Declarations of independence

Abstract

Extending Giorgio Agamben’s analysis, I argue that The Declaration of Independence founds the American state of exception. The failure of British colonial rule to recognize the full rights of its colonists is the exception that justifies the suspension of British law for the sake of preserving natural law. But that exception quickly becomes the rule as the nation is founded and developed. Jefferson’s agrarian ideal depends on both the city and the immigrant in complex ways. Both are eventually incorporated into the nation as necessary evils—as on‐going threats that justify a permanent state of emergency. The sovereign authority therefore legitimates the supposedly exceptional circumstances that require the suspension of constitutional rights and the imposition of military operations in the civil sphere. Increasingly, the threat of the city and the immigrant Other legitimizes the USA as a permanent state of exception. A new locus of the state of exception is the rurban area. Neither urban nor rural, it is a threatened place, a marginalized place. As such, it draws marginalized people, the paradigm of whom is the immigrant. In this paper I focus on the particular case of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Hazleton leads a US movement of ‘rurban’ towns that have passed laws targeting Latino immigrants. While this movement is intended to usurp federal sovereign authority on the grounds that the federal government has failed in its responsibilities to control its southern border, the rhetoric and strategies that Hazleton employs mimic the national ones from which they supposedly declare their independence.