State of Exception

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"State of Exception is an impressive and disquieting meditation on the state of the democratic institutions by which political power is organised in the West. Written in a simple and lucid language, this is an erudite, meticulous, and precise examination of the long and complex history of the ideological framework underpinning the present obsession with the state of exception as the ''new form-of-state'' as it obtains at least in the USA and UK." -- Tony Simoes da Silva "International Journal of Baudrillard Studies" (07/01/2005)

"A worthwhile addition to the burgeoning literature on mass violence."--Kenneth Hemmerechts "H-Net "

"The impact of Agamben''s thought since the publication of the first volume of "Homo Sacer" . . . has been immense not merely in the field of continental philosophy but also in political and legal theory, sociology, and in literary and cultural studies."--M. Canstantinou and M. Margaroni "Continental Philosophy "

""State of Exception" is an impressive and disquieting meditation on the state of the democratic institutions by which political power is organised in the West. Written in a simple and lucid language, this is an erudite, meticulous, and precise examination of the long and complex history of the ideological framework underpinning the present obsession with the state of exception as the 'new form-of-state' as it obtains at least in the USA and UK."--Tony Simoes da Silva"International Journal of Baudrillard Studies" (07/01/2005)

"This book will likely be every bit as influential as [Agamben's] previous texts. . . . An indispensable read for geographers and others interested in the spatiality of law and sovereign power."--Mathew Coleman "Environment and Planning "

"For Agamben, fingerprinting is not just a matter of civil liberties: it is symptomatic of an alarming shift in political geography. We have moved from Athens to Auschwitz: the West's political model is now the concentration camp rather than the city state; we are no longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo not by any difference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated--or unexpectedly executed by a missile from an unmanned aircraft. . . . But although his recent examples come from the war on terror, the political development they represent is not, according to Agamben, peculiar to the United States under the Bush presidency. It is part of a wider range in governance in which the rule of law is routinely displaced by the state of exception, or emergency, and people are increasingly subject to extra-judicial state violence."--Malcolm Bull"London Review of Books" (12/16/2004)

""State of Exception" is a timely and compelling inquiry into the capacity of state power to withdraw the guarantees of legal protection and entitlement, at once abandoning its subjects to the violent whims of law and intensifying state power. Not to be conceived as merely occasional and conditional, invocations of a state of exception have come to constitute the basis of modern state power. Agamben deftly considers the historical and philosophical implications of this power, offering a brilliant consideration of 'life' and its tense relation to normativity. This is an erudite and provocative book that calls for us to 'stop the machine' and break the violent hold that law lays upon life."
--Judith Butler"Judith Butler, author of Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning" (08/06/2004)

"When a conservative member of the U.S. Congress recently designated the Guantanamo prisoners as 'those who were missed by the bombs' and thus forfeited their right to live, he almost literally evoked Agamben's notion of homo sacer, a man reduced to bare life no longer covered by any legal or civil rights. What you hold in your hands is simply the book for all those who do not see in 9/11 a mere pretext for patriotic mobilization, but an impetus for a deeper reflection on where we stand today with regard to the very fundamentals of our civilization."--Slavoj Zizek"Slavoj Zizek, author of Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle" (08/06/2004)

" State of Exception is a timely and compelling inquiry into the capacity of state power to withdraw the guarantees of legal protection and entitlement, at once abandoning its subjects to the violent whims of law and intensifying state power. Not to be conceived as merely occasional and conditional, invocations of a state of exception have come to constitute the basis of modern state power. Agamben deftly considers the historical and philosophical implications of this power, offering a brilliant consideration of 'life' and its tense relation to normativity. This is an erudite and provocative book that calls for us to 'stop the machine' and break the violent hold that law lays upon life."
--Judith Butler"Judith Butler, author of Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning" (08/06/2004)

"State of Exception is an impressive and disquieting meditation on the state of the democratic institutions by which political power is organised in the West. Written in a simple and lucid language, this is an erudite, meticulous, and precise examination of the long and complex history of the ideological framework underpinning the present obsession with the state of exception as the 'new form-of-state' as it obtains at least in the USA and UK."--Tony Simoes da Silva"International Journal of Baudrillard Studies" (07/01/2005)

"The impact of Agamben's thought since the publication of the first volume of Homo Sacer . . . has been immense not merely in the field of continental philosophy but also in political and legal theory, sociology, and in literary and cultural studies."--M. Canstantinou and M. Margaroni "Continental Philosophy "
Product Description
Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to....
From the Inside Flap
Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states.
The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a working paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt.
About the Author
Giorgio Agamben is professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona. He is the author of ten previous books, including the prequel to this one, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Kevin Attell is a writer and translator living in Berkeley, California. He is the translator of Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal.





Homo sacer

Homo sacer (Latin for "the sacred man" or "the accursed man") is a figure of Roman law: a person who is banned and may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual.[1]

The meaning of the term sacer in Ancient Roman religion is not fully congruent with the meaning it took after Christianization, and which was adopted into English as sacred. In early Roman religion sacer, much like the Hebrew ?????? qado?, denotes anything "set apart" from common society and encompasses both the sense of "hallowed" and that of "cursed". This concept of the sacred is more in line with the Islamic notion of haram. The homo sacer could thus also simply mean a person expunged from society and deprived of all rights and all functions in civil religion. Homo sacer is defined in legal terms as someone who can be killed without the killer being regarded as a murderer; and a person who cannot be sacrificed.[2] The sacred human may thus be understood as someone outside the law, or beyond it. In the case of certain monarchs in western legal traditions, the sovereign and the Homo Sacer have conflated.[3]

The status of homo sacer could fall upon one as a consequence of oath-breaking. An oath in antiquity was essentially a conditional self-cursing, i.e. invoking one or several deities and asking for their punishment in the event of breaking the oath. An oathbreaker was consequently considered the property of the gods whom he had invoked and then deceived. If the oathbreaker was killed, this was understood as the revenge of the gods into whose power he had given himself. Since the oathbreaker was already the property of the oath deity, he could no longer belong to human society, or be consecrated to another deity.

A direct reference to this status is found in the Twelve Tables (8.21), laws of the early Roman Republic written in the 5th century BC. The paragraph states that a patron who deceives his clients is to be regarded as sacer.

The idea of the status of an outlaw, a criminal who is declared as unprotected by the law and can consequently be killed by anyone with impunity, persists throughout the Middle Ages, medieval perception condemning the entire human intrinsic moral worth of the condemned outlaw, dehumanizing the outlaw literally as a "wolf" or "wolf's-head" (in an era where hunting of wolves existed strongly, including a commercial element)[4] and is first revoked only by the English Habeas Corpus act of 1679 which declares that any criminal must be judged by a tribunal before being punished.

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes the concept as the starting point of his main work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998).

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Last edited 18 days ago by Gilliam
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