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Review
"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 Žižek
(Slavoj Zizek Slavoj Zizek, author of Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle 20041216)"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 20050701)"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
(Malcolm Bull London Review of Books )"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 )"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 )"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 )"In Agamben's work, one meets a vision that looks deeply into the well of human experience, and perceives there a turbulent and powerful interplay of political and social forces, all serving to shape and constitute--not only the social order and individual suhbjectivity--but also 'life' at its most basic level."
(Radical Philosophy Review )"A worthwhile addition to the burgeoning literature on mass violence."
(Kenneth Hemmerechts H-Net )
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Book Description
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 normal 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.
In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.
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 normal 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.
In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.
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4.0 out of 5 stars (14 customer reviews)
37 of 41 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Liberalism of Fear, Contintental Style, Sep 18 2006
By Signs and Wonders "Signs and Wonders" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: State of Exception (Paperback)
In Agamben's new book, State of Exception, a sequel to Homo Sacer, he draws explicitly upon lectures he has delivered in New York and elsewhere in the years since 9/11, repeating the central themes of his past work and transposing it to a different key. Here, rather than speaking of "the camp," he argues that "the state of exception" is a primal form of modern government. Agamben has long argued, in a formulation best distilled in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (2000), that "the camp"- the concentration camp as much as the refugee camp-- is the paradigm of political modernity insofar as legal categories and the idea of sovereignty have served as a justification for abondoning `enemy bodies'to zones outside strict legality. While that book's conceptual apparatus is all too reminiscent of quirky Heideggerian readings of Greek politics, and he sometimes leans on tendentious readings of Foucault, Benjamin, Arendt, and Schmitt, Agamben's thesis, when examined closely, is no more "paranoid" than the more redemptive works of Primo Levi or Judith Shklar. Beneath his evasive ethics is yet another post-Holocaust "liberalism of fear." In my view, Agamben can be read as a philosopher of deep ethical concern and originality, but to read him charitably, one must start by getting used to his signature rhetorical devices of hyperbole, paradox, and "indistinctions"-- situations where conceptual opposites (security and insecurity, totalitarianism and civil war) are actually contained within each other. It is helpful to approach a number of these claims as "thought experiments." Moreover, perhaps more than any other concern of legal theory, the discussion of states of exception is an area of inquiry where these discursive vices can actually be seen as virtues: the language of indistinction and undecidibility is often descriptively appropriate.
42 of 53 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Solid "State", Nov 17 2005
By Kevin Killian - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: State of Exception (Paperback)
The jaunty gray on yellow cover reminds us that, at his best, Giorgio Agamben is like a breath of spring air across the dreary landscape of geopolitical quagmire. When I got this book, I panicked because it advertised itself as the sequel to an earlier Agamben essay which I had not read! Nevertheless I sucked it up and dove on in, prepared to be baffled and bemused, but believe me, STATE OF EXCEPTION is a stand-alone as well, and you need no prior knowledge of what happened in the earlier book HOMO SACER to understand the concepts here. I'm no scholar, but it seems to me that even he or she who knows absolutely nothing about Latin will be able to understand the history he delves into (perhaps a refresher course in HBO's series "ROME" would be in order). Partly this is due to the exemplary translation, by UC Davis' Kevin Attell, whose work I have not run across before. He's great. He has re-translated or so it appears, not only Agamben's steely prose, but also each of Agamben citations from the original Latin, German, French, Greek, Italian or whatever. How does he do it? I have no idea, but his expertise is quite helpful especially when the reader needs to see where the emphasis falls in Agamben's particular use of his sources, it's now crystal clear.Along the way Agamben and Attell demolish all our previous ideas about the so-called "state of exception." Even such obvious ones such as the ease with which we on the left have applied the term "dictator" to such figures as Mussolini and Hitler, even though, legally speaking, neither of them were dictators. It's easier for us to dismiss them this way. In general the book gains power, sweep and poetry the deeper you get into it.
I feel like I've already read HOMO SACER, it must be more about how under martial law (or say in the case of Hitler's death camps) humans were reduced to what Agamben called "mere life," with their citizenship stripped from them, so that they live in a state of nowhere, like that Beatles song. STATE OF EXCEPTION is to Agamben's body of work what STATE OF INDEPENDENCE was to Donna Summer's-a crisp, dry, declaration of moving on, wiping it up, and tearing the mind a new hole of opinion.
27 of 34 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
State of Normalcy?, Oct 12 2005
By Timothy B. Hurst - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: State of Exception (Paperback)
If Michel Foucault's work has created a new discursive space, then Giorgio Agamben's work has driven a chasm between the existing spaces of between public law and political fact. Agamben has attempted to define that ambiguous space, to fill it with a description that gives it a tenuous position in the lexicon of modern political theory. Whether it is a "point of imbalance" or "no man's land" (1), a "zone of undecidability", or a "paradoxical phenomenon" (2) a "threshold of indeterminacy" (3) or a "fictitious lacuna" (31) Agamben has embarked on describing the indescribable, even though the concept is "matched by terminological uncertainty" (4). Expanding on the ideas expounded by Schmitt and Benjamin, Agamben asserts that the state of exception he describes is no longer a temporary state in times of war or siege, but that it "tends to increasingly appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics" (2). Whether it is now the dominant paradigm or, as Agamben argues, the state of exception "has by now become the rule" (9) may be of scholarly debate. Agamben does make a good argument that this state he describes is becoming more prevalent especially after the events of September 11, 2001 have brought the United States into this war on terrorism. This timely essay seems to fit well within this age of security and surveillance brought forth by the Patriot Act and the more recent state of exception from hurricanes Rita and Katrina.
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