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January 25, 2007
Brett Neilson, from the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney, has a very interesting review of Giorgio Agamben's important text State of Exception (2005), which he reads as a critique of Schmitt's understanding of the state of exception as dictatorship.
Nielsen highlights Agamben's argument about the inextricable link between the state of exception and the normal functioning of the liberal democratic state. Far from being a hallmark of totalitarian rule, the state of exception, which 'presents itself as a zone of indetermination between democracy and absolutism' , is becoming a normality in the sense that 'the constitutional use of emergency powers is becoming the rule and not the exception.'
Neilson says:
To deepen his case against Schmitt, Agamben offers an analysis of the Roman republican convention of the iustitium--an ancient precedent for the state of exception. When the Roman senate was alerted to a situation that seemed to threaten or compromise the republic, they pronounced a senatus consultum ultimum. This involved the declaration of a tumultus or a state of emergency whose consequence was the proclamation of the iustitium. The iustitium involved not a suspension of the framework of justice but a suspension of the law itself....Agamben distinguishes the legal void of the iustitium from the paradigm of dictatorship. Under the Roman constitution, a dictator was a special type of magistrate selected by the consuls, whose wide powers were conferred by means of a lex curiata that defined their scope. In the iustitium, by contrast, there was no creation of a new magistrate. The powers enjoyed by the magistrates under the iustitium resulted not from the conferment of a dictatorial imperium but from the suspension of laws that limited their actions.
Neilson says that Agamben points out that the same is true for modern emergency powers in liberal democratic regimes---it is a mistake to confuse the state of exception with dictatorship.
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We ozzies have a great word which sums up Schmitt, Strauss et al and their pretentious posturing.
They were wankers.
Austria/Germany has given us some truly toxic "philosophers" and their associated ideological movements.Each of which claim(ed) to be the true bearer and interpreter of some "hallowed" ancient tradition or philosopher/philosophy.
Hitler,Schmitt, Strauss,Hayek,Mises