Sovereign Exception Research Articles

Topologies of vulnerability and the proliferation of camp life

An important theoretical insight in critical geography of late has been the conceptual reevaluation of space topologically, in a manner that moves us away from an insistence on topographical priority. Unlike topography that relies on fixity, placement, grounding, and mapping, topology approaches space as a matter of relationality, redistribution, layering, transformation, or virtuality. The camp has been a ubiquitous geographical figure of late-modern life that has been subjected to topographical representations and rationalities. Recently, we have been encouraged to rethink the camp as a series of topological relations between the potentiality of spatial conditions of power and the capacity of bodies to be captured by regimes of sovereign exception. This paper examines two theorists who have made the space of the camp intelligible topologically: Agamben and Butler. These theorists help us to understand that what manifests itself topographically is often the result of topological dispositions that invest bodies with various forms of becoming. Whereas Agamben's camp topology allows us to see how political power can be ‘virtually everywhere’, Butler extends this theorizing by being more open to the presence of differential regimes of exposure to vulnerability. In this manner, Butler still finds a use for some form of critical topography.

Exposing and Deposing the Nexus: School Shootings and the Sovereign Exception

Exposing and Deposing the Nexus: School Shootings and the Sovereign Exception

SPINOZA AND THE BIOPOLITICAL ROOTS OF MODERNITY

Much has been written about biopolitical sovereignty in the wake of Agamben's work, which relies, at least in the first volume of Homo Sacer, on Carl Schmitt's transcendental account of sovereignty. This article argues, however, that Foucault and Arendt rightly identify what Derrida once called the “changing shape and place of sovereignty” in modernity, which for them is horizontal and disseminated within a presupposed nation. For this reason, we will look to the source of modern philosophical immanentism, Spinoza, to show that he is not extrinsic to this modern biopolitics, and demonstrates how the sovereign exception and its nationalized version work hand-in-glove in the era of which he was a part – and thus is part of all thinking that would take this to form a new communitas. In this way, we argue that it is Spinoza's political theology, not Schmitt's, that is the better pass-key to what Foucault and Arendt identify as biopolitical. By doing so, we put in tension two trends in recent Continental philosophy: philosophical vitalism and the critique of biopolitics at the heart at any contemporary thinking of community.

Justice and Legitimacy: Rawls, Schmitt and the Normativity of Law

This article argues that the later work of John Rawls offers the best hope for establishing a justifiable and sustainable concept of liberalism. The context for this concern is the work of Carl Schmitt, whose attack on liberal legal practices exposes a deep weakness in most liberal approaches to the concept of law. The divide between positivism and normative legal approaches (expressed in the debates among H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, and Hans Kelsen) seems to wither in the face of Schmittian critique, leaving only a depoliticized husk of legal practice. Rawls offers a different approach, a justificatory regime capable of engaging the problem of the sovereign exception while preserving the force of liberal normativity.

White Rajas, Native Princes and Savage Pirates:Lord Jimand the Cult of White Sovereignty

This article reads Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1900) as an ironic but also nostalgic reimagining of the first of the white rajas, James Brooke. This figurehead of informal imperial expansion was idolized in England, as archival documents reveal, for his charismatic bestowal of the rule of law in Borneo. As this article argues, however, Brooke achieved sovereignty through his personal defiance of law in an example of what Carl Schmitt terms the ‘sovereign exception’. Understood in this context, the novel's refrain, that Jim is ‘one of us’, gestures both to a Hobbesian model of representational sovereignty and to the absolute inapplicability of this model in a colonial context. As an individual embodiment of colonial hegemony, Jim governs with not only the consent but also the ostensible worship of the governed, in a fantasy of ecstatic submission by colonized people that effaces the violence at the heart of imperial conquest. Yet the novel's eroticized descriptions of Jim recall the worship it attributes to ...

