ABSTRACT
The last chapter on Schmitt concluded that two main sets of problems need further consideration. The first is ‘the exception’ as a problem of exceptional contingency and limit. The second is the problem of the politics of exceptionalism, particularly its discursive and socio-political processes and conditions of possibility. Schmitt uses the former – the idea of the exception as a metaphysical and philosophical problem of limit and contingent event – to construct a legitimation of the latter – a politics of exceptional policies and practices. His suture of the problem of ‘the exception’ to a politics of exceptionalism both is overdetermined with an authoritarian nation-statist ethic and rests on some slippery conceptual moves, namely the conflation of the exceptional event with both the exceptional sovereign response to that event and the sovereign decision that the event is exceptional in the first place. This chapter will focus on the first of these sets of problems – the exception
as limit and contingency. The question is whether the exception can be addressed in a way that resists the move to a Schmittian politics. If Schmitt’s strategy is to present the problem of the exception in such a way that it appears to carry an inherent set of political determinations, necessities and imperatives, is there a way of addressing the problem of the exception which does not produce or imply these same political effects? The contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has produced
some of the most serious work on these problems. Indeed it would be fair to credit him, at least in part, with the current revival of interest in the exception concept. His work in this area is presented in two books: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, first published in Italian in 1995 and translated in 1998, and what is described as its sequel, State of Exception, first published in Italian in 2003 and translated in 2005. The two books are of a slightly different order. Homo Sacer is the longer and more original text. It lays out some rather innovative ideas regarding sovereignty and the figures of man and life. State of Exception is a shorter text that is less far-reaching in its ambition, but engages more closely with the debates in the literature concerning the idea of a ‘state of exception’. This chapter is an exposition, analysis and critique of Agamben’s work.
Through a close reading of these two texts it will establish what Agamben is
doing, why it is important, where it is limited or problematic, and what needs to be addressed differently or considered further. It will make reference to contemporary empirical concerns and engage closely with Agamben’s readings of key theorists for the problem of the exception, specifically Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. The overriding concern is to question the political and methodological implications of Agamben’s response to the problem of the exception.
