The biopolitical forms of law and language aren’t just “pure theory” – they have material effects.

Philosophically speaking, Agamben suggests, both language and law are sig-naturae that signify the efficacious relation between respectively, words and world, law and life.83 Like language, law is not merely signification, ‘“ius dicere” (saying what is in conformity with the law)’: it is always also a ‘“vim dicere” (saying the efficacious word)’84 which constitutes the legal order as the sphere in which law can (i.e., has the power to) refer to life (like words refer to the world) in a stable and efficacious manner. This efficacious relation—which represents, with Agamben’s words, an ‘excess of efficacy over signification’, ‘a relation that exceeds and grounds every relation’85—is thus allowed to produce meaning (i.e., to signify) in accordance with the logic of instrumentality. Most importantly, the concrete instances (including theories, judicial and legislative decisions, administrative acts, juridical categories, and so forth) in which this relatability is expressed and articulated become paradigms of the signatura of law, examples of its power (i.e., organised potentiality).Law’s self-preservation coincides with the administration of the relatability of law and life and, from this perspective, it is biopolitical or governmental: it constitutes life itself as a governable force and, at the same time, produces the sub-ject (of law) who will administer life’s governability, the (law’s) ‘signator’,86the subject who administers the signatura (of law). This figure represents an ‘enunciative function’, to be understood, with Foucault, as a ‘vacant place’ within a network of power relations that individuals must fill in order to produce intelligible meaning in a given historical moment.87 This ‘signatura’ produces a ‘sanctioned mode of intelligibility’88 through the institutions of ‘subjective enunciative positions’ that pre-determine the intention to signify of the individuals enter-ing that framework of meaningful signification, thus allowing them to con-struct the objective world around them.

In this sense, for example, when legal theorists speak of a fundamental norm (such as Kelsen’s Grundnorm or Hart’s rule of recognition) which allows to deter-mine the criteria for identifying the law, they are implicitly dealing with the issue of law’s signatura. My suggestion, specifically, is that the enunciative func-tion presupposed by legal theory’s fundamental norm(s) is to turn life into a ‘zero-degree of law’,90 that is to say, an instrument for the self-preservation of law. Crucially, these ‘master norms’, which found the relation between law and life in terms of decidability, are shaped and sustained by various ‘officials’ and, ultimately, also by ‘the man in the street’,91 that is to say, by society at large.92For example, as Atienza and Manero suggest, the fact that ‘one could not use the law as a mechanism of foreseeing the consequences of one’s own behav-iour, if one would not expect norm-applying and norm-producing organs to follow one and the same rule of recognition’,93 implies that private citizens themselves enforce, through their thoughts and actions, law’s decidability, and, in this respect, act as (quasi)officials who perform a social function. In similar terms, Lindhal has recently re-interpreted Kelsen’s Grundnorm as an ‘ought form’ which provides subjects with social agency by, precisely, allowing them to understand ‘something as something in law’.

Law can thus be interpreted, with Agamben, as a process of ‘desemantici-sation and suspension of concrete praxis ... custom and usage of individuals’ (i.e., life) which produces (‘isolates’) a norm,95 a ‘generic proposition endowed with a merely virtual reference’96 which, in turn, grounds a generalised ability to decide (decid-ability). In fact, the application of a norm—‘the passage ... from virtual reference to a concrete reference to a segment of reality’—is not merely a logical (deductive or inductive) operation and, in this sense, ‘is in no way contained within the norm and cannot be derived from it; otherwise, there would have been no need to create the grand edifice of trial law’.97 The application of the norm, Agamben continues, is the expression of an ‘enuncia-tive function’, ‘a trial that always involves a plurality of subjects and ultimately culminates in the pronunciation of a sentence, that is, an enunciation whose operative reference to reality is guaranteed by the institutional powers’.98 The law, from this perspective, is split into two poles, namely, on one side, a ‘pure form of law’ ‘reduced to the zero point of its significance’,99 (the idea of law’s virtuality as the ultimate representation of law as means) and, on the other, a ‘force-of-law’, a ‘juridically formless ... vis obligandi or applicability’100 (represent-ing the necessity of a decision as the external finality of law).

In biopolitical terms, life itself is, at the same time, desemanticised and turned into a means for a decision on, precisely, life’s governability (the ulti-mate end of bio-power).101 The desemanticisation of life produces not only decidability but more generally life’s governability, the idea that life as such is governable, or better, ungovernable (an-archos) and, for this very reason, something that has to be governed102 through a praxis which will always demand, more or less directly, also a decision on the relationship between life and law. Any meaning biopolitics attributes to life will presuppose the ‘signatura’ of life’s governability, its constitution as a force-of-law, that is to say, life normatively charged in order to ground a decision on its relationship with the law—and, therefore, on law’s self-preservation. Life’s governability is thus defined by its relationship with law’s decidability.

This is true even in situations in which the law seems to disappear. In this respect, even (Foucault’s) normalisation, namely, processes through which all the aspects of life can become intelligible in terms of (deviation from) a norm—i.e., ‘a new form of law, a mixture of legality and nature, prescription and constitution’,103 a ‘natural rule’, providing ‘standards against which people are measured incessantly’104—is functionally (and thus instrumentally) related to legalisation. As Kelly observes, on one side, law is colonised by the norm and, on the other, the norm provides law ‘with a new, indefinitely expanding scaffold’.105 In other words, the norm stands for a representation of ‘society itself in a perfected form’106—and, therefore, for the end of law (as a means) which gives it force (i.e., justifies its enforcement as a formal means)—but this constitution of norm as an end and a force (of law as means and form) stands ultimately, and again, for the constitution of a sphere of decidability on the ambiguous relation between law and life: society ‘in a perfected form’ is, in this sense, merely a virtual space in which ‘everything is punishable’,107 the space of a never-ending trial.