ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to formulate a critique of historical reason by foregrounding the idea of life that is essentially immemorial, invisible and freed from the grasp of the law. Reading the works of Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Michel Henry and Friedrich Nietzsche, this chapter conceives of life that is each time irreducible to the “mere being alive” or mere life. Such life, life as life, the pure life, is to be understood as freedom from the attributes of the law, which are the very markers of sovereign powers.
