SPECIAL ISSUE An Interview with Giorgio Agamben By Ulrich Raulff*
[This interview, conducted by Ulrich Raulff in Rome on 4 March 2004, was originally published, in German, by the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 6 April 2004. This translation was made by Morag Goodwin, EUI, Florence. All notes have been provided for this publication by the editors.]
Raulff: Your latest book The State of Exception has recently been published in German. It is an historical and legal-historical analysis of a concept that we, at first blush, associate with Carl Schmitt. What does this concept mean for your Homo Sacer1 project? Agamben: The State of Exception belongs to a series of genealogical essays that follow on from Homo Sacer and which should form a tetralogy. Regarding the content, it deals with two points. The first is a historical matter: the state of exception or state of emergency has become a paradigm of government today. Originally understood as something extraordinary, an exception, which should have validity only for a limited period of time, but a historical transformation has made it the normal form of governance. I wanted to show the consequence of this change for the state of the democracies in which we live. The second is of a philosophical nature and deals with the strange relationship of law and lawlessness, law and anomy. The state of exception establishes a hidden but fundamental relationship between law and the absence of law. It is a void, a blank and this empty space is constitutive of the legal system. Raulff: You wrote already in the first volume of Homo Sacer that the paradigm of *
Ulrich Raulff is the Culture Editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
See, e.g., GIORGIO AGAMBEN, HOMO SACER: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE (Daniel Heller-Roazen trans., Stanford University Press 1998). Homo Sacer is, according to ancient Roman law, a human being that could not be ritually sacrificed but whom one could kill without being guilty of committing murder. Agamben uses the concept as the underpinning for a fresh decoding of the major political difficulty in our century: the rise of the worst sort of totalitarianisms, with Nazism at its apex. 1