Table Of ContentPlace, Commonality and Judgment
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy
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Place, Commonality and
Judgment
Continental Philosophy and
the Ancient Greeks
Andrew Benjamin
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© Andrew Benjamin, 2010
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-7680-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Benjamin, Andrew E.
Place, commonality, and judgment : continental philosophy and the ancient
Greeks / Andrew Benjamin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-7680-6
1. Philosophy, Ancient. 2. Philosophy–Greece–History. 3. Heraclitus, 1st cent.
I. Title.
B171.B46 2010
180–dc22
2010016798
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
Contents
Introduction: Measure Places 1
Chapter 1 Staging the Ground: Place, Commonality and Judgment 8
Chapter 2 Placing Being-in-Common: Working through Heraclitus 29
Chapter 3 Spacing as the Shared: Heraclitus, Pindar, Agamben 54
Chapter 4 Political Translations: Hölderlin’s Das Höchste 78
Chapter 5 Placing Speaking: Notes on the First Stasimon
of Sophocles’s Antigone 96
Chapter 6 Possible Returns: Deconstruction and
the Placing of Greek Philosophy 114
Chapter 7 The Inoperative Jew: Agamben’s Paul 136
Notes 159
Bibliography 179
Index 184
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Introduction: Measure Places
Hepetar d’en hekastó metron. (Each thing has its own measure.)
Pindar. Olympian. 13.47
Hélios ouch huperbésetai metra. (The sun will not overstep its measures.)
Heraclitus, Fragment 94
The lines cited above from Pindar’s Olympian Ode and Fragment 94 of
Heraclitus stage the centrality of measure. Moreover, not only is there a
sense of measure that pertains to what there is (Pindar) but to the extent
that the ‘sun’ can be generalized what there is also cannot overcome its own
proper measure (Heraclitus). While it will not be pursued here, Fragment
94 also begins to defi ne a form of justice in relation to the work of measure.
Understood more broadly, the centrality of measure, what could be
described not just as measure’s ubiquity but, more emphatically, as its neces-
sity, introduces an interpretive ambivalence. Measure could be linked,
almost exclusively, to continuity and thus to the repetition of what there is.
That reiteration, guided by a sense of Sameness, would defi ne progress.
In addition, progress would be incorporated within the progression of time
as chronology such that the latter would then defi ne historical time. The
future would have been measured in advance. Each opening delimited by
forms of prediction and thus each move would have been determined
in advance. Measure, in the sense deployed here, has an internality that
controls the future while predicating its form. Measure, from within such a
setting, would be both conserving and conservative. It would seem that any
invocation of measure would have to preclude, almost by defi nition, the
possibility of any form of interruption and especially that form that would
reorientate the direction of human activity thus demanding its reconceptu-
alization. Hence the question that arises, given the apparent ubiquity of
measure, has to concern the possibility of a radical form of reconfi guration
2 Place, Commonality and Judgment
that maintains the centrality of measure. What arises therefore is the
possibility of generating a conception of measure that allows for forms of
interruption and thus one that can occasion the actualization of differ-
ences. Responding to the questions of measure necessitates drawing a dis-
tinction between different ways in which measure can be understood. It
should be added immediately that what the distinction stages is at work
continually throughout the essays comprising this volume.
On one level the distinction is straightforward. It depends on the non-
identifi cation of a particular system of measure with the indispensability
of measure itself. However, what the distinction sets in place is the impos-
sibility of any practice, event or ‘thing’ falling beyond the hold of measure.
Any discovery, equally any invention, can either be measured or will demand
the introduction of a system that aspires to be appropriate to it. The
capacity to be measured is inherent to any occurrence. What occurs does
so within the hold of measure even if the specifi c form that measure takes
may need to be a post hoc invention. What matters, however, is how the dis-
tinction between measure as an already present condition and the practice
of a specifi c form of measurement is to be understood? What type of dis-
tinction is it? A precondition to answering either of these questions is the
recognition that what the questions presuppose, as intimated above, is the
impossibility that there be either an event, occurrence of thing that takes
place, or has a place, prior to measure. Were this to happen, it presupposes
the possibility of a moment placed beyond measure and as a result would
be one to which the language of measure would then be inappropriate. (As
though there were actually a position, ‘before the law’.) Measure, however,
is an original condition. In fact, this is precisely the position that working
on Ancient Greek philosophy and literature brings to the fore; here, of
course, the limitation is the one imposed by the texts studied. Nonetheless,
caution is still necessary. The originary nature of measure entails the pres-
ence of an already determined system of measurement. However, it brings
an addition with it, as it is also the case that any one system is not immutable
and withdrawn from the possibility of contestation. Systems of measure-
ment bring with them an inherent relativity. And yet what is at work inde-
pendently of relativity is a general sense of measure. Measure becomes an
abstract term that identifi es the presence of conditions of possibility. As will
emerge in the discussion of Heraclitus, Herodotus and Pindar, relativity
and thus error always occur on the level of conventions, rules and laws
(nomos as a general terms covers them all). Moreover, the possibility of con-
fl ict on the level of nomoi is inescapable. What is not escapable, however, is
that what there is occurs in relation to nomos. The same position takes place
Introduction 3
in Heraclitus in regards to logos. The argument is that what there is takes
place kata ton logon.1 In other words, existence is delimited and thus limited
by a relation to logos. To which it can be added that taking place kata ton
logon defi nes what it means for something to exist, where existence is not
reduced to mere empirical existence. In other words, what there is exists
actually, i.e. that it has actual existence. However, that which exists actually
do so equally kata ton logon. In a more general sense, it also means that dis-
covery and investigation are possible precisely because there is both an
already existent form and measure in play. This will be the case even if the
content of the system of measure is itself the site of contestation. What can-
not be contested is measure. Consequently, claims made on the level of
logos involve conditions of possibility – in the precise sense that any claim
about what exists or any claim concerning what should or ought exist has to
work with the necessity of measure’s ineliminability. Equally, Heraclitus also
uses similar constructions in relation to ‘nature’ (phusis) and ‘confl ict’
(eris). Without, at this stage, engaging with their meaning, it can still be sug-
gested that they also need to be understood as naming the regulative and
thus as naming conditions of possibility. Therefore, they also have the status
of transcendental principles. (This is a position that will be developed in
greater detail in Chapter 2.)
Nomos, logos, phusis, eris, diké, koinos are terms whose translation and
meaning are a continual point of focus within the project of these essays.
They all identifying measure and thus allow for judgment. This is the case
even if the sense of measure and thus the nature of the judgment may
change from one to another. Equally, they all function as conditions of
possibility. For example, nomos functions as a transcendental condition of
human sociality. What the general claim means is that human activity, where
activity involves the primacy of relationality, is only possible because of con-
ventions ands norms. Hence, necessity lies in the presence of conventions,
norms and laws (all can be accounted for in terms of nomoi) and not in their
content. While contextually this is a position that arises initially from a study
of both Aristotle and Heraclitus, it has greater extension throughout the
overall argument of the essays. In other words, that independently of any
actual content that is given to a range of specifi c nomoi, it remains the case
that nomos is a necessary condition for sociality. Indeed, this is position that
is implicitly present in a range of texts. While there will be important differ-
ences, a similar argument can be made for all the terms noted above.
Before returning to the question posed above concerning the possibility of
a form of radical interruption that maintains a relation to measure, continu-
ity as discontinuity, there is a further element of that needs to be introduced.
