ABSTRACT
Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben are the most prominent philosophical figures to have emerged from the so-called 'Heideggerian left' in Europe and apart from Heidegger they share many more intellectual sources varying from Plato, Aristotle and Hegel to Bataille, Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Furthermore, the paths that both philosophers have followed in their long careers are quite similar, starting with questions of language and meaning, moving on to aesthetics and literature and concluding with long and complicated discussions about the nature and structure of the political. Derrida's point of departure for his reading of Kafka is the spatial paradox that faces the man from the country: although the door of the law is open and is meant for him alone, he cannot go through it. Accordingly, Agamben does not base his reading on Freud but rather on the debate between Benjamin and Gershom Scholem that took place in the 1930s and revolved around precisely this ontological uniqueness.
