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Giorgio Agamben

“In reality the oft-invoked distinction between constitutive rule and prag- matic rule has no raison d’être. Every constitutive rule—the bishop moves in this or that way—can be formulated as a pragmatic rule—“one cannot move the bishop except diagonally”—and vice versa. The same happens with grammati- cal rules: the syntactic rule “in French the subject normally precedes the verb� can be formulated pragmatically as “you cannot say pars je ; you can only say je pars.� In truth it is a matter of two different ways of considering the game—or language: one as a formal system that exists in itself (namely, as a langue) and another as a use or praxis (namely, as a parole).
For this reason it has rightly been asked whether it is possible to transgress a rule of chess, like what constitutes checkmate. One would be tempted to say that transgression, which is impossible on the level of constitutive rules, is pos- sible on the pragmatic level. In reality, the one who transgresses the rule simply ceases playing. Hence the special gravity of the swindler: the one who swindles does not transgress a rule but pretends to keep playing when in reality he has left the game.”

Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer
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The Omnibus Homo Sacer (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) The Omnibus Homo Sacer by Giorgio Agamben
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