Agamben, State of Exception - Summary

The general summary of Agamben's discussion of the State of Exception (as it is relevant for me right now):

1. The State of exception as a problem
• "The essential contiguity between the state of exception and sovereignty was established by Carl Schmitt in his book Politische Theologie (1922). Although his famous definition of the sovereign as "he who decides on the state of exception" has been widely commented on and discussed, there is still no theory of the state of exception in public law, and jurists and theorists of public law seem to regard the problem more as a quaestio facti than as a genuine juridical problem." p1
2. Politics vs Law, the no-man's land
• "...it is difficult even to arrive at a definition of the term given its position at the limit between politics and law. Indeed, according to widely held opinion, the state of exception constitutes a "point of imbalance between public law and political fact (Saint-Bonnet 2001, 28) that is situated - like civil war, insurrection and resistance - in an "ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the political" (Fontana 1999, 16)." p1
  
• "It is this no-man's-land between public law and political fact, and between the juridical order and life, that the present study seeks to investigate. Only if the veil covering this ambiguous zone is lifted will we be able to approach an understanding of the stakes involved in the difference - or the supposed difference - between the political and the juridical, and between law and the living being. And perhaps only then will it be possible to answer the question that never ceases to reverberate in the history of Western politics: what does it mean to act politically?" p2
3. A diagram
   
• I feel like there is a diagram to draw here to sum up the problem of the state of exception (especially as that problem relates to the difference between political and legal). It has to do, basically, with whether the state of exception is a political construct entirely outside of the law (and thus also a legal form of something that is not legal), or a legal construct that mandates the suspension of law itself, and therefore an inside/outside legal issue.
• For now that diagram is this (and I'm not really sure state of nature is appropriate in here according to Agamben):
• 
4. Civil war, and a permanent state of emergency
   
• "Because civil war is the opposite of normal conditions, it lies in a zone of undecidability with respect to the state of exception, which is state power's immediate response to the most extreme internal conflicts." p2
• "legal civil war" - the Third Reich as "a state of exception that lasted 12 years." p2
• "In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones." p2
• "Faced with the unstoppable progression of what has been called a "global civil war," the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics. The transformation of a provisional and exceptional measure into a technique of government threatens radically to alter - in fact, has already palpably altered - the structure and meaning of the traditional distinction between constitutional forms. Indeed, from this perspective, the state of exception appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism." p2-3
• "...it is important not to forget that the modern state of exception is a creation of the democratic-revolutionary tradition and not the absolutist one." p5
  
5. Evolution
• "...the democratic regimes were transformed by the gradual expansion of the executive's powers during the two world wars and, more generally, by the state of exception that had accompanied and followed those wars. They are in some ways the heralds who announced what we today have clearly before our eyes - namely, that since "the state of exception has become the rule" (Benjamin 1942, 697/257), it not only appears increasingly as a technique of government rather than exceptional measure, but it also lets its own nature as the constitutive paradigm of the juridical order come to light." p7
• Relationship to dictatorship (constitutional vs. sovereign)
• Benjamin (from Agamben): "No sacrifice is too great for our democracy, least of all the temporary sacrifice of democracy itself." p9
• Then, a long discussion (see diagram above, maybe) of the difference between states that regulate the state of exception in the constitution or by law, and states that choose not to explicitly regulate it.
• This is probably enough of Agamben for now, the rest gets hyper-technical.
  
6. Terms and names
   
• state of exception, state of emergency, state of necessity, (by) military order, no-man's land, state of siege (both political and fictitious), emergency decrees, martial law, emergency powers, full powers, state of peace vs. state of war,