Anonymous Comrade submits:

Giorgio Agamben. Stato di eccezione.

Torino: Bollati Borighieri. 2003

Brett Neilson
University of Western Sydney

Review by Brett Neilson (University of Western Sydney)

At a time when Australians face trial before U.S. military tribunals,
asylum seekers languish in camps like Baxter and Nauru, and new government
legislation allows the detention of Australian citizens themselves, the
prose of Giorgio Agamben burns with relevance for those who live on the
southern continent. Stato di eccezione is Agamben's latest offering, an
extension and deepening of Homo sacer (1995)--of which it announces itself
as Volume II, Part 1. Growing more directly from this earlier text than
Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998), Volume III of Homo sacer, the book is
at once more historically grounded and more politically audacious. Agamben
steps away from the pessimistic analytic of 'bare life' to recover some of
the redemptive energy that inhabits La communità che viene (1990), his
best-known work among English language readers. Perhaps it is the force
with which emergency powers have gripped the world in the past two years
that lends Stato di eccezione a political intensity that remains wholly
current even as it interrogates Roman republican law and plummets the
ontological depths of early 20th-century thinkers like Carl Schmitt and
Walter Benjamin.

In the opening pages of Stato di eccezione, Agamben announces that 'before
the unstoppable progression of what has been identified as a "global civil
war," the state of exception tends ever more to present itself as the
dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics.' The reference to
'global civil war' signals an immediate concern with the current
transformations of world order, even as the text notes that this term first
appears in 1961 (both in the work of Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt).
Agamben identifies the 'military order' issued by George W. Bush on 13
November 2001 (subjecting non-citizens suspected of terrorist activities to
indefinite detention and military tribunals) as the most recent in a line
of emergency measures that open a no-man's-land between the political and
the juridical.

The French état de siège (which finds its origins in the eighteenth century
Revolution), article 48 of the Weimar constitution (mobilized over 250
times before 1933), the Italian decreto di urgenza (which became the normal
means of governmental legislation following World War II), the emergency
powers of the British parliament (introduced with the Defence of the Realm
Act in 1914), and the capacity of the U.S. president to issue 'executive
orders' (which allowed Lincoln to suspend to writ of habeas corpus in 1861,
Wilson to assume emergency powers in 1917-18, and F.D. Roosevelt to declare
a national emergency six hours after assuming power in 1933)--all of these
attest the inextricable link between the state of exception and the normal
functioning of the bourgeois democratic state. Far from being a hallmark of
totalitarian rule, the state of exception 'presents itself as a zone of
indetermination between democracy and absolutism.' Thus even those who
argue that emergency powers are necessary to safeguard democracy, such as
Clinton. L. Rossiter--author of Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis
Government in the Modern Democracies (1948, must recognize the mutual
implication of the emergency state and absolutist government, noting that
'the constitutional use of emergency powers is becoming the rule and not
the exception.'

As in Homo sacer, Agamben's argument finds its point of departure in Carl
Schmitt's Political Theology. Schmitt describes the state of exception as a
kind of legal vacuum, a 'suspension of the legal order in its totality.'
But for him, the issue is to ensure a relation, no matter what type,
between the state of emergency and the legal order: 'The state of emergency
is always distinguished from anarchy and chaos and, in the legal sense,
there is still order in it, even through it is not a legal order.' The
state of emergency introduces a zone of anomy into the law, and thus it can
be presented as a doctrine of sovereignty. The sovereign, who proclaims the
state of emergency, remains anchored in the legal order. But precisely
because this decision concerns a nullification of the norm, and
consequently, because the state of emergency represents the control of a
space that is neither external nor internal, 'the sovereign remains
exterior to the normally valid legal order, and nevertheless belongs to
it.' In Stato di eccezione, Agamben works to sever this link between
sovereign power and legal order, revealing an 'essential fiction' that
underlies the push to 'global civil war.' The book thus points to a
'countermovement' that separates life from law--a force that 'melts that
which has been artificially and violently linked.' There are three main
moments to this countermovement.

