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Delves into the history of the ancient Greek word nomos (and related words) to reveal the interdisciplinary depth of this term beyond its later meaning of 'law' or 'law-making'Assembles a genealogical history of the ancient Greek work nomos, showing how it contains a richness that is not reflected in its classical and modern usage as simply 'law' or 'law-making'Draws on works by ancient Greek philosophers, poets and tragedians including Homer, Hesiod, Alcman, Pindar, Archilochos, Theognis, Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and PlatoIncludes extracts from ancient primary sources, in both the original and in English translation, to analyse how nomos has been used in the literary evidence and in contextConsiders how nomos has been used by contemporary philosophers, including Agamben, Foucault, Heidegger, Schmitt, Deleuze and Axelos, and re-examines their interpretationsThis is a highly original, interdisciplinary study of the archaic Greek word nomos and its family of words. Thanos Zartaloudis draws out the richness of this fundamental term by exploring its many uses over the centuries. The Birth of Nomos includes extracts from a wide range of ancient sources, in both the original and English translation, including material from legal history, philosophy, philology, linguistics, ancient history, poetry, archaeology, ancient musicology and anthropology. Through a thorough analysis of these extracts, we gain a new understanding of nomos and its foundational place in the Western legal tradition.Find out moreRead 'On Nomos and the Meaning of Philosophy in Law: an interview with Thanos Zartaloudis' by Gian Giacomo Fusco in ExceptionsRead 'Thinking between words and traditions: An interview with Thanos Zartaloudis on The Birth of Nomos by Tristan Webb in Countercurrents"

Part I Life and Sovereignty -- chapter 1 Anton Schutz (2008), 'The Fading Memory of Homo non Sacer', in Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron and Alex Murray (eds), The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 114-31 -- chapter 2 William Watkin (2013), 'Homo Sacer and the Politics of Indifference', in Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview, London: Rowman and Littlefield International, pp. 181-207 -- chapter 3 Kirk Wetters (2006), 'The Rule of the Norm and the Political Theology of -- chapter 4 Mathew Abbott (2012), 'No Life Is Bare, the Ordinary Is Exceptional: Giorgio Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology', Parrhesia, 14, pp. 23-35 -- part Part II State of Exception and Government -- chapter 5 Steven DeCaroli (2007), 'Boundary Stones: Giorgio Agamben and the Field of Sovereignty', in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (eds), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 43-69 -- chapter 6 Daniel McLoughlin (2012), 'Giorgio Agamben on Security, Government and the Crisis of Law', Griffith Law Review, 21, pp. 680-707 -- chapter 7 Bruno Gulli (2007), 'The Ontology and Politics of Exception: Reflections on the Work of Giorgio Agamben', in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (eds), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 219-42 -- chapter 8 Jessica Whyte (2013), -- chapter 9 Anton Schutz (2009), 'Imperatives without Imperator', Law and Critique, 20, pp. 233-43 -- part Part III Law, Violence and Justice -- chapter 10 Thanos Zartaloudis (2011), 'On Justice', Law and Critique, 22, pp. 135-53 -- chapter 11 Mathew Abbott (2014), 'The Creature before the Law', in The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 106-22 -- chapter 12 Catherine Mills (2008), 'Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice', South Atlantic Quarterly, 107, pp. 15-36 -- chapter 13 Tom Frost (2013), 'The Hyper-Hermeneutic Gesture of a Subtle Revolution', Critical Horizons, 14, pp. 70-92 -- chapter 14 Paolo Bartoloni (2008), 'The Threshold and the Topos of the Remnant: Giorgio Agamben', Angelaki: Journal ofthe Theoretical Humanities, 13, pp. 51-63 -- part Part IV Fulfilling the Law: The Power of Experience -- chapter 15 Alice Lagaay and Juliane Schiffers (2009), 'Passivity at Work: A Conversation on an Element in the Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben', Law and Critique, 20, pp. 325-37 -- chapter 16 Alexander Cooke (2005), 'Resistance, Potentiality and the Law: Deleuze and Agamben on -- chapter 17 Carlo Salzani (2013), 'In a Messianic Gesture: Agamben's Katka', in Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani (eds), Philosophy and Kafka, Plymouth: Lexington Books, pp. 261-82 -- chapter 18 Adam Kotsko (2013), 'The Curse of the Law and the Coming Politics: On Agamben, Paul and the Jewish Alternative', in Tom Frost (ed.), Giorgio Agamben: Legal, Political and Philosophical Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 13-30 -- chapter 19 Nicholas Heron (2011), 'The Ungovernable', Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 16, pp. 159-74 -- part Part V Studying the Law -- chapter 20 Anton Schutz (2000), 'Thinking the Law with and against Luhmann, Legendre, Agamben', Law and Critique, 11, pp. 107-36 -- chapter 21 Daniel McLoughlin (2009), 'In Force without Significance: Kantian Nihilism and Agamben's Critique of Law', Law and Critique, 20, pp. 245-57 -- chapter 22 John Lechte and Saul Newman (2012), 'Agamben, Arendt and Human Rights: Bearing Witness to the Human', European Journal of Social Theory, 15, pp. 522-36 -- chapter 23 Connal Parsley (2010), 'The Mask and Agamben: The Transitional Juridical Technics of Legal Relation', Law Text Culture, 14, pp. 12-39 -- chapter 24 Steven DeCaroli (2013), 'Political Life: Giorgio Agamben and the Idea of Authority', Research in Phenomenology, 43, pp. 220-42 -- chapter 25 Bostjan Nedoh (2011), 'Katka's Land Surveyor K.: Agamben's Anti-Muselmann', Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 16, pp. 149-61 -- chapter 26 Giorgio Agamben, Stephanie Wakefield (trans.) (2014), 'What Is a Destituent Power?', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, pp. 65-74.

