June 26, 2005

Agamben: state of exception

In the few moments that I have in finishing one job and finding another I am reading Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception, the sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. This is Volume III of Homo Sacer, and it takes its point of point of departure from Carl Schmitt's Political Theology which describes the state of exception as a kind of legal vacuum, a 'suspension of the legal order in its totality.'

We have been here before, and understood that Agamben is arguing here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, has became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. The text is theorizes the generalization of the state of exception" in its historical and philosophical context.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 26, 2005 11:26 PM | TrackBack
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