I managed to abtain a copy of Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception on interlibrary loan on Friday through the Parliamentary Library. I'd ordered it so that I could begin to build on this earlier post by working my way through the book. Alas the book has to be returned on Monday, as it has been recalled by the lending Library.
I'm a little annoyed, as the book looks to be very good. So I cannot work my way through it here. This reading group may suffice until my ordered copy arrives.
The opening pages of the State of Exception state that the state of exception as exceptional measures signifies a temporary abrogation of the rule of law; is a state within the intersection of the legal and the political that represents a no-man's land between public law and poltical fact, between juridical order and life.
Agamben states the paradox nicely:
"...if exceptional measures are the result of of periods of political crisis and, as such, must be understood on political and not juridico-constitutional grounds, then they find themselves in the paradoxical position of being juridical measures that cannot be understood in legal terms, and the state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form. On the other hand, if the law employs the exception-- that is the suspension of law itself---as its original means of referring to and encompassing life, then a theory of the state of exception is the preliminary condition of the definition of the relation that bindsand, at the same time, abandons the living being to law."