1. Sacred foundations: mythologemes of law and power -- 2. From transcendental sovereignty to neo-governmentality: the oikonomia of power -- 3. Secular sovereignty : a gigantomachy over a void -- 4. The biopolitical nomos of insignificant lives -- 5. The sacrament of power and the sacrament of language -- 6. The experience of potentiality -- 7. The idea of justice.

In media, political and lay representations of migrants it remains frequently the case that metaphors are systematically used in racist and demeaning manners, though also, occasionally, in positive ways empathizing with the plight of refugees, migrant com-munities and the sans papiers. In this piece, however, I wish to note the wider, more personal and speculative reasons as to why metaphors are so frequently used and are, it seems, so widely effective in shaping social perceptions. In late modernity, in the affluent north-west we name the migrant through demeaning metaphors in an attempt to deny our anxiety over our own inessence and instability, our own constant transferal in our species' constitutive shapeshifting body that encompasses the linguistic being of the non-linguistic. I think this with and against the use of metaphors towards a sense of metamorphosis, including through a reading of the pneumatic body in Paul.

It could be said that architecture encounters its end through its self-extraction from its original existential potential –its power of creativity– when at some point it replaces this experience of loss by procuring a self-validation for itself as a techne, an art and end in itself; and, perhaps, even more depressingly today when thought as near-exclusively along the axis of production and commodity circulation. How are we to think of this power, this potentia, other than by appreciating its key formulation, in the western tradition, as dynamis in Aristotle (Metaphysics 1069b19-20)? A paradoxical definition of potentiality (dynamis), perhaps, given that a potentiality, by definition, is, to put it in a modern sense, a possibility that exists. Such a definition posits a line of what could be called an existent (and not merely possible or probable) potentialization in the creative act. By definition, historically, existence has been subject to an understandable logical scission (a dividing line) between 'what is actual' and 'what is potential', which however as an ontological motor of truth production, including political truth production, leads to a misunderstanding of potentiality as something that once actualized belongs to the past and which crucially thus remains exhausted. Yet in the original formulation in Aristotle, potentiality as a philosophical problem is precisely that of a potentiality which is not reducible to actuality –and this becomes the kernel of Aristotle's Metaphysics. From this point a remarkable and complex series of consequent medieval formulations came to define potentiality as the problem of sovereign power (whether earthly or divine) and all the way to our time. Giorgio Agamben is of course the thinker who has shed more recent light to Aristotle's link between power (potere) and potentiality (potenza) throughout his work; and who has centered his critique of the forgetting of its most crucial element (impotentiality); a forgetting that intentionally aimed at capturing the birth of the subject in the form of an alleged sovereignty of a self-grounding being. A self-grounding, an autonomy, justified historically through the political theology of a self-grounding power (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press [1995]1998: 47). Thus, as Agamben shows, we have mostly thought of impotentiality as an incapacity, an absence or a negation. Instead, for Agamben, potentiality indicates in a particular way "the existence of non-Being" (Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Ed. and Trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1999: 178). But how are we to think of such a paradoxical existence of non-Being or of the unthought, that seemingly has, through a politically conscious misunderstanding, crippled our politics of creativity, including, one may venture to suggest as a hypothesis, that of the existential creativity of architecture? How are we to avoid being impoverished by our "estrangement from impotentiality"? (Agamben, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Trans. D. Kishik, S. Pedatella. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009: 45). I would like to propose that we can first attempt to do that, as a preliminary theoretical step, by exploring further what Aristotle thought.

