Agamben and the Possibilities of Tradition

This chapter focuses upon a specific question – namely, what could politics be today? As Agamben himself has written, politics exists because human beings cannot be defined through vocation or identity. In approaching this question, attention is focused upon the interplay between politics and law. This focus is quite deliberate. Here, law, and specifically the role of precedent and tradition in the common law of England and Wales, can be used as a foil to consider what this belonging could look like. Crucial to this task is to challenge the mythic foundation of politics, and the mythic nature of ‘progression’, and place them in opposition to a messianic idea of politics.