In so doing, he unearths a distinction between those who see the state of exception as juridical and those who consider it political. 3).Īgamben continues with an examination of Western law and scholarship on the state of exception.

As an example, he mentions the USA Patriot Act (issued on October 26, 2001), which gives the United States government the power “to take in custody any alien suspected of activities that endangered the national security of the United States” (p. According to Agamben, the state of exception increasingly appears to be dominant in contemporary politics. What is little recognized is that law possesses within itself an exception that traps humans and objects within the juridical order. He concludes that, as a result, political crises appear only to be understood on political and not juridical grounds. Scholars instead regard the state of exception as a political problem. In the first chapter, “The State of Exception as a Paradigm of Government,” Agamben problematizes the fact that there is no juridical theory of the state of exception. 2 According to Agamben, this juridical measure can be considered to be the starting point of the Third Reich as an example of what he calls the “state of exception,” the suspension of the juridical order. This law, the Verordnung zum Schutz vom Volk und Staat (Decree for the Protection of the People and the State), was proclaimed on February 28, 1933, a day after the Reichstag fire. He adopts a poststructuralist perspective exposing the assumptions of modernity as (effective) fictions.Īgamben begins his current inquiry with an analysis of the legal basis behind the National Socialist persecution of unwanted groups.

State of Exception is a sequel to Homo Sacer, in which he argued that the concentration camp (including the death camp at Auschwitz) is “the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.” 1 In State of Exception (a book consisting of a mere eighty-eight pages with three pages of references and a three-page index), Agamben investigates the terra incognita between (public) law, political fact, juridical order, and life itself. Well known are the author’s works that preceded this book, namely, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999) (both translated from the Italian by Daniel Heller-Roazen). State of Exception, a book written by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, is the English translation by Kevin Attell of the monograph Stato di eccezione. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Agamben state of exception summary