In media, political and lay representations of migrants it remains frequently the case that metaphors are systematically used in racist and demeaning manners, though also, occasionally, in positive ways empathizing with the plight of refugees, migrant communities and the sans papiers. In this piece, however, I wish to note the wider, more personal and speculative reasons as to why metaphors are so frequently used and are, it seems, so widely effective in shaping social perceptions. In late modernity, in the affluent north-west some name the migrant through demeaning metaphors in an attempt to deny their anxiety over their inessence and instability, a pushing away of the common and constant transferal in our species' shapeshifting linguistic being of the non-linguistic. I think this with and against the use of metaphors towards a sense of metamorphosis, including through a reading of the pneumatic body in Paul.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Author Biographies -- Prelude: Peter Goodrich and Thanos Zartaloudis -- Chapter 1 The imaginary origins of the common law -- Chapter 2 A Quiet and Secret Place - An Enquiry on the Dreamer God, A God without a Name -- Chapter 3 Borges, The Keystone and the legal imagination -- Chapter 4 A triptych of lawlessness -- Chapter 5 When dragons did rise -- Chapter 6 Doctorum agnomina: On the satirical laws of academia -- Chapter 7 The Corbels Act, London 1909 -- Chapter 8 Report to the Treasurer of Injustice -- Chapter 9 Ennomie -- Chapter 10 Twelve theses on the exorbitant principle that a lawyer must work for the poor -- Chapter 11 Intha gnalamum poy thaano - imagining the other in contract -- Chapter 12 Ad vitam aeternam: A legal text that remains relevant -- Chapter 13 In nomine patris -- Chapter 14 It is forbidden to sell your soul to the devil -- Chapter 15 The Court of the Monuments -- Chapter 16 Lexicon Act 2020 -- Chapter 17 Carrier bag law -- Chapter 18 Law in the round -- Chapter 19 Kαὶ μηδὲν μόριον ἀποκεκρύφθαι: The bare life of the Stoic sage -- Chapter 20 Move over, Felix: Addressing the impact of the domestic cat -- Chapter 21 The Proof of Judicial Omniscience Act (UK) -- Chapter 22 The rule book of a dreamer -- Chapter 23 The dismantler -- Chapter 24 Breathing law - real imaginings of what it might mean to matter differently -- Chapter 25 Untitled. Unreliable. Unconfirmed -- Chapter 26 Legal fictions: a dialogue imagining law -- Chapter 27 COIL -- Chapter 28 Waiting for law: A play in one act -- Chapter 29 The protocol of mobile rooms -- Chapter 30 Law No. 9321/2028: Exceptional Regulations for Communal Living and Use on the Ground of Higher Order Natural Sites -- Chapter 31 A confidential private placement memorandum.

"Returning to the map of the island of utopia, this book provides a contemporary, inventive, addition to the long history of legal fictions and juristic phantasms. Progressive legal and political thinking has for long lacked a positive, let alone a bold imaginary project, an account of what improved institutions and an ameliorated environment would look like. And where better to start than with the non-laws or imaginary legislations of a realm yet to come. The Cabinet of Imaginary Laws is a collection of fictive contributions to the theme of conceiving imaginary laws in the vivid vein of jurisliterary invention. Disparate in style and diverse in genres of writing and performative expression, the celebrated and unknown, venerable and youthful authors write new laws. Thirty-five dissolute scholars, impecunious authors and dyspeptic artists from a variety of fields including law, film, science, history, philosophy, political science, aesthetics, architecture and the classics become, for a brief and inspiring instance, legislators of impossible norms. The collection provides an extra-ordinary range of inspired imaginings of other laws. This momentary community of radial thought conceives of a wild variety of novel critical perspectives. The contributions aim to inspire reflection on the role of imagination in the study and writing of law. Verse, collage, artworks, short stories, harangues, lists, and other pleas, reports and pronouncements revivify the sense of law as the vehicle of poetic justice and as an art that instructs and constructs life. Aimed at an intellectual audience disgruntled with the negativity of critique and the narrowness of the disciplines, this book will appeal especially to theorists, lawyers, scholars and a general public concerned with the future of decaying laws and an increasingly derelict legal system"--