State of exception and state of emergency
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 30, 2020
In a recent article published in an aligned newspaper, a jurist whom I once held in some esteem, tries to justify, with arguments that aspire to be legal, the state of exception declared by the governmen for the umpteenth time. Taking up implicitly the Schmittian distinction between commissary dictatorship — which aims to preserve or restore the constitution — and sovereign dictatorship — which aims, instead, at establishing a new order — said jurist distinguishes between emergency and exception (or, to put it more precisely, between state of emergency and state of exception). Such an argument does not, indeed, have any basis in law since no constitution can contemplate its own legitimate subversion. Hence, in his work Political Theology, which features the famous definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception”, Schmitt simply speaks of the Ausnahmezustand — the “state of exception” — which, in German doctrine and beyond, imposed itself as the technical term for defining the no man’s land between juridical order and political fact, and between law and its suspension. [Read more].
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 30, 2020
In a recent article published in an aligned newspaper, a jurist whom I once held in some esteem, tries to justify, with arguments that aspire to be legal, the state of exception declared by the governmen for the umpteenth time. Taking up implicitly the Schmittian distinction between commissary dictatorship — which aims to preserve or restore the constitution — and sovereign dictatorship — which aims, instead, at establishing a new order — said jurist distinguishes between emergency and exception (or, to put it more precisely, between state of emergency and state of exception). Such an argument does not, indeed, have any basis in law since no constitution can contemplate its own legitimate subversion. Hence, in his work Political Theology, which features the famous definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception”, Schmitt simply speaks of the Ausnahmezustand — the “state of exception” — which, in German doctrine and beyond, imposed itself as the technical term for defining the no man’s land between juridical order and political fact, and between law and its suspension. [Read more].
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