Popular Sovereignty and Private Ordering in the State of Exception

Carl Schmitt, how trite for a paper from 2011. This paper unpacks some of the implications of the then-recent Schmittian turn, which raised important implications for our theories of public law, sovereignty, and punishment. Scholars have long made strong claims about unconstrained executive power during emergencies as being consistent with the claim that the republican system in the United States is one of laws, and not of men. In this paper I describe the Schmittian theory of sovereignty (via Benjamin, Agamben, and the secondary literature that has addressed these thinkers), then explain how limits have evolved on popular sovereignty, in turn shifting power to a model of centralized government power to decide on the exception. In so doing, I evaluate the claim offered by Schmittian constitutionalists that the sovereign exception is an inherent feature of western political institutions. It is necessary to look beyond the simple application of Schmittian ideas in the “emergency powers” context, and to evaluate how his concept of sovereignty maps onto our own understanding of “who decides” the law and its exceptions more generally. I then outline a conception of sovereignty that draws upon a close reading of these thinkers’ work. This conception stands in opposition to the older liberal understanding of popular sovereignty, as well as to the newer legal-pluralist understanding of private ordering. Next, I try to reconcile this conception of sovereignty with our understanding of private ordering, decisionism in public law, and jurisgenerative power. The paper ends with observations about the decline of private ordering, centralization of power, and concerns about potentiality and decisionism in American public law.

The Paradox of Sovereignty from Pindar to Byzantium

This essay traces the contradictory nature of sovereignty from its initial statement in Pindar's controversial ode in fr. 169 (Nomos basileus) to its medieval manifestation in the Greek novels surviving from medieval Byzantium, namely, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, Drosilla and Charikles, Aristandros and Kallithea, and Hysmine and Hsyminias. To unravel the paradoxical nature of Byzantine kingship in the novels, the author draws on two influential paradigms of sovereignty, Pindar's nomos basileus and Giorgio Agamben's bio-political paradox of homo sacer. The iconography of desire as it emerges in the medieval Greek narratives showcases the repression of a quasi-legitimate sovereign that mirrors Pindar's nomos basileus and Agamben's sovereign exception. Both posit Eros as a formidable ruler, revered and abhorred for his violent interventions, who stands simultaneously within and outside the law. This striking figuration of Eros as tyrannos and basileus is the byproduct of powerful patrons' propagandistic aspirations and the ingenuity of the authors of the novels themselves. In their narrative exploration of passion and sovereignty, Byzantine court writers in twelfth-century Constantinople reconcile the political interests of their patrons with the civic concerns of their times.

‘These People Could Be Anyone’: Fear, Contempt (and Empathy) in a British Immigration Removal Centre

Detention is proliferating as a governmental response to human mobility in the ‘war on terror’. Theoretical engagements with spaces of detention and enclosure have been influenced by Agamben's work on the camp and the sovereign exception. Such a view focuses on the abject ‘bare life’ that is produced by the sovereign decision. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among staff at a UK immigration removal centre, the paper makes the case for ‘going inside’ the detention centre. It examines the everyday life of detention through the lens of emotion, with a focus on fear and contempt. Exploring these emotions as forms of judgement or construal can unravel staff dispositions towards the detainees, and can demonstrate the ways in which emotion shapes the treatment the detainees receive. The paper argues for emotion as an analytical tool; in the case of detention, it can supplement abstract accounts of ‘the camp’.

Sovereign Times: Acts of Creation

Contemporary understandings of sovereignty have generally followed, or borrowed heavily from, Carl Schmitt’s theory of the exception, which Giorgio Agamben refers to as a “topological” concept. Schmitt conceives of the sovereign as a figure who exists both inside and outside of the juridical order. This paper suggests that Schmitt’s theory of the sovereign exception involves not only a topology, but also a temporality, in that it treats the decision as a single, compacted instant — one in which crisis, decision, and decider all miraculously leap into existence. It further suggests that Agamben’s interpretation of Saint Paul’s “ ho nyn kairos” or “time of the now,” and his distinction between the prophet and the apostle, effectively reinforces the Schmittian conception of “sovereign time.” As an alternative, I refer to Jacques Derrida’s work on iteration and undecidability, and maintain that genuine decisions cast us into, rather than delivering us from, the aproias of time.

