Abstract
The paper tries to reconstruct not only the scene of birth, but also the scene of the first encounter between law and life. Although the question of the determination of life “as such” is secondary for this argument (what is, after all, “life as such?”; when does life begin and when do its crucial characteristics first crystalize?; or, what is the legal status of life and the various actors involved in “creating” life?), its intention is, nevertheless, to evoke the problem of pregnancy. The paper uses the word “uterus” (belly, cavity, viscera, viscus) as a legal fiction, in order to make a clear distinction between the act of institution and the instituted norm. The paper presents an argument against Foucault that remains in agreement with French institutionalism, which affirms an institution (the stomach, the uterine lining, the uterus, the body, a woman’s body, a mother’s body) that protects life without restriction or reservation. This line of thought would, of course, assume that the institution includes within its scope the establishment (the protection) of the norm as well—or at least the possibility of the norm in general, which is the very limit of normativity itself.
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Notes
- 1.
In two brief texts from 1996, “La norme et son suspens” and “La norme doit manquer,” Derrida explains the paradox in which the condition of the existence of freedom and responsibility is the inexistence or absence of norm. The institution or contre-institution (parallel institution) ought to ensure that space of the prenormative (Derrida 1996: 143–146).
- 2.
Mauss and Fauconnet insist in multiple places that the institution is not a “living thing” (une chose vivante), but rather a “static thing” (chose fixe, Mauss and Fauconnet 1901: 168).
- 3.
Biopolitics even appears within the institution as such, in the La volonté de savoir. The decisive moment of opposition to institutions is in Foucault’s lectures from 1974 (Foucault 1994: 1058).
- 4.
In a 1966 unpublished seminar entitled “Les normes et le normal,” specifically in the chapter “Judgement, value and life” (Jugement, valeur et vie), Canguilhem writes about philosophy that introduces a negative element into life, that is, negates it. Canguilhem continues: “Philosophy can only come second, compared to life. This secondary characteristic of philosophy directly introduces the notion of the norm” (La philosophie ne peut être que seconde par rapport à la vie. Le caractère second de la philosophie introduit directement la notion de norme). Quoted in Le Blanc (1998: 18).
- 5.
Many authors have written about this, above all Nitzan Lebovic.
- 6.
In the original French: “J’aime la vie, mais j’aime aussi les miens; les miens dont le sang coule dans mes veines, les miens dont l’âme s’est dilatée au parfum de la même terre natale, les miens qui portent sur le front la fierté des mêmes souvenirs et des mêmes espérances, les miens qui ne sont avec moi qu’un même corps spirituel. Je suis l’un d’eux, et il y a en eux quelque chose de moi-même. J’aime la vie, mais ma vie est engagée dans la vie des miens, car nous sommes embarqués… J’aime la vie, mais j’aime aussi ma famille, ma patrie, la civilisation dont je suis tributaire, l’Eglise qui tient le meilleur de mon âme; et si je ne puis garder les deux à la fois, je sacrifierai ma vie, et je garderai le Bien commun qui vaut plus que ma vie.”
- 7.
Ulpianus comments that “partus is an integral part of the woman, of her stomach. Yet it is also entirely separate from her (plane post editum)” (Digesta, XXV, 4, 1).
- 8.
In Homo sacer, Agamben unjustifiably turns the phrase "bloßes Leben," which Benjamin uses four times in Zur Kritik der Gewalt, into “bare life” (nuda vita), nacktes Leben (Agamben 1995: 75). Similarly, in Nudità, the phrase nuda corporeità makes an appearance (Agamben 2009: 89). Benjamin uses this phrase in order to oppose Kurt Hiller and his position that existence as such is more important than happiness and a just existence or life (Falsch und niedrig ist der Satz, daß Dasein höher als gerechtes Dasein stehe, wenn Dasein nichts als bloßes Leben bedeuten soll—und in dieser Bedeutung steht er in der genannten Überlegung) (Benjamin 1965: 62).
- 9.
At the beginning of his lecture “La nouvelle connaissance de la vie” of 1966, Canguilhem is more precise, I think: “By live, we mean the present participle or the past participle of the verb to live, the living and the lived” (Canguilhem 2002: 335).
- 10.
A variation of this position is also put forward by Claude Bernard in “Définition de la vie,” published in 1875 in La Revue des deux mondes. “A surgeon at the school in Paris, Pelletan, teaches that life is the resistance offered by organized matter to causes that seek ceaselessly to destroy it” (Un chirurgien de l’école de Paris, Pelletan, enseigne que la vie est la résistance opposée par la matière organisée aux causes qui tendent sans cesse á la détruire, Bernard 2016: 23).
- 11.
In 1930, Georg Misch used the phrase das bloß menschliche Leben (Misch 1975: 24).
- 12.
Bruno Bauch repeats this argument seven years later in Philosophie des Lebens und Philosophie der Werte. In the foreword of the second edition, Rickert writes: “I consider bare life meaningless. Only a philosophy of a meaningful life, which is always more than mere life, would seem to me to be a goal worthy of striving, and only based on the theory of non-living valid values that give meaning to life can promise that a goal will be achieved” (Das bloße Leben halte ich für sinnlos. Erst eine Philosophie des sinnvollen Lebens, das stets mehr als bloßes Leben ist, scheint mir ein erstrebenswertes Ziel, und nur auf Grund einer Theorie der unlebendigen, geltenden Werte, die dem Leben Sinn verleihen, wird das Ziel sich erreichen lassen, Rickert 1922: XI).
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Bojanić, P. (2020). Institution and Life as an Institution: Uterus: Mother’s Body, Father’s Right (Life and Norm). In: Kulcsár-Szabó, Z., Lénárt, T., Simon, A., Végső, R. (eds) Life After Literature. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33738-4_3
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