“Pure violence” is outside the law for Benjamin Agamben wants to do the same for law. Like Benjamin’s notion of “pure violence” as “pure means” as a force that is neither law-making nor law-preserving, Agamben wants to think about law that is in some way pure-not “pure” in the colloquial sense, but in the relative sense as defined by an externality. I’m not really sure what to make of this claim other than trying to think about and understand what it’s doing for his argument, which I think I get an inkling of in the discussion of the debates between Walter Benjamin and Schmitt. And here is his departure from Schmitt, because the German jurist retained a notion of the state of exception within a juridical context, whereas Agamben sees a “space without law” (50-51). The state of exception is void of law it is “an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law” (force-of-law). A threshold of undecidability is produced when fact and law fade into each other (29).

In the past an extant situation made the exception necessary post-facto, but “the modern state of exception is instead an attempt to include the exception itself within the juridical order by creating a zone of indistinction in which fact and law coincide” (26). Agamben also argues that the state of exception has increasingly become the principal paradigm of government for states since World War I, reaching new heights with George W. Writing that “the state of exception is not a special kind of law (like the law of war) rather, in so far as it is a suspension of the juridical order itself, it defines law’s threshold or limit concept” (4), Agamben is trying to theorize how the state of exception can be both in/out of the juridical order, as Schmitt himself posed, but didn’t really explain. “In truth, the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other” (23).

In some places of the text, he shows how exception productively articulates and/or disarticulates linkages between these seemingly oppositional terms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Īgamben explores how the state of exception, building from Schmitt as the suspension of law for the preservation of the juridical order, produces and is indeed predicated on the blurring of or the indistinction between legal and illegal, public and private, state and law, war and peace, potestas and auctoritas, law and violence, life and norm, criminal and combatant, the political and the juridical (etc.).

Agamben state of exception summary