Refuse the practice of legalism and the attempt to mobilize productive research in favor of a process of study that exposes legal violence.

According to Agamben, study is an important strategy for living outside the law and making it inoperative. In what sense can study be a strategy? Study has a long tradition in Judaism as a form of resistance. In 586 BC, Jerusalem was plundered by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and the temple of the Jews destroyed. Many Jews died and the rest were taken captive and brought to Babylonia. During the Babylonian exile, when they no longer had a temple and were forbidden to practise their faith, the Jewish people focused on the study of their holy books. After the Persian king Cyrus defeated Babylonia and issued a decree in 537 BC that the exiled Jews could return to their homelands and rebuild their holy sanctuaries, 40,000 Jews returned to rebuild the temple. But the religion of the Jews was already marked by exile and in 70 AD the temple was again destroyed, this time by the Romans. The temple was not rebuilt and study has since then become the true temple of the Jews. The Jewish religion is no longer focused on worship but on study. This gave the scholar a messianic significance (IP, 63). Talmud means ‘study’; the original meaning of Torah is not ‘law’ but ‘instruction’ Mishnan, the set of rabbinic laws, is derived from a root that has ‘repetition’ as its basic meaning. The study Agamben is aiming at does not have a predetermined goal: getting a degree and a good position in society, or getting some valuable insight that can be used to overthrow a political structure. Just as the strategy to close the door of the law was especially hard because the law does not prescribe anything and the task of the Messiah is paradoxical because there is no original structure of the law to restore, so study also lacks a transcendent meaning it can aim at, a goal it can set. As far as etymology is concerned, the word studium is closely related to a root that indicates a coffision, a shock or influence. Study and surprise are closely related in that sense. Whoever studies finds oneself shocked, amazed and is, in a certain sense, stupid (cf. studium, stupefying). On the one hand, study is undergone and, on the other, undertaken. Here Agamben sees a close affinity with Aristotle’s description of potentiality, which is passive on the one hand — an undergoing — and active on the other — an unstoppable drive to undertake something, to do something, to engage in action. Study is the place where undergoing and undertaking converge; it is a gesture (IP, 64). The rhythm of studying is an alternation between amazement and clarity, discovery and loss, doing and undergoing. This combination of undergoing and undertaking yields a kind of passive activity, a radical passivity. Something happens without seeming to happen. Agamben argues that study is pre-eminently unending. Study does not have an appropriate end nor does it desire it. This gives the scholar a woeful air. At first glance, the students in Kafka’s works seem to be of little use or significance. Nevertheless, Benjamin contends that they have a major role to play: ‘Among Kafka’s creations, there is a clan which reckons with the brevity of life in a peculiar way. The students who appear in the strangest places in Kafka’s works are the spokesmen for and leaders of this clan3° Agamben is in complete agreement with this view: [T]he latest, most exemplary embodiment of study in our culture is not the great philosopher nor the sainted doctor. It is rather the student, such as he appears in certain novels of Kafka or Walser. (IP, 65) It is precisely the apparent uselessness of the students and the hopelessness of study that plays such an important role in the strategy they develop with respect to power. Kafka’s useless students without Schrift So the students operating in Kafkas stories have an important characteristic: their studies seem to be useless. In Amerika, Karl sees a strange young man: He watched silently as the man read in his book, turned the pages and occasionally checked something in another book that he always picked up at lightning speed, often making entries in a notebook, his face always bent surprisingly low over it. Could this man be a student? He did seem to be studying. ... ‘You’re studying?’ asked Karl. ‘Yes, yes’, said the man, using the few moments lost to his studies to rearrange his books.3’ (...) And when wifi you be finished with your studies?’ asked Karl. ‘It’s slow going’, said the student. ... ‘[Y]ou can be happy about having given up your studies. I myself have been studying for years, out of pure single-mindedness. It has given me little satisfaction and even less chance of a decent future. 