|
January 27, 2007
In his review of Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception Brett Neilson argues that Agamben develops a criticizism of Carl Schmitt by turning to a debate on the role of violence between Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. For Agamben the task of a radical politics is to break the link between violence and the law.
Neilson interprets one strand of Agamben's countermovement to Schmitt in terms of Agamben's reading of the debate on the state of emergency between Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin from 1928 to 1940. Neilson says that Schmitt's theory of sovereignty must be read as response to Benjamin's essay 'Critique of Violence.'
Neilson summarizes the debate between the two thus:
In this 1921 essay, Benjamin posits the existence of a 'pure' or 'revolutionary' violence--that is, violence outside the law, a violence that ruptures the dialectic between the violence that institutes the law (constituent power) and the violence that upholds the law (constituted power). Agamben argues that the state of emergency is the means invented by Schmitt to respond to this postulation of a pure violence. For Schmitt, there can be no violence absolutely exterior to the nomos, because revolutionary violence, once the state of emergency is established, always finds itself to be included in the law. Benjamin's definitive response to Schmitt is the famous passage in 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' where he surmises that 'the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.'
For Benjamin, the state of exception leads not to the restoration of legal order but to a generalized catastrophe in which the the transcendental claims of sovereign power are vanquished.
Neilson finishes there, with out evaluating the debate. The contemporary states of emergency in the war on terrorism support Schmitt's thesis that the sovereign who proclaims the state of emergency (ie., President Bush in the US) remains anchored in the legal order. Schmitt's insight is that the peculiar status of the exception allowed for by law derives from the condition that it is a factual situation that cannot be normatively predicted. When an exception to a rule is declared, this is not outside of rules as something altogether exterior to the juridico-political order. Instead, the act of suspension itself creates a relation between the rule and its exception, declaring what lies outside the rule to be an exception and thus, and only thus, giving the rule a coherence and validity. The exception proves, or rather constitutes, the rule.
|
Schmitt's early view of the exception (in his study of Dictatorship) saw it as a temporary suspension of the legal order (a suspension allowed by the constitution) in order to confront a crisis. His later view (expressed in his book on Political Theology) saw the exception as lying outside of legal order altogether: sovereign power means the ability to step outside the legal order to make decisions the legal order could not. By 'legal order,' Schmitt means the Weimar liberal parliamentary system which he (and many others at the time) considered totally incapable of handling the political and economic crises of post-WWI Europe and the threat posed by the astounding rise of the Soviet Union.