“… we are being left to burn because we do not count”*: Biopolitics, Abandonment, and Resistance

Starting from the puzzle posed by the ultimate aim of modern governmental rationality to nurture the population and its tendencies to exclude large parts of the same population from the spectrum of its care, this article argues that abandonment is always already inscribed into this rationality. In contradiction to Agamben, abandonment here is not attributed to the sovereign exception but is traced back to modern processes transforming the political—as problematised by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Complementing their observations with the empirical and the anti-political implications of “the count” based on Ian Hacking's and Jacques Rancière's thought, first a conceptual framework for understanding biopolitical abandonment is outlined, then the materialisation of abandonment is assessed. Arriving finally at the possibility of thinking resistance to the power that disallows life through conceiving of politics as disruption, the final section discusses the South African shack-dwellers' struggle that, on occasions, is able to disturb the dynamics of abandonment and so potentially furthers the conceptualisation of resistance to biopolitics.

Kipling’s famine‐romance: Masculinity, gender and colonial biopolitics in “William the Conqueror”

Our present understanding of colonial masculinity is strongly mediated by Kipling’s fictional representation of late 19th‐century India as a space of male self‐determination and imperial service. This article concentrates on one of Kipling’s short stories, published in American and British women’s magazines and speculates on how a female audience might have caused Kipling to modify his (conventional) depiction of Anglo‐Indian gender relations. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s work and reviewing the history of colonial famine relief, I suggest that the formal conjunction of the romance genre with the unusual setting of a famine‐relief camp is the key to Kipling’s “gender transactions” in this story, and can be read as an indicator of the “biopolitical” logic of the camp as a space of sovereign exception.

Political Theology and Shakespeare Studies

AbstractThe current focus on political theology in Shakespeare studies is largely devoted to tracing how Shakespeare's dramas illuminate the structural link between religious and political forms in both early modernity and modern liberal democracy. Critics concerned with addressing Shakespeare's engagement with political theology are also interested in how Shakespeare's portrayal of sovereign bodies in crisis constitute an early representation of ‘biopolitics’. These critics draw on theorists ranging from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben to inform their analyses of the way Shakespeare dramatizes sovereignty in a ‘state of emergency’ in his histories and tragedies. Plays such as Richard II, Coriolanus, and Hamlet have drawn particular attention insofar as they vividly interrogate the nature of the sovereign exception and decision highlighted by theorists of political theology. While this line of criticism adds a new theoretical dimension to Shakespeare studies, it also offers the potential for remapping our understanding of the religious and political history of early modern England in its attention to the deforming pressure of religious schism on traditional structures of sovereignty.

The Gap in the Law and the Border-Breaching Function of the Exception

This paper evaluates the status and function of the border in the two polemics that bookend the long history of political theology: Paul’s polemic against the Jewish law, and Carl Schmitt’s critique of constitutional liberalism. Paul and Schmitt both challenge spatial notions of law that establish a boundary between an “inside” and an “outside” by topologizing “inside” and “outside” as continuous: through the “fulfillment of the law” in Paul, and through the strategy of sovereign exception in Schmitt. Schmitt even describes sovereignty as a “border concept,” a Grenzbegriff: a concept that pertains to borderline cases, but perhaps at the same time a concept of the border, one that proposes a particular interpretation of the border and its logical function. The essay argues that Schmitt’s contribution to the logical problem of law as border is to claim that the border need not be written, and that the sovereign exception is not of the order of a writing, but a “miracle” that is by nature unwritten and unwritable. The Hebraic tradition of law that is the object of Paul’s polemic offers another way of considering the border, as the function of the written law. It conceives of law not as a normative representation of an existing situation, but as the delimination of a space or gap that may not be transgressed. While the fulfillment of the law and the sovereign exception bypass the limit implied in the law, offering a topological interpretation of the border as what integrates “inside” and “outside” into a new whole, the Hebraic law aligns the border with the logical function of negation. The essay approaches these different accounts of the border by way of Lacan’s distinction between the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of law. The imaginary is the “incarnated” dimension of law, while the symbolic corresponds to the function of speech as a barrier or limit, and involves a spacing and negation, the introduction of a gap or emptiness that precludes anything like a “whole.”

