Study of Law Without Ends

This chapter develops a critique of the governmentality of the learning society through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s work on law, here reinterpreted as a form of study without ends. It is suggested that the role of the student, as opposed to the learner, can be to critically question the instrumental logic which grounds law’s decidability (power to decide) on life. At stake in this critical questioning (i.e. study) is a questioning of sociality itself, understood as biopolitically as the production of a sphere in which life is made governable. While the learner, through self-empowerment, ends up preserving the power of law to decide, the student, as the representation of a form of permanent criticism, disempowers both the self and the law.