relation of exception

quotes by giorgio agamben from homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life

"in his final years foucault seemed to orient this analysis according to two distinct directives for research: on the one hand, the study of the political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which the state assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its very center; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power. . . in one of his last writings, foucault argues that the modern western state has integrated techniques of subjective individualization with procedures of objective totalization to an unprecedented degree, and he speaks of real 'political 'double bind,' constituted by individualization and the simultaneous totalization of structures of modern power.'"

"at once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested. when its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the organization of state power and emancipation from it. everything happens as if, along with the disciplinary process by which state power makes man as a living being into its own specific object, another process is set in motion that in large measure corresponds to the birth of modern democracy, in which man as a living being presents himself no longer as an object but as the subject of political power. these processes - which in many ways oppose and (at least apparently) bitterly conflict with each other - nevertheless converge insofar as both concern the bare life of the citizen, the new biopolitical body of humanity."

"there is no rule that is applicable to chaos. order must be established for juridical order to make sense. a regular situation must be created, and sovereign is he who definitely decides if this situation is actually effective. all law is 'situational law.' the sovereign creates and guarantees the situation as a whole in its totality. he has the monopoly over the final decision. therein consists the essence of state sovereignty, which must therefore be properly juridically defined not as the monopoly to sanction or to rule but as the monopoly to decide. . . the decision reveals the essence of state authority most clearly. here the decision must be distinguished from the juridical regulation, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves itself not to need law to create law. . . the exception is more interesting than the regular case. the latter proves nothing; the exception proves everything. . .  when one really wants to study the general, one need only look around for a real exception. it brings everything to light more clearly than the general itself. after a while, one becomes disgusted with the endless talk about the general - there are exceptions. if they cannot be explained, then neither can the general be explained. usually the difficulty is not noticed, since the general is thought about not with passion but only with comfortable superficiality. the exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion." - carl schmitt

"the exception is an element in law that transcends positive law in the form of its suspension. the exception is to positive law what negative theology is to positive theology. while the latter affirms and predicates determinate qualities of god, negative (or mystical) theology, with its 'neither... nor...,' negates and suspends the attribution to god of any predicate whatsoever. yet negative theology is not outside theology and can actually be shown to function as the principle grounding the possibility in general of anything like a theology. only because it has been negatively presupposed as what subsists outside any possible predicate can divinity become the subject of a predication. analagously, only because its validity is suspended in the state of exception can positive law define the normal case as the realm of its own validity."

"it has often been observed that the juridico-political order has the structure of an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside. gilles deleuze and felix guattari were thus able to write, 'sovereignty only rules over what it is capable of interiorizing;' and, concerning the 'great confinement' described by foucault in his madness and civilization, maurice blanchot spoke of society's attempt to 'confine the outside,' that is, to constitute it in an 'interiority of expectation or of exception.' confronted with an excess, the system interiorizes what exceeds it through an interdiction and in this way 'designates itself as exterior to itself.' the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is, however, even more complex. here what is outside is included not simply by means of the juridical order's validity - by letting the juridical order, that is, withdraw from the exception and abandon it. the exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule. the particular 'force' of law consists in this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority. we shall give the name relation of exception to the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion."

"the paradox here is that a single utterance in no way distinguished from others of its kind is isolated from them precisely insofar as it belongs to them. if the syntagm 'i love you' is uttered as an example of a performative speech act, then this syntagm both cannot be understood as in a normal context and yet still must be treated as a real utterance in order for it to be taken as an example. what this example shows is its belonging to a class, but for this very reason the example steps out of its class in the very moment in which it exhibits and delimits it (in the case of a linguistic syntagm, the example thus shows its own signifying and, in this way, suspends its own meaning). if one now asks if the rule applies to the example, the answer is not easy, since the rule applies to the example only as to a normal case and obviously not as to an example. the example is thus excluded from the normal case not because it does not belong to it but, on the contrary, because it exhibits its own belonging to it. the example is truly a paradigm in the etymological sense: it is what is 'shown beside,' and a class can contain everything except its own paradigm.

the mechanism of the exception is different. while the example is excluded from the set insofar as it belongs to it, the exception is included in the normal case precisely because it does not belong to it. and just as belonging to a class can be shown only by an example - that is, outside of the class itself - so non-belonging can be shown only at the center of the class, by an exception. in every case (as is shown by the dispute between anomalists and analogists among the ancient grammarians), exception and example are correlative concepts that are ultimately indistinguishable and that come into play every time the very sense of the belonging and commonality of individuals is to be defined. in every logical system, just as in every social system, the relation between outside and inside, strangeness and intimacy, is this complicated."