Why the Economy is Often the Exception to Politics as Usual

Many political theorists have turned to the dramatic political events of the post-9/11 world – terrorism, war, and the erosion of civil liberties – for insight into our changing sense of the political. Yet few have examined the economic dimensions of these events or sought to learn what they might tell us about the changing nature of political community today. This article seeks to fill this gap by drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Georgio Agamben to examine the intimate and changing relationship between the political and the economic in the contemporary world. Now more than ever, there is a particular conception of politics at stake in global efforts to govern economic relations. Global economic institutions like the IMF and World Bank are policing the definition of political community and, in doing so, extending the scope of liberal governmentality. At the same time, the character of their implementation and justification is that of the sovereign exception, as state autonomy must continually be breached through extensive conditionality in order for it to be re-established in the form of a more ‘sound’ political and economic order. This is a sovereign exception with a difference: for the norm that is being established is one that necessarily limits the scope of sovereign power in the interests of market freedom. Paradoxically, while the economy is often the exception to politics as usual, is it an exception that simultaneously enables and constrains the possibility of exercising sovereignty itself?

Willing and Deciding: Hegel on Irony, Evil, and the Sovereign Exception

Willing and DecidingHegel on Irony, Evil, and the Sovereign Exception Andrew Norris If political decisionism is the claim that the most important political decisions cannot be regulated by rational norms and instead require a confrontation with the exception, Carl Schmitt remains its most notorious advocate. While Schmitt distanced himself from decisionism when he joined the Nazi party in the 1930s, his critics insist that his role in the events leading to Hitler’s assumption of power and his own membership in the party were only attempts “to put . . . into practice” his earlier theoretical attack on legal positivism and what he vaguely termed “liberalism.”1 Even for those who reject such sweeping claims, the teaching laid out in his 1922 Political Theology remains deeply disturbing. On Schmitt’s account, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” [Political Theology 5]. This decision is not a matter of recognizing an exception that already exists; rather it has a performative quality whereby the sovereign decision that names a given event to be an exception is the necessary precondition for the existence of the exception as such—as well as, by extension, the legal system from which it is excepted or removed. The exception is, as it were, called into being by the sovereign, whose decision on it is unregulated by the standards of law or, indeed, of normal life itself. The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juristic element—the decision in its absolute purity. The exception appears in its absolute form when a situation in which legal prescriptions can be valid must first be brought about. Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations. The norm requires a homogenous medium. . . . For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitively decides whether this normal situation actually exists. [Political Theology 13]2 [End Page 135] As the ability to decide on the exception (and hence the norm and the normal) in this sense is what defines the sovereign, sovereignty only appears in its “absolute purity” in the act of naming the exception. Schmitt’s sovereign is a creature of the border: “although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who decides when the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety” [Political Theology 7].3 But while the sovereign’s decision on the exception seems to range back and forth over the borders of the legal order, this movement is in fact the oscillation of the borders themselves—an oscillation that bears the two names sovereignty and exception. Though it makes sense in one way to speak of the sovereign overstepping the limits he lays down, in a deeper sense he, as the moment of decision, is himself the limit. On this account, George W. Bush was more accurate than he could have known in his recent halting suggestion that he is not just the nation’s “decider,” but also himself “a decision.” Or, as he more regularly if quietly maintains, an exception.4 While Schmitt’s celebratory analysis of the exception is the best-known today, he is hardly the inventor of this problematic: as he himself emphasizes in Political Romanticism (1919), the question of the decision lies at the heart of nineteenth-century Continental Romanticism, which celebrated an “occasionalism” derived from Malebranche in which the self and its whims take precedence over any substantive commitments that self might take up.5 Karl Löwith has demonstrated that Schmitt’s 1920s decisionism is, rather ironically, open in many aspects to his earlier attack upon this Romantic occasionalism [see Löwith]. Löwith was perhaps as attuned to this as he was on account of being a keen student of Hegel, as well as of Heidegger. Indeed, many features of Schmitt’s own attack upon the Romantics are anticipated in Hegel’s fierce critique of this movement and, in particular, his attack upon Friedrich Schlegel’s role in it. But if Hegel’s critique of Schlegel casts...