32 Karl explains his problems with Delamarche to the student. The student cannot really help him either; he does not offer Karl any insight in what he must do and even advises him to remain with Delamarche ‘absolutely33 Karl wonders where studying had got him — he had forgotten everything again.34 The most extreme example of a student, in Agamben’s view, is MelvillËs Bartleby, the scriber who stopped writing. According to Benjamin, Kafkas students have also lost the Schrift. This can mean either that they have stopped writing or that they have lost the Schrift in the sense of the Torah, the object of study. According to Scholem, the students have not lost the Schrift or the Torah, but they can no longer decipher it (cited in HS, 51). Nonetheless, Benjamin’s genius is apparent, according to Agamben, precisely in the fact that the students have lost the Schrift. Their commentaries on the Schrift, on the Law, are notes in the margin of a blank page.35 Study does not lead to an a priori determined goal; Kafka does not attach any promises to study that are traditionally attached to the study of the Torah. According to Agamben, the messianic tension of study is turned around here. Or better: it has gone beyond itself. Its gesture is that of a power that does not precede but follows its action, which it has left behind forever, of a Talmud that has not only announced the reconstruction of the temple but has already forgotten it. ‘At this point, study shakes off the sadness that disfigured it and returns to its truest nature: not work, but inspiration, the self-nourishment of the soul’ (IP, 65).36 Kafkas assistants are members of a congregation who have lost their house of prayer. His students have forgotten how to write, have lost the Schrift. Now nothing stops them on their ‘[u]ntrammeled, happy journey:37 The study of the horse Bucephalus But the most enigmatic example of the student in Kafkas work may be Alexander the Great’s horse Bucephalus, who happens to become a lawyer to the surprise of his colleagues. We have a new lawyer, Dr. Bucephalus. In his outward appearance there is little to recall the time when he was the warhorse of Alexander of Macedonia. ... I recently saw a quite simple court usher with the knowing eye of a little racetrack regular marveffing at the lawyer as the latter, lifting his thighs high, mounted step by step with a stride that made the marble clang. In general the bar approves the admission of Bucephalus. ... Nowadays, as no one can deny, there is no great Alexander. To be sure, many know how to commit murder ... and many feel that Macedonia is too narrow ... but no one, no one, can lead the way to India. Even in those days India’s gates were beyond reach, but their direction was indicated by the royal sword. ... Today ... no one shows the way; many carry swords but only wave them in the air and the gaze that tries to follow them grows confused. Perhaps, therefore, it is really best, as Bucephalus has done, to immerse oneself in law books. Free, his flanks unburdened by the loins of the rider, by quiet lamplight, far from the tumult of Alexander’s baffle, he reads and turns the pages of our old books.38 In his interpretation of this story, Werner Kraft concludes that law is set over against myth in the name of justice: instead of taking part in the mythical (pre-law) struggle, Bucephalus devotes himself to law.39 Benjamin sees this as a serious misunderstanding of Kafkas story. Indeed, the goal is to unmask mythical-juridical violence and human beings, like the horse Bucephalus, must tame the mythical forces at whatever cost (SE, 63). But, according to Benjamin, what is new about this ‘new lawyer what is new for the legal profession, is that he does not practice law but only studies it, reading in tranquil lamplight. Bucephalus is free: his flanks are no longer squeezed by Alexander the Great’s thighs and he is no longer carrying the latter on his back. The door to justice is not to employ law but to make it inoperative — not by practicing law (which would be a repetition of the mythical forces, given that law is in force without significance), but by doing nothing more than studying it. ‘The law which is studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice Bucephalus’ strategy against law is thus study. Agamben remarks that it is decisive that the law that is not practiced but only studied does not itself become justice but only the door to it. The study of the law has no ‘higher purpose’ - that is why the law has become inoperative.4’ ‘That which opens the passage to justice is not the abolishment of the law but its deactivation and inactivity — that is, another use of the law’ (SE, 63). This is a law that is liberated from all discipline and all relation to sovereignty. Bucephalus depicts a figure of the law that is possible after its link with violence and power has been deposed, a law that is no longer in force and applied (SE, 63-64), just as the study of doorkeepers by the man from the country makes it possible to remain living outside the law. Agamben then outlines the following picture of the future: One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use, but to free them from it for good. (SE, 64)