ABSTRACT

War and political violence are defined as periods of exception. The violent tactics associated with war have been famously characterized by Carl von Clausewitz as politics ‘by other means’; furthermore, war is often labelled as a period of unrest and chaos in contrast to ‘normal’, peaceful politics. In the current international political climate, references to exceptionality are rampant. The war on terror is often framed as an exceptional war, requiring novel tactics.1 Furthermore, the policies that individual nations have constructed in response to this so-called war – including the Patriot Act and the practice of extraordinary rendition in America and Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act – emphasize the supposed need for exceptional political responses and strategies. Giorgio Agamben’s work on exceptionality in politics and what he calls the state of exception has been extremely popular and frequently applied over the last decade, particularly in scholarship centred on the war on terror.2 This chapter focuses on Agamben’s conception of the state of exception as outlined in Homo Sacer (1998). Rens Van Munster points out that Agamben’s Homo Sacer is ‘driven by an ethical drive to lay bare the juridico-political mechanisms of power that make it possible to commit acts of violence that do not count as crime’.3 As will be elaborated later in this chapter, Agamben finds answers to this dilemma of crime without retribution in his understanding of the state of exception. Agamben explains the state of exception as the process by which the sovereign suspends law, thereby creating both a category of people and a space that are beyond the protections of the state. It is a ‘primitive’ space of chaos where laws can be ignored and individuals can be killed without penalty. In doing so, Agamben argues that the sovereign recreates the very ‘state of nature’ which initially gave meaning to the sovereign and to politics. Like many investigators of war, Agamben is interested in understanding the conditions that make exceptional violence possible, yet, by discounting gender, he misses the everyday, private types of violence systemic to society as well as the centrality of gender and the gendered subject to understandings of normal and chaos. Agamben’s analysis is representative of wider thinking about exceptionality in its discounting of gender. In particular, analyses of war and political violence all too often ignore the implicit, deeply embedded gender structures that give meaning to ideas about everyday politics and exceptional politics.