1. First is Agamben's interpretation of the term 'force-of-law,' which, as
he notes, supplies the title for a 1990 lecture by Jacques Derrida. For
Agamben, it is astounding that, despite the debate between philosophers and
legal theorists occasioned by this lecture, there has been little analysis
of the 'enigmatic formula' that provides its title. Following article six
of the French constitution of 1791, he finds the term 'force-of-law' to
designate the indestructible character of the law--the supreme value of
acts expressed by an assembly representative of the people (which the
sovereign can neither abrogate nor modify). In the technical sense,
'force-of-law' refers not to the law itself, but to decrees that have, as
the expression goes, 'force-of-law'--decrees that executive power can be
authorized to give, and most notably in the state of exception. The term
identifies a gap between the efficacy of the law and its formal essence,
and this means that acts that do not have the value of law can acquire the
'force-of-law.' For Agamben, this separation between law and 'force-of-law'
characterizes the state of exception. In the state of exception, the
'force-of-law' can exist without law. There is a radical separation between
potential and act as well as a mystical element or fiction that seeks to
eliminate this disconnection. Far from leading back to the legal order, as
Schmitt contends, the state of exception exhibits the 'impossible
conjuncture' between norm and reality, or between the law and its
application. It is a limit zone where logic and practice intermingle and a
pure violence without logos activates an enunciation with no real referent.

2. To deepen his case against Schmitt, Agamben offers an analysis of the
Roman republican convention of the iustitium--an ancient precedent for the
state of exception. When the Roman senate was alerted to a situation that
seemed to threaten or compromise the republic, they pronounced a senatus
consultum ultimum. This involved the declaration of a tumultus or a state
of emergency whose consequence was the proclamation of the iustitium. The
iustitium involved not a suspension of the framework of justice but a
suspension of the law itself. Following Adolphe Nissen's Das Iustitium
(1877), Agamben distinguishes the legal void of the iustitium from the
paradigm of dictatorship. Under the Roman constitution, a dictator was a
special type of magistrate selected by the consuls, whose wide powers were
conferred by means of a lex curiata that defined their scope. In the
iustitium, by contrast, there was no creation of a new magistrate. The
powers enjoyed by the magistrates under the iustitium resulted not from the
conferment of a dictatorial imperium but from the suspension of laws that
limited their actions. Agamben points out that the same is true for modern
emergency powers. It is a mistake to confuse the state of exception with
dictatorship (a fullness of powers or pleromatic state of law)--and this
is, indeed, the limit of Schmitt's analysis. In spite of the common view,
neither Hitler nor Mussolini was a dictator. Hitler, in particular, was
Chancellor of the Reich, legally appointed by the president. What was so
dangerous about the Nazi regime is that it allowed the Weimar constitution
to remain valid, while doubling it with a secondary and legally
non-formalized structure that could only exist alongside the first by
virtue of a generalized state of emergency. For one reason or another, the
existence of such spaces devoid of law seems so essential to the legal
order that the latter must make every possible effort to assure a relation
to the former, as if the law in order to guarantee its functioning must
necessarily entertain a relation to anomy.

