Limited edition II
Giorgio Agamben is one of the most important figures of modern philosophy.
In his sequel to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Agamben attempts to theorize historically and philosophically the notion of the state of exception. He provides with a rich historiography of the state of exception, starting with the state of siege whose origins are traced back to the French Revolution.
Particularly, Agamben traces the origins in the French Constituent Assembly’s decree of July 8, 1791, which distinguished between état de paix (state of peace), état de guerre (state of war) and état de siège (state of siege) while the term fictitious or political state of siege goes back to the French doctrine (referring to Napoleon’s decree of December 24, 1811) that provided with the possibility of a state of siege that the emperor could declare whether or not a city was actually under attack or directly threatened by enemy forces.
For him, one of the most central issues regarding the state of exception is that in its modern formulation, it is a creation of the democratic-revolutionary tradition and not the absolutist one.
He provides with a rich variety of references drawing from Western European and American contexts using primarily the works of Carl Schmitt but also of Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Clinton Rossiter, Benjamin and Hannah Arendt.
We are informed that it is during the period of WWI that exceptional legislation by executive decree became a regular practice in the European democracies. From this as his modern starting point, he provides with more examples: from the history of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution whose uses and abuses explain part of Hitler’s rise to power; the use of Article 16 of the French Constitution by Charles De Gaulle during the Algerian crisis in April 1961; the Italian kingdom’s resort to proclaiming a state of siege from 1862 (in Palermo and the Sicilian provinces) and the Fascist governments’ abuse of emergency decrees; the British DORA (Defence of the Realm Act) of August 4, 1914 and the latter Emergency Powers Act (October 29, 1920) which went beyond the emergency of the war (also in time of strikes and social tensions); Lincoln’s authorisation given to the General in Chief of the Army to suspend the writ of habeas corpus during the American Civil War, Wilson’s series of acts that granted him absolute control over the administration of the country and prohibited disloyal activities (to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government in the United States” was criminalised) until Pr. Bush’s decision to refer to himself as the “Commander in-Chief of the Army”.
Agamben discusses the inherent paradox of the state of exception: “If the state of exception’s characteristic property is a (total or partial) suspension of the juridical order, how can such a suspension still be contained within it?How can an anomie be inscribed within the juridical order?” only to answer that “[I]n truth, the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold…where…[the state of exception and juridical order] do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other.”
“Faced with the unstoppable progression of what has been called a ‘global civil war’ the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics. This transformation of a provisional and exceptional measure into a technique of government threatens radically to alter- in fact, has already palpably altered- the structure and meaning of the traditional distinction between constitutional forms. Indeed, from this perspective, the state of exception appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism.”
Giorgio Agamben is a true among the few.
