Book Review by Vik Kanwar - State of Exception (Stato di eccezione). Translated by Kevin Attell
Book review of: Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Stato di eccezione). Translated by Kevin Attell, University of Chicago Press, 2005. 104pp.
Reviewed by Vik Kanwar, in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, in July 2006
Introduction: In 2004, to protest certain new security measures applied to foreign nationals entering the United States, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote in Le Monde that he would refuse to travel to the U.S. to assume a visiting professorship at New York University. While Agamben, as a citizen of an EU country, would likely have been exempted from these measures, he offered his gesture as a call for solidarity with vulnerable populations and warned that similar biometric measures had foreshadowed the Holocaust. Whatever the response to Agamben’s announcement in Europe (where philosophers are considered important public figures), in the United States (where they are less venerated), his statement was greeted with a certain degree of incredulity. Academic colleagues and other commentators in the media seemed either offended by the implied comparison of mere fingerprinting with the operation of concentration camps or else they dismissed his comment as symptomatic of a politically irresponsible and paranoid style of thought infecting academia. Whether either of these reactions would be justified by a deeper consideration of the issues, readers of Agamben’s past work will immediately recognize the consistency of his gesture with earlier theoretical claims.
Agamben has long argued, in a formulation best distilled in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, that the “camp”—be it concentration camp or refugee camp—is the paradigm of political modernity insofar as legal categories and the idea of sovereignty have served as a justification for abandoning ‘‘enemy bodies’’ to zones outside strict legality. In Homo Sacer, Agamben is steeped in the most dystopian and rights-skeptical thought of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Carl Schmitt, yet he still emerges with a relatively redemptive ethical sensibility, one that would be appealing to those who seek to defend human dignity against cruelty. Certainly, his persistent invocation of the Holocaust to dramatize modern forms of exclusion and outlawry puts him in the company of twentieth-century ethicists ranging from Emmanuel Levinas to Judith Shklar, who drew upon the Holocaust as the ultimate experiential grounding for their theories. In my view, Agamben can be read as a philosopher of deep ethical concern and originality but, to read him charitably, one must become accustomed to his signature rhetorical devices of hyperbole, paradox, and “indistinction” (whereby Agamben frames conceptual opposites, such as security and insecurity, rights and repression, or public and private, as deeply intertwined). It is helpful to approach a number of these conceits as thought experiments. For example, the use of hyperbole is not very different from “slippery slope” arguments. As for paradox and indistinction ...it seems fair to say that states of exception—perhaps more so than any other subject matter of legal theory—constitute an area of inquiry where these discursive vices can actually be seen as virtues. The language of indistinction and undecidability is often descriptively appropriate, and this is evident in numerous scholarly accounts of the blurred distinctions between war and crime, sovereignty and territorial control, combatant and civilian, legal and political decisions, all of which have increased since September 11, 2001.
In Agamben’s new book, State of Exception, a sequel to Homo Sacer, he draws explicitly on lectures delivered in New York and elsewhere in the years since 9/11, repeating the central themes of his past work and transposing them 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. While innumerable debates and insights may be drawn from this slim volume, I will limit this review to three areas: (a) Agamben’s historical account of the state of exception, including his most controversial claim, in which he finds a basis for the practice not in the Roman dictatorship but in an obscure public ritual known as iustitium; (b) recent constitutional theory that refutes Agamben’s statement that the state of exception (even as he redefines it) has been ignored as a “question of public law”; and, finally, (c) the curious absence of Agamben’s distinctive theories of “spaces of exception,” which had been productively developed in earlier works but are muted here in service of a larger ethical thesis.
For Agamben, the vulnerability of the “others” in states of exception reveals the fragility of rights discourse generally. He sees the distinctions between territorial sovereignty and deterritorialized punishment, between citizen and noncitizen, disappearing, so that we will eventually confront “exceptional” measures as the new “normal.” Agamben makes a case for these claims, yet his account suffers from an insufficient engagement with the body of existing public law—that is to say, constitutionalist—literature.
The full text of the book review can be found here and here, and a pdf version can be found here.
For more, please also see this book review of Agamben’s State of Exception conducted by ISSE here.
