Agamben and the logic of Geltung ohne Bedeutung (validity without significance) at the foundation of the juridical, political, linguistic, ethical and medical domains

Abstract

In a letter to his friend Walter Benjamin in 1934, the scholar of religions Gershom Scholem described the status of the law in Kafka’s work as Geltung ohne Bedeutung (validity without significance). He meant that, in Kafka’s work, the law keeps its validity, but does not translate into concrete, identifiable laws. More than sixty years later, Agamben revived this notion in a number of texts. The first goal of this paper is to explore how an attentive reading of Agamben reveals that the logic of Geltung ohne Bedeutung might also operate at the foundational moment of the juridical, the political, the ethical, and the linguistic. And, moreover, how this logic, as if haunting us, is felt throughout the entire experience of these fields. Second, by moving beyond Agamben’s work, I study the potential that the notion has for understanding the foundational moment of the medical field: the meta-medical. I argue that the notion of Geltung ohne Bedeutung sheds new light on why philosophers of medicine do not agree on the criteria for distinguishing between the normal and the pathological. It remains to be explored how much this logic and its implications owe to Husserl’s digression on the dialectics between genesis and structure.