Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben

Chapter 2: Politics at the Limits of the Law: On the State of Exception

Chapter 2 Politics at the Limits of the Law On the State of Exception The accumulated anguish of individuals who fear for their lives brings about a new power. —Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes In State of Exception, Agamben discusses a series of lawless feasts—the Saturnalia , the charivari, and the Carnival—during which lawfulness would give way to chaos, hierarchies would be overturned and social norms openly transgressed.1 He quotes a horrified observer who perfectly captures the anomic disorder that ensued in such periods: “One showed his ass to the wind, / Another smashed a roof, / One broke windows and doors, / Another threw salt in the well, / And another threw filth in faces; / They were truly horrible and savage.”2 Although the anthropological literature has often understood these periods of “legal lawlessness” as related to the agrarian cycle or to notions of ritual purification, Agamben suggests they can be better understood in light of similar suspensions of law that existed in various archaic juridical institutions. Relying on the work of Karl Meuli, he portrays these anomic feasts as parodic repetitions of the violence that accompanied the “abandonment of bare life.”3 In a series of “meticulous studies,” Meuli demonstrates, Agamben writes, that the violent acts recorded in medieval descriptions of lawless feasts “precisely replicate the different phases of the cruel ritual in which the Friedlos and the bandit were expelled from the community, their houses unroofed and destroyed, and their wells poisoned or made brackish.”4 What appear as “rough and wild acts of harassment” are in fact highly developed legal forms, which enable the ritual punishment associated with what Meuli terms “the ban.”5 These periods of “legal 47 48 / CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION anarchy,” he suggests, thus dramatize the ambiguity of the legal order, and its need to internalize lawlessness.6 In Homo Sacer, Agamben had already explained that the Friedlos— the “man without peace” of ancient Germanic law—was a figure whose expulsion from the community left him without peace precisely because it deprived him of legal status, and thus ensured anyone could kill him without committing homicide. Similarly, the bandit’s expulsion condemned him to a liminal zone between life and death, as, in Cavalca’s words, “[w] hoever is banned from his city on pain of death must be considered as dead.”7 Both the Friedlos and the bandit are exemplary figures of the homo sacer—figures, that is, of bare life. Thus, the life of the bandit is not without relation to the city and its laws, but is, rather, a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, “exclusion and inclusion.”8 This liminal existence of the bandit can illuminate the anomic feasts Agamben sees as mimicking the lawless violence that the legal order intermittently wields. These feasts, he argues, replicate, and serve to celebrate , the violence that law must capture in order to maintain its grasp on chaos—they perform the suspension of law that must be incorporated into the legal order if it is to refer to life. Thus, such feasts point to the intimate relation between law and anomie, and performatively gesture to the possibility of a sphere of life over which the law would no longer be violently enforced. In State of Exception, Agamben suggests that this border zone between law and life can best be understood as the reverse of the state of exception , which has more commonly been understood as a juridical mechanism that ensures the law can be suspended in times of necessity to preserve the legal order. In a reversal of this perspective, he conceptualizes the state of exception not simply as a juridical mechanism, but as the original means by which law refers to, and captures, life. A “theory of the state of exception ,” he thus argues, “is the preliminary condition for any definition of the relation that binds and, at the same time, abandons the living being to law.”9 It is only if we are able to decipher the state of exception, and bring to light what is shrouded by this obscure juridical figure that we will develop a clear understanding of the differences between the political and the juridical and between life and law. “And perhaps only then,” he suggests , in language that makes clear that he sees the state of exception as far more than a limited juridical figure, “will it be possible to answer the question that never...