ABSTRACT
How are claims about exceptional events being used to give legitimate authority to exceptional practices? Since the violent destruction of the World Trade Centre on September 11th 2001, a notable transformation has occurred in political discourse and practice. Politicians and commentators have frequently made the argument that the rules of the game have changed, that this is a new kind of war, that exceptional times require exceptional measures. Under this discourse, an array of exceptional measures have been put into practice, such as detention without trial, extraordinary rendition, derogations from human rights law, sanction or connivance in torture, the curtailment of civil liberties and aggressive war against international law. The category of the ‘exceptional’ has been invoked to legitimize and mobilize an array of violent and illiberal practices. These exceptional policies and practices, legitimated by claims about exceptional events and circumstances, I will call exceptionalism. Many difficult questions are raised by the problem of exceptionalism. What
makes an event or situation exceptional? Are there certain recognizable qualities and conditions that mark something out as being so? Does the exception bring about certain necessities and imperatives? Does the exception dictate an exceptional response? What is the relationship between the exceptional event and practices of exceptionalism? How do claims about exceptions work? How are they received? What gives discourses of exceptionalism authority? Who designates the exceptional? How do they overcome political contestation? How is an imperative and mobilizing link made between exceptional events and exceptional practices? What is at stake in the discourse and practice of exceptionalism? What are the politics of the exception? These post-9/11 transformations in political discourse and practice have not
gone unnoticed or uncontested. A broad argument has emerged about the proper relationship between liberty and security. Many urgent and challenging questions have been raised. Should liberal states ever act illiberally? Are there certain situations in which it is necessary to make exceptions to the law and the norm? Or do exceptional security practices destroy the very ‘freedoms’ they are supposed to protect?1 I take this ‘liberty/security’ debate as the starting point for an investigation into the politics of the exception. Does this debate capture what is at stake? I argue that it does not, because many
assumptions about liberty and security are problematized by exceptionalism itself. The need to defend the liberal subject as a historical achievement is taken
as a central principle of Western politics, yet the liberal subject, bearing freedom and rights, is thrown into contestation in the liberty/security debate. Is it ‘terrorism’ that threatens liberty, or the state itself ? In this contested field, the discourse of liberty is used both to oppose illiberal security practices and to legitimate them. We must be defended against illiberal and fanatical fundamentalists who are not proper liberal citizens at all, we are told. Terrorist suspects do not deserve liberty and rights, it is claimed. The political implications of liberal principles are being heavily contested. Judgements are put into play about who is liberal and who is illiberal, who is modern and who is pre-modern, and who is normal and who is exceptional. Liberal societies must be defended, we hear, but by and from whom? The conventional liberal debate contains contradictions that suggest there
is something profoundly at stake in the politics of the exception. Exceptionalism problematizes not only the liberal subject, but also liberal society and the principle of liberty itself. How do liberal societies defend themselves, and what is the relationship between their liberal identity and their security practices? How do liberal political authorities make sovereign decisions about who and what is exceptional? How can the sovereign state make exceptions to liberty in the name of liberty, or exceptions to the law in the name of the law? These questions point towards a set of problems that need to be taken very seriously. One effect of the discourse of exceptionalism and the liberty/security debate
has been a resurgence of interest in the sometime Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. In 1922, Schmitt proclaimed that ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’.2 Schmitt argued that there is always the ‘real possibility’ of an existentially threatening exceptional event or situation that falls beyond the limits of law, liberty, rights and constitutional government. The exception, according to Schmitt, brings about a more fundamental range of imperatives and necessities that can only be answered by unlimited, unconstrained and unmitigated exceptional sovereign power. For Schmitt, security always trumps liberty and liberal politics; the exception always trumps the norm. As a spectre haunting contemporary security politics, Schmitt seems to be
winning the argument, and has expressed a serious challenge that has not been adequately met by the popular liberal discourse. To ask how and why the claims of Schmitt work is to ask how and why the claims of exceptionalism work. If exceptionalism has taken hold in contemporary political discourse and practice, then how does Schmitt, as one of its sharpest and most uncompromising proponents, make his case? Schmitt’s exceptionalism operates as a pointed critique of the political and philosophical limits of liberalism. The reanimation of Schmitt is a symptom of the empirical rise of practices of exceptionalism. This book claims that a critique of Schmitt is also a critique of those practices.