3. In this perspective, Agamben reads the debate on the state of emergency
that pitted Carl Schmitt against Walter Benjamin from 1928 to 1940.
Schmitt's influence on Benjamin has always appeared scandalous, but Agamben
attempts to reverse this scandal, suggesting that Schmitt's theory of
sovereignty must be read as response to Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence.'
In this 1921 essay, Benjamin posits the existence of a 'pure' or
'revolutionary' violence--that is, violence outside the law, a violence
that ruptures the dialectic between the violence that institutes the law
(constituent power) and the violence that upholds the law (constituted
power). Agamben argues that the state of emergency is the means invented by
Schmitt to respond to this postulation of a pure violence. For Schmitt,
there can be no violence absolutely exterior to the nomos, because
revolutionary violence, once the state of emergency is established, always
finds itself to be included in the law. Benjamin's definitive response to
Schmitt is the famous passage in 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'
where he surmises that 'the "state of emergency" in which we live is not
the exception but the rule.' But before revisiting those important lines,
Agamben detours through Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, which
contrasts Schmitt's theory of sovereign decision with the notion of
sovereign indecision. Far from deciding on the state of exception (and
thereby including it in the legal order), the sovereign in the German
tragic drama aims to avoid such emergency measures (to keep them separate
from the legal order): 'Whereas the modern concept of sovereignty amounts
to a supreme executive power on the part of the prince, the baroque concept
emerges from a discussion of the state of emergency, and makes it the most
important function of the prince to avert this.' Confronted with the
decision to proclaim an emergency, the sovereign reveals that 'he is almost
incapable of making a decision.' The fracture between sovereign power and
the capacity to act thus becomes impassable. For Benjamin, the state of
exception leads not to the restoration of legal order but to a generalized
catastrophe. And in this catastrophe, the transcendental claims of
sovereign power are vanquished: 'However highly he is enthroned over
subject and state, ... [the sovereign] is confined to the world of
creation; he is lord of the creatures, but he remains a creature.'

This figure of generalized catastrophe under a sky void of transcendental
authority haunts Agamben's description of a 'global civil war'
characterized by 'governmental violence that ignores international law
externally and produces a permanent state of exception internally, while
all the time pretending to uphold the law.' Far from facilitating a return
to the 'state of law,' the current global emergency throws the very
concepts of the 'state' and 'law' into question. Today the state of
exception has reached its 'maximum planetary unfolding' and manifests
itself as an unrestrained festival in which pure violence is exercised in
full freedom. Not accidentally does the term iustitium, after the fall of
the Roman republic, come to designate the period of public mourning
following the sovereign's death. According to classicist Karl Meuli, anomic
festivals (such as the Roman saturnalia, the charivari, and the medieval
carnival) display a connection with the situations of suspended law that
characterize certain archaic penal institutions. They thus reveal the
anomic drive that lies at the very heart of the nomos. As Agamben explains,
'in the exhibition of the mournful character of every festival and the
festive character of every mourning, law and anomy show their distance and,
at the same time, their secret solidarity.' This double movement adds a new
level of disingenuousness to one of the most feted comments of recent
Australian public life--Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock's description
of the former Lager at Woomera: 'It's not a holiday camp, nor should it be
seen as one.'

For Agamben, the Western political system is founded in the double movement
between two heterogeneous and antithetical elements: nomos and anomy, legal
right and pure violence, the law and the forms of life whose articulation
is guaranteed by the state of emergency. In opposition to the movement that
seeks to maintain the relation between these elements, he poses a
countermovement that seeks to break the fictional link between violence and
the law. He thus understands contemporary Western culture as a 'field of
tensions' in which two opposing forces clash--one that institutes and
imposes, the other that deactivates and deposes. There can be no hope of
flattening these forces onto indifference, or containing them in the
synthesizing logic of dialectic. But equally it is only possible to
distinguish them by virtue of their articulation in the biopolitical
machine--'bare life is a product of the machine and not something that
pre-exists it.' The task of a radical politics is to break the link between
violence and the law, an action that implies not the return to an original
state but the accession to a new condition. Stato di eccezione is Agamben's
most sustained blueprint of this politics-to-come, a document that charts
an ethical and conceptual path beyond the state of exception by providing
tools to break into and move through it.

Dr. Brett Neilson

Centre for Cultural Research

University of Western Sydney

PENRITH SOUTH DC NSW 1797

AUSTRALIA

Tel: +61-2-4736-0387

Fax: +61-2-4736-0224

http://www.uws.edu.au/ccr

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