Reviews

Book Reviewed in this article: Ahmed, Monisha. 2002. Living fabric. Weaving among the nomads of Ladakh Himalaya. Banks, Marcus. 2001. Visual methods in social research. Causey, Andrew. 2003. Hard bargaining in Sumatra. Western travelers and Toba Bataks in the marketplace of souvenirs. Fausto, Carlos. 2001. Inimigos fiéis. História, guerra e xamanismo na Amazǒnia. Fiskesjö, Magnus. 2003. The Thanksgiving turkey pardon, the death of Teddy's bear and the sovereign exception of Guantánamo. Foster, Helen Bradely, and D. Clay Johnson (eds.). Wedding dress across cultures. Frank, Katherine. 2002. G‐strings and sympathy. Strip club regulars and male desire. Griffith, David, and Manuel Valdés Pizzini. 2002. Fishers at work, workers at sea. Harris, Mark. 2000. Life on the Amazon. The anthropology of a Brazilian peasant village. Knauft, Bruce (ed). 2002. Critically modern. Alternatives, alterities, anthropologies. Lohmann, Roger Ivar (ed.). 2003. Dream travellers. Sleep experiences and culture in the western Pacific. Martínez‐Hernáez, Angel. 2000. What's behind the symptom? Popenoe, Rebecca. 2004. Feeding desire. Fatness, beauty and sexuality among a Saharan people. Scher, Philip W. 2003. Carnival and the formation of a Caribbean transnation. Schrauwers, Albert. 2000. Colonial‘reformation’in the highlands of central Sulawesi, Indonesia, 1892–1995. Shackel, Paul (ed). 2001. Myth, memory and the making of the American landscape. Srinivas, M.N. 1996. Indian society through personal writings. Thomas, Helen, and Jamilah Ahmed (eds.). 2003. Cultural bodies. Ethnography and theory. Wallis, Robert J. 2003. Shamans/Neo‐shamans. Ecstasy, alternative archaeologies and contemporary pagans. Whittle, Alasdair. 2003. The archaelogy of people. Dimensions of Neolithic life.

