In this video, I'm just going to give you my personal opinion in terms of what I think
of the book "State of Exception," which I've talked about in four previous videos already.
I'll give you some pros and some cons as well, and then you can kind of
take this with a grain of salt and read the book yourself, and make up your own mind!
So, first of all, the pros. I think the book is full of fascinating historical insights.
It's very good at critiquing the abuses of law -- if you think, for instance, of Guantanamo Bay,
and there are many more recent events as well. It's good at paradigm thinking. In other words,
it gives us different paradigms, different structures, to kind of make sense of the state of
exception, states of emergency, and how we might think about whether they are outside the law,
inside the law, or often they're really a kind of blending of both life and what we talked about as
"anomie" or an absence of ethics. The book is also really good at giving us a sense
of the paradoxes and aporias that the law often struggles to reconcile or overcome.
We talked about aporias before as these irresolvable contradictions. And then finally,
perhaps the most interesting part of the book (especially if law is not your primary interest)
is the fact that the state of exception becomes this structure of thought which we start to see
in other areas of life as well. So that's where you can take the book and basically say, "You know
what? I'm not interested in law necessarily, but I am interested in literature or something else,
and I can think about this notion of the state of exception as a kind of structure or
a paradigm -- that it can apply elsewhere and that can be tremendously productive." At the same time,
there are some problematic aspects of the book I think. First of all, this is more of a stylistic
thing, the book is quite messy and confusing. There are all these little breakout sections.
Sometimes you have to read multiple chapters together to get a good sense of what's going on.
For instance, the concept of the "iustitium" comes up in chapter three and then later again.
It can be quite confusing to make sense of the book. Also, if we think about this second
critique of the abuses of law, this also has a negative kind of counterpart,
and that's the essentialism that often goes with it. So we have a kind of essentialism where the law
is almost inevitably bad, as well as we have this notion that the law is very rigid all the time.
Both of these could be construed as essentialist positions in terms of paradigm thinking.
It can also be hard to read the book because we we get the sense that paradigms are often shifting.
So we can also accuse the book of paradigm shifts. For instance, initially Agamben really critiques
people who place the state of exception outside of the law, because he argues that the two are blended,
but later, towards the end of the book, he seems to adopt Benjamin's notion of divine violence outside
the law. So it can be hard to kind of make sense of of that particular perspective. At first
it seems like you cannot get outside of the state of exception or the law, and then later we do have
this more utopian kind of solution. Also, towards the end he seems to conflate the entire law with
the state of exception, whereas earlier we got maybe more of the sense that they could still be
somewhat separate. Then, if we think about this fourth pro here (paradoxes and aporias of the
law), we can also say in contrast that sometimes there's too much emphasis, so too much emphasis,
on the exception. The exception comes to rule everything.
And yes, I know that Agamben will point out that we can never quite go back to a pure and
unstained law, and I understand that, but at the same time there there does seem to be a
case here, I think, that sometimes again it goes too far. For instance, his argument that since World War II
we've basically lived in a continual state of exception, I'm not sure that I buy that. I think
yes, the government often shows overreach, but I do think we can still make clear distinctions between
when the government is kind of protecting democracy and following
the rules and when it's definitely going against international conventions and things like that.
And then the final thing here is that the structure of thought that we had a look at before
can sometimes lead to generalization. There's a danger here of generalization. For instance,
Agamben suggests that lawyers are being silent. They're not talking enough
about the state of exception, but if we think about things like Guantanamo Bay,
or more recent events as well, when there are abuses of law there are plenty of lawyers
ready to to start legal cases, legal action, and they can appeal to the very law itself --
international law, the law of the state itself -- in order to say, "You know what? This is an abusive
law." So if that's the case, then I think sometimes Agamben simply overstates his
argument and he pushes it too far. At the same time, I think the book is so fascinating and
so interesting that you're going to get something out of it, and I think it should be a really useful
and productive text as you apply it to different aspects that you might be interested in.