The Exceptional Life of the State: Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 / Giorgio Agamben, Stato di eccezione: Homo sacer, II, I. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. “The exception is more interesting than the regular case. The latter proves nothing, the exception proves everything.” Carl Schmitt Political Theology
1. Philosophers have often written of the nature of the state and of the state of nature. They have often written of the state of culture and the culture of the state. Rarely, however, have they written of a state of exception in which the state’s habitual nature and culture is suspended. It is to just such a state of exception—and of the possibility that such states of exception lie at the heart of the functioning of modern states—that the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has dedicated his most recent work, State of Exception [Stato di eccezione]. Like the larger project of which it is a part, State of Exception is a book about life. It is not about life in any banal or belletristic sense. It is an earnest and erudite analysis of the ethical, juridical and ontological coordinates through which Western culture has developed and defined a concept of life—of life’s essence and its limits. The book’s subtitle—which the English translation unaccountably fails to render—Homo sacer, II, 1, refers the reader to a project which Agamben inaugurated in 1995 with the publication of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita).1 This investigation of the life of power—profoundly influenced, as its subtitle reflects, by Michel Foucault’s final works2—was continued in the next—and anachronistic—volume to 1The hallmark concepts and themes of that work are also present in a collection of essays not contained within the Homo sacer series, Means Without End: Notes on Politics. 2One might note Foucault’s contribution to Agamben’s reflection is not limited to his reflection on biopolitics-which Agamben writes of in the opening pages of Homo Sacer (cf. HS 3-5; 5-8)-but also to the idea of sovereignty. If, for Foucault, the only real discursive recourse that was available to those who wished to resist the reigning disciplinary regime is a juridical discourse founded on a notion of sovereignty dating back to the rebirth of interest in Roman law in the Middle Ages, that option is not, for Foucault, a real or effective one. What remains to be done is then to think beyond the conception of sovereignty. As Foucault says, “it is not in a recourse to an idea of sovereignty as opposed to that of discipline that one will be able to limit the effects of disciplinary power [ce n’est pas en recourant à la souveraineté contre la discipline que l’on pourra limiter les effets mêmes du pouvoir disciplinaire]” (Il faut défendre la société, 35).
GENRE XXXVIII - SPRING/SUMMER 2005 - 179-196. COPYRIGHT © 2005 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA. ALL RIGHTS OF REPRODUCTION IN ANY FORM RESERVED.