Zones of Indiscernibility

The concept of a "zone of indiscernibility" plays a significant role in how both Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben conceive of life. Both attend to a level of sub-individual singularities in order to think life beyond, and below, the human, and it is to this level that the concept of a "zone of indiscernibility" pertains.1 Here, I will trace the divergences between their respective formulations of this concept, which in Agamben becomes a zone of indistinction or indifference, by considering the way each treats the relation between humans and animals. This relation will be the point of departure for the present analysis both because our conceptions of humanity and animality are central to how life gets organized and defined, and because both Deleuze and Agamben take the interchange between the human and the animal to be a zone of indistinction and indiscernibility. Loosely defined in a way consistent with both philosophers, a zone of indiscernibility or indistinction is an ontological domain in which the terms of a seemingly clear distinction are seen to overlap. On Deleuze's understanding, zones of indiscernibility are the loci of becoming. Thus, in A Thousand Plateaus, relations between humans and animals can be understood in terms of a process of becominganimal. Agamben devotes his 2002 text, The Open, to problematizing the ways in which the relationship between humans and animals has been articulated. Further, he clearly believes that the decisions shaping this relation are constitutive of the notion of "bare life," which figures so prominently in the rest of his work. Zones of Indistinction and theInclusion/ Exclusion Paradigm In a recent interview, Agamben asserts the need for a logic of zones of indistinction and his desire "to question the interweaving" of categories that have been rendered distinct and oppositional: in order to understand what is really at stake here, we must learn to see these oppositions not as "di-chotomies" but as "di-polarities," not substantial, but tensional. I mean that we need a logic of the field, as in physics, where it is impossible to draw a line clearly and separate two different substances.2 On his account, then, zones of indistinction are regions in which there is a coincidence of two seemingly opposed terms. Their separation and distinction creates two poles, but these poles are not, for example, "the animal" as a rigid, pure entity that is completely disconnected from "the human." Instead, the two poles indicate two types of movement with respect to this fundamental indistinction. The zone of indistinction makes possible relational structures in which all inclusions are simultaneously modes of exclusion and all exclusions are simultaneously modes of inclusion. This general paradigm pervades Agamben's work, which he characterizes as offering genealogies of specific instances of this structure of inclusion and exclusion. Indistinction, then, is the persistent and underlying structure, and what is of interest are the ways in which this indistinct zone is carved up and distinctions demarcated and maintained. The structure of the zone of indistinction can be explained briefly with reference to the figure of homo sacer and the sovereign exception that constitutes this limit figure. The state of exception, which is precisely not an exception but a constitutive exercise of power, is-not simply the enclosure of an outside within the domain of the sovereign power of the state for the purposes of controlling and suppressing it.4 Rather, the state of exception is one in which the law suspends itself in order to ground itself: "what is excluded in the exception [a particular case, e.g., homo sacer] maintains itself in relation to the rule in the form of the rule's suspension. The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it" (Agamben 1998, 170-71). The form of "non-relation" that characterizes the state of exception also characterizes the figure of homo sacer that is constituted on its basis. …

A ‘Retro‐version’ of Power: Agamben via Foucault on Sovereignty

This essay reviews Agamben’s work on the sovereign exception to ask whether it has missed crucial aspects in its reading of Foucault, especially given Foucault’s worry that the focus in political theory on sovereignty was but a focus on a ‘retro‐version’ of power. The first part reviews Foucault’s work on power and sovereignty in The History of Sexuality and ancillary texts from the late 1970s and early 1980s, followed by Agamben’s work on sovereignty and its connection to the work of Foucault. The essay is less concerned with whether Agamben is faithful to the work of Foucault than in ascertaining if Agamben forms a critique of sovereignty in line with what Foucault would consider a naïve notion of power, or if Agamben has identified something about the very concept of sovereignty, its place as exception to law and history, that is missing from Foucault’s analysis.

The Balkan Merchants: Changing Borders and Informal Transnationalization

In the Balkans transnationalism is currently associated with foreign interventions and organized crime. In between these extremes, rests a vast area of informal or ‘grey’ economy. This burgeoning transnational activity, which eludes official statistics, invites comparisons with the Balkan's last truly transnational period: the merchant-based economy of the late Ottoman Empire. Against such a historical backdrop contemporary informal and illicit trade in the Balkans proves to be an integral part of the world economy, a local response to the rise of global merchant networks, and a zone of sovereign exception which has affirmed and enabled the continuing existence of the international state system through a period of significant economic and political turbulence.

Citizen-saints: Shakespeare and political theology

Turning to the potent idea of political theology to recover the strange mix of political and religious thinking during the Renaissance, this bracing study reveals in the works of Shakespeare and his sources the figure of the citizensaint, who represents at once divine messenger and civil servant, both norm and exception. Embodied by such diverse personages as Antigone, Paul, Barabbas, Shylock, Othello, Caliban, Isabella, and Samson, the citizen-saint is a sacrificial figure: a model of moral and aesthetic extremity who inspires new regimes of citizenship with his or her death and martyrdom. Among the many questions Julia Reinhard Lupton attempts to answer under the rubric of the citizen-saint are: how did states of emergency, acts of sovereign exception, and Messianic anticipations lead to new forms of religious and political law? What styles of universality were implied by the abject state of the pure creature, at sea in a creation abandoned by its creator? And how did circumcision operate as both a marker of ethnicity and a means of conversion and civic naturalization? Written with clarity and grace, Citizen-Saints will be of enormous interest to students of English literature, religion, and early modern culture.