Justice: Klimt's Jurisprudence - Sovereign Violence and the Rule of Law

Abstract

There is something uncanny and prophetic about painter Karl Klimt’s lost masterpiece. Jurisprudence, a suffering naked man surrounded by eyes, eerily captures the relationship between “sovereignty and bare life” that Agamben argues was re-forged and refined across the twentieth century—a particular construction of legality that grants to executive power an uncanny freedom of action, and in the process both dominates and shapes the bodily experience of human beings subject to it. Klimt’s image might perhaps be regarded as the very first, and perhaps still among the most comprehensive representations of this abject modern figure. Show more