This welcome edited volume brings together some of the most insightful leading writers work-ing in the wake of the Italian philosopher of language, Giorgio Agamben. Each of the contri-butors, bar one, deploy the phrase ‘as if’ not always but sometimes in a technical sense to which this review remains attentive. Agamben’s ‘as if’ structures his conception of the legal fiction – ‘substituting a truth with the opposite accession, from which juridical consequences, may be derived’– expressed variously by the formulae, ‘as if not/as if, just as if not/just as if’.1 A key example he cites is ‘acting as if the slave were a free citizen and in deducing from this fiction the validity of a juridical act that would otherwise be null’.2 Thus, ‘as if’ for Agamben, just as it is for the law, indicates a fiction that is nonetheless taken to be true not because it is true, but because it must be true. Not an ontology of being but of ‘having to be’ which goes beyond law all the way to politics.3 Agamben further notes its political and ethical centrality to the West’s politics and ethics while remaining shrouded in relative obscurity:

中文翻译：

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阿甘本与激进政治

这本受欢迎的编辑卷汇集了意大利语言哲学家乔治·阿甘本 (Giorgio Agamben) 之后的一些最有见地的主要作家。每个贡献者，除了一个之外，并不总是使用“好像”这个短语，但有时在技术意义上使用，本评论仍然关注这一点。阿甘本的“好像”构建了他对法律虚构的概念——“用相反的加入代替真理，从中可以推导出法律后果”——用公式不同地表达，“好像不是/好像，就像不是/就好像'.1他引用的一个关键例子是“表现得好像奴隶是一个自由公民，并从这个虚构中推断出否则无效的法律行为的有效性”。2因此，“好像”对于阿甘本，就像法律一样，尽管如此，它仍然被认为是真实的虚构，不是因为它是真实的，而是因为它必须是真实的。不是存在的本体，而是“不得不存在”的本体论，它超越了法律一直延伸到政治。3 阿甘本进一步指出，它在西方政治和伦理中的政治和伦理中心地位，同时仍然笼罩在相对默默无闻中：