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January 21, 2005
This post is courtesy of Matt over at Pas au dela, who advised us to go read Wood s Lot for this quote by Giorgio Agamben on the state of exception. I took Matt's advice. Here is the quote:
"President Bush's decision to refer to himself constantly as the "Commander in Chief of the Army" after September 11, 2001, must be considered in the context of this presidential claim to sovereign powers in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct reference to the state of exception, then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible."
Yes.
That quote reinforces what I said here in an earlier post on Carl Schmitt. There I suggested that we can use Schmitt's categories (eg., the 'state of exception') to make sense of the political in the historical present. I only suggested. Agamben takes it much further.
The above quote is from this excerpt from Agamben's A Brief History of the State of Exception. In the excerpt Agamben says:
"The place---both logical and pragmatic---of a theory of the state of exception in the American constitution is in the dialectic between the powers of the president and those of Congress. This dialectic has taken shape historically (and in an exemplary way already beginning with the Civil War) as a conflict over supreme authority in an emergency situation; or, in Schmittian terms (and this is surely significant in a country considered to be the cradle of democracy), as a conflict over sovereign decision."
The sovereign power of the president is essentially grounded in the emergency linked to a state of war, over the course of the twentieth century the metaphor of war becomes an integral part of the presidential political vocabulary whenever decisions considered to be of vital importance are being imposed. The exceptional legislation by executive decree (which is now perfectly familiar to us) has became a regular practice in the European democracies, and liberal democratic regimes.
The national security state formalizes this whilst the war on terror normalizes the exception. The Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission.
Australia quietly goes along with this in relation to its own citizens. Mark Kaplan over at the Charlottte Street says that British citizens were held for years on end without trial by a foreign government.
What Giorgio Agamben argues is that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states.
The most recent issue of Contretemps is devoted to the work of Giorgio Agamben.
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