ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues instead that the exception must be better understood in terms of performativity. When the exception becomes a regulated and normalised technique of government, the verification of its legality or illegality – a central trope of past and present jurisprudence – becomes a trivial enterprise. More important, instead, would be calling into question the very nature of the exception as a ‘legal object’, which ‘lies squarely within the field of public law’. Consequently, the possibility of abusing emergency powers simply to obtain a certain goal, and not as a reaction to a chain of perilous events, will appear as inscribed in the very nature of the exception as a legal object. But the term masquerade is also telling in another sense – the one that pertains to the sphere of the ‘fictional’. Law’s practice and history is populated by fictions of very different kinds.
