the profundity, as well as the enormity, of the stakes now
posed by contemporary biopolitics in and through the dense globally
evolving web of its micro-political practices. Precisely because it is a
strategically sophisticated operation of heterogeneous, plural and
disseminated power relations of unrivalled virtuosity, contemporary
biopolitics calls for an equally heterogeneous and disseminated but quite
differently ordered virtuosity, not merely of dissent but of a positively
different living of life. Betraying Foucault because I think he shares that cause
with him, Agamben pushes the thinking of it into realms that confront the
death of God with a re-thinking of the good in terms of the figure of ‘happy
life’.32 Doing so, Agamben’s nomological biopolitics recalls the issue of the
transcendent at work within the immanent as it contests the nomological
reduction of life to bare life; a feature complementary to that of Foucault’s
biologised life, posing a complex of political questions about the contesting of
each. This is not meant to pose some covert transcendental critique of
Foucault. The whole question of the relation of transcendence and immanence
is a complex one. It is being newly re-thought in the thought of the messianic,
as the concept of the messianic arises differently in contemporary continental
thought.33 What Agamben’s nomologisation of Foucault poses is the question

31 Although they don’t quite put it like this, see again the detailed argument presented

in Moreira and Palladino, “Between Truth and Hope.”
32 Mills, “Agamben’s Messianic Politics.”
33 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains. A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. The Foundation of

foucault studies, No 2, pp. 37-46

of whether or not a purely immanent critique of biopolitics is sufficient or
even possible. If ultimately judged to be neither sufficient or possible, and
Agamben clearly thinks both, that judgment poses the additional question of
some sort of transcendence at work within the immanent. For that, here at
least, we have to thank Agamben; or not, if such a question troubles and
disturbs you.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my colleagues Paul Fletcher and Paolo Palladino for their
contribution to the thinking behind this response: Paul Fletcher especially for
his reflections on Agamben, transcendence and corporeality beyond
biopolitics; Paolo Palladino especially for his rigorous insistence on the
historical.

Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Walter Benjamin, “Critique
of Violence,” in, Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 1. (Cambridge, Mass.: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996): 236-253; Jacob Taubes, The Political
Theology of Saint Paul, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); and Jacques
Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: Chicago University Pres, 1995); Derrida, “Force
of Law,” in Drucilla Cornell, ed. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York:
Routledge, 1993); and Gil Anidjar, ed. Jacques Derrida. Acts of Religion (New York:
Routledge, 2002).

Acknowledgments