Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: The State of ExceptionAgamben defines the state of exception as a 'threshold of indistinction' that suspends law by differentiating what is included in the legal order from that which is excluded.The state of exception is, therefore, not a precise or identifiable kind of law (like the law of war), given that it suspends legal order and abolishes executive, legislative and judicial powers (2005: 6-7).Agamben's (1998) notion of the state of exception combines Carl Schmitt's (1985) idea of the sovereign and Michel Foucault's (1977) treatise on biopower to argue that the sovereign makes decisions concerning life and death.Agamben (1998: 15) agrees with Schmitt's assertion that both the sovereign and the execution of political power are a consequence of 'the sovereign decision'.For Schmitt, the decision is the originary politico-legal structure,1 since sovereignty and the sovereign do not exist prior to the decision but are constituted through it.The act of decisionmaking simultaneously creates the state of exception and invents the 'decider' (the sovereign).The sovereign is therefore always an ambiguous and paradoxical creature, since the sovereign exists inside and outside, as well as before and after, the order it governs.The structure of the sovereign paradox is the state of exception, since it differentiates what is included and excluded from legal order at the precise point that the sovereign decides on the exception.The state of exception is therefore a paradoxical threshold of indistinctionan interval or liminal spacethat suspends law and destroys legal and political boundaries through the contradictory act of forging them.The state of exception is the principle of legal localization, since the sovereign decision opens the space by which a certain legal order and territorial formation become possible.Schmitt contends that the moment of the sovereign decision opens the spaces by which certain legal order and territorial formation become possible.This does not have to be only a physical location (e.g.territory), but can also refer to legal status, namely citizenship.The sovereign decision, then, creates and guarantees the spaces and situations law needs for its own validity (Agamben, 1998: 16).Contrary to Schmitt's idea of the ordering of space as 'taking the land' (the determination
Source: Body & Society
Authors: Erin Kruger, Shoshana Magnet, Joost Van Loon
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2089433518