Abstract
AbstractThe state of exception is classically understood as a situation devoid of laws and marked by the sovereign's absolute powers. This picture is unsettled by offering a more tenuous account of the state of siege, showing that normal laws and processes can be a constitutive dimension of modern exceptional regimes. Through an ethnography of a permanent space of exception in India, I argue that emergency regimes as forms of structural injustice are marked by affective intensities and anger directed against state power. Irom Sharmila's 16‐year hunger strike in the state of Manipur was one such affective act that challenged state authority. The police mitigated this challenge through the minutia of rules and processes targeting the protester's body. The state's legal response to the hunger strike showed that emergency powers are better understood not by the sovereign's fantasy of absolutism but as the messy affective mediation of the normal and exceptional.
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