In his essay ‘On the Limits of Violence,’ 1 Giorgio Agamben seeks to determine violence’s relation to politics in order to uncover the question of violence in and of itself. After Walter Benjamin, 2 Agamben notes that any theory of violence that situates the justification of violence outside of violence itself, that is to say, any theory ‘that defines the legitimacy of revolutionary means through the justice of their end is as contradictory as legalistic theories that guarantee a just end by legitimizing repressive means.’ 3 Agamben’s reading of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ 4 has received attention in recent studies that have focused on the notion of bare life, 5 the sacrificial character of violence, 6 its relation to law 7 and to political theology. 8 Less attention, however, has been given to the mean- ing and function of the notion of violence within Agamben’s archaeologi- cal project itself and to the relation between this notion and his critique of Western metaphysics and biopolitics. Here, the works of William Wat- kin 9 and Thanos Zartaloudis 10 constitute a fertile ground for considering the meaning of violence in the work of Agamben beyond the critique of violence as a means. Indeed, Zartaloudis focuses on the violence of ‘the ontological model of constitutive vicariousness’ 11 of power that Agam- ben’s philosophical archaeology helps to trace and on the notion of pure violence as a radical suspension of mythic violence. Watkin, 12 for his part, treats the notion of violence in Agamben’s work as a signature, providing a methodological framework for the interrogation of violence as it relates to signification. Drawing upon both Watkin and Zartaloudis, my focus in this chapter is the problematization of the ambiguous relation between violence and metaphysics, which I will undertake by providing an account of what I will call the ‘signature of violence.’ To do so, I offer a nuanced account of the way in which signatures work and control the intelligibility of dis- cursive formations. Here I engage with William Watkin’s 13 analysis of the economy of the common and the proper as the inner logic through which signatures become operative. The common is that which appears as the ground of a phenomenon, the founding and unconditioned element of discursive formations. The proper is what is founded, the conditioned 11 Biopolitics and Resistance The Meaning of Violence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben German Primera The Meanings of Violence : From Critical Theory to Biopolitics, edited by Gavin Rae, and Emma Ingala, Routledge, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubrighton/detail.action?docID=5569564. Created from ubrighton on 2018-11-14 05:48:10. Copyright © 2018. Routledge. All rights reserved.