State of Exception

An amazing book. It is a must read for anyone who is interested in political processes and the grey lines within 'constitutional' democracy.

In Agamben's new book, State of Exception, a sequel to Homo Sacer, he draws explicitly upon lectures he has delivered in New York and elsewhere in the years since 9/11, repeating the central themes of his past work and transposing it to a different key. Here, rather than speaking of "the camp," he argues that "the state of exception" is a primal form of modern government. Agamben has long argued, in a formulation best distilled in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (2000), that "the camp"- the concentration camp as much as the refugee camp-- is the paradigm of political modernity insofar as legal categories and the idea of sovereignty have served as a justification for abondoning `enemy bodies'to zones outside strict legality. While that book's conceptual apparatus is all too reminiscent of quirky Heideggerian readings of Greek politics, and he sometimes leans on tendentious readings of Foucault, Benjamin, Arendt, and Schmitt, Agamben's thesis, when examined closely, is no more "paranoid" than the more redemptive works of Primo Levi or Judith Shklar. Beneath his evasive ethics is yet another post-Holocaust "liberalism of fear." In my view, Agamben can be read as a philosopher of deep ethical concern and originality, but to read him charitably, one must start by getting used to his signature rhetorical devices of hyperbole, paradox, and "indistinctions"-- situations where conceptual opposites (security and insecurity, totalitarianism and civil war) are actually contained within each other. It is helpful to approach a number of these claims as "thought experiments." Moreover, perhaps more than any other concern of legal theory, the discussion of states of exception is an area of inquiry where these discursive vices can actually be seen as virtues: the language of indistinction and undecidibility is often descriptively appropriate.

The jaunty gray on yellow cover reminds us that, at his best, Giorgio Agamben is like a breath of spring air across the dreary landscape of geopolitical quagmire. When I got this book, I panicked because it advertised itself as the sequel to an earlier Agamben essay which I had not read! Nevertheless I sucked it up and dove on in, prepared to be baffled and bemused, but believe me, STATE OF EXCEPTION is a stand-alone as well, and you need no prior knowledge of what happened in the earlier book HOMO SACER to understand the concepts here. I'm no scholar, but it seems to me that even he or she who knows absolutely nothing about Latin will be able to understand the history he delves into (perhaps a refresher course in HBO's series "ROME" would be in order). Partly this is due to the exemplary translation, by UC Davis' Kevin Attell, whose work I have not run across before. He's great. He has re-translated or so it appears, not only Agamben's steely prose, but also each of Agamben citations from the original Latin, German, French, Greek, Italian or whatever. How does he do it? I have no idea, but his expertise is quite helpful especially when the reader needs to see where the emphasis falls in Agamben's particular use of his sources, it's now crystal clear. Along the way Agamben and Attell demolish all our previous ideas about the so-called "state of exception." Even such obvious ones such as the ease with which we on the left have applied the term "dictator" to such figures as Mussolini and Hitler, even though, legally speaking, neither of them were dictators. It's easier for us to dismiss them this way. In general the book gains power, sweep and poetry the deeper you get into it. I feel like I've already read HOMO SACER, it must be more about how under martial law (or say in the case of Hitler's death camps) humans were reduced to what Agamben called "mere life," with their citizenship stripped from them, so that they live in a state of nowhere, like that Beatles song. STATE OF EXCEPTION is to Agamben's body of work what STATE OF INDEPENDENCE was to Donna Summer's-a crisp, dry, declaration of moving on, wiping it up, and tearing the mind a new hole of opinion.

If Michel Foucault's work has created a new discursive space, then Giorgio Agamben's work has driven a chasm between the existing spaces of between public law and political fact. Agamben has attempted to define that ambiguous space, to fill it with a description that gives it a tenuous position in the lexicon of modern political theory. Whether it is a "point of imbalance" or "no man's land" (1), a "zone of undecidability", or a "paradoxical phenomenon" (2) a "threshold of indeterminacy" (3) or a "fictitious lacuna" (31) Agamben has embarked on describing the indescribable, even though the concept is "matched by terminological uncertainty" (4). Expanding on the ideas expounded by Schmitt and Benjamin, Agamben asserts that the state of exception he describes is no longer a temporary state in times of war or siege, but that it "tends to increasingly appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics" (2). Whether it is now the dominant paradigm or, as Agamben argues, the state of exception "has by now become the rule" (9) may be of scholarly debate. Agamben does make a good argument that this state he describes is becoming more prevalent especially after the events of September 11, 2001 have brought the United States into this war on terrorism. This timely essay seems to fit well within this age of security and surveillance brought forth by the Patriot Act and the more recent state of exception from hurricanes Rita and Katrina.