Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states.
The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt.
In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.
Author: Giorgio Agamben
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Customer Reviews
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The Liberalism of Fear, Contintental Style
In Agamben's new book, State of Exception, a sequel to Homo Sacer, he draws explicitly upon lectures he has delivered in New York and elsewhere in the years since 9/11, repeating the central themes of his past work and transposing it to a different key. Here, rather than speaking of "the camp," he argues that "the state of exception" is a primal form of modern government. Agamben has long argued, in a formulation best distilled in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (2000), that "the camp"- the concentration camp as much as the refugee camp-- is the paradigm of political modernity insofar as legal categories and the idea of sovereignty have served as a justification for abondoning `enemy bodies'to zones outside strict legality. While that book's conceptual apparatus is all too reminiscent of quirky Heideggerian readings of Greek politics, and he sometimes leans on tendentious readings of Foucault, Benjamin, Arendt, and Schmitt, Agamben's thesis, when examined closely, is no more "paranoid" than the more redemptive works of Primo Levi or Judith Shklar. Beneath his evasive ethics is yet another post-Holocaust "liberalism of fear." In my view, Agamben can be read as a philosopher of deep ethical concern and originality, but to read him charitably, one must start by getting used to his signature rhetorical devices of hyperbole, paradox, and "indistinctions"-- situations where conceptual opposites (security and insecurity, totalitarianism and civil war) are actually contained within each other. It is helpful to approach a number of these claims as "thought experiments." Moreover, perhaps more than any other concern of legal theory, the discussion of states of exception is an area of inquiry where these discursive vices can actually be seen as virtues: the language of indistinction and undecidibility is often descriptively appropriate.
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