ABSTRACT ON AGAMBEN'S 'BARE LIFE (CHAPTER 1 – THE PARADOX OF
SOVEREIGNTY)'
- Carl Schmitt defines sovereignty as the paradox wherein the sovereign is at the same time outside and inside the juridical order – as the sovereign can proclaim sates of exception
- The law is outside itself – Schmitt's structure of exception
- The exception appears in its absolute form when it is a question of creating a situation in which juridical rules can be valid
- There is no rule that is applicable to chaos. Order must be established for juridical order to make sense
- In this genealogy, authority proves itself not to need law to create law
- This reveals that the exception is more interesting than the regular case to understand the substance and limits of politics.
- The exception does not only confirm the rule; the rule as such lives off the exception alone
- I find this proposition very deconstructivist in the sense given by Butler
- The exception is to positive law what negative theology is to positive theology
- The state of exception is thus not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension
- It has been observed that the juridico-political order has the structure of an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri were thus able to write 'sovereignty only rules over what it is capable of interiorizing'
- Maurice Blanchot says that modern politics tries to constitute the outside into an interiority of expectation or of exception
- Confronted with an excess, the system interiorizes what exceeds it through an interdiction and in this way 'designates itself as exterior to itself' (Foucault)
- The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaning itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule.
- The particular force of law consists in this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority – relation of exception.
- This is not a fact, since it is only created through the suspension of the rule
- E.G: The 'ordering of space' that is, acording to Schinmitt, constitutive of the sovereign nomos, is therefore not only a 'taking of land' (landesnahme) – the determination of a juridical and a territorial ordering (of an ordnung and an ortung) – but above all a 'taking of the outside', an exception (ausnahme).
- As such, the state of exception itself is thus essentially unlocalizable (even if definite spatiotemporal limits can be assigned to it from time to time)
- When our age tried to grant the unlocalizable a permanent and visible localization, the result was the concentration camp
- The camp – and not the prision – is the space that corresponds to this originary structure of the nomos. This is shown, among other things, by the fact that while prision law only constitutes a particular sphere of penal law and is not outside the normal order/ the juridical constellation that guides the camp is martial law and the state of siege.
- This is why it is not possible to inscribe the analysis of the camp in the trail opened by the works of Foucault. As the absolute space of exception, the camp is topologically different from a simple space of confinement. And it is this space of exception, in which the link between localization and ordering is definitely broken, that has determined the crisis of the nomos of the earth
- The main problematization to be made about sovereignty is not about who exercise it, but rather about 'over what is it being exercized'. In which case Agamben suggests that sovereignty is exercised against life as its sacralization doesn't prevent its murder – just its sacrifice – and subsequently orbitates the very possibility that it can be taken away. The possibility of emergency structures the juridico-normative power and, at the same time, derives from it.
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