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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Agamben: State of Exception #2 « Previous | |Next »
April 3, 2005

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."

Agamben argues that in today's political discourse, the state of exception increasingly presents itself as the dominant mode of governing. What had been thought of as a temporary displacement of law, has gradually been becoming the normal practice of governance. The military order and the US Patriot Act that were enacted by the Bush administration after September 11, 2001, serve Agamben as examples of this development.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:09 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)
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