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Violence in the State of Exception: Reflections on Theologico-Political Motifs in Benjamin and Schmitt
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Violence in the State of Exception Reflections on Theologico-Political Motifs in Benjamin and Schmitt Marc de Wilde Two months after the events of September 11, President George W. Bush issued a Military Order authorizing the ‘‘indefinite detention’’ of certain noncitizens in the ‘‘war on terror.’’1 The Military Order effectively resulted in the suspension of fundamental rights of ‘‘enemy aliens,’’ such as the right to be brought before an impartial tribunal within forty-eight hours and to seek the assistance of an attorney, and eventually legitimized a biopolitical violence against those detained at U.S. interrogation centers in Guantánamo Bay, Baghram, and Abu Ghraib . In his recent book State of Exception (2005), Giorgio Agamben argues that Bush’s Military Order has introduced a ‘‘state of exception’’ in which enemy aliens are no longer subject to positive law and have completely lost their juridical identities. The ‘‘bare lives’’ of these enemy aliens are directly exposed—without any legal mediation—to a sovereign violence: ‘‘neither as prisoners nor as accused, but only as ‘detainees ,’ they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight.’’2 Agamben’s argument suggests that understanding the violence inherent in contemporary ‘‘states of exception’’ involves not merely a critical analysis of U.S. detention policies but also a genealogical investigation into the formation of new figures of sovereignty emerging in an age of post-secular reason. Contrary to the classical forms of sovereignty , constituted by a public, even theatricalized or ritualized manifestation of state violence, its new post-secular forms seem to be dependent upon a more elusive, spectral violence, related, for example, to classified rules and ‘‘ghost detainees.’’ The center of gravitation in Agamben’s genealogical analysis is the work of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, written during the Weimar Republic (1919–33), a time in which state 1 88 V I O L E N C E I N T H E S TAT E O F E X C E P T I O N sovereignty constantly threatened to dissolve into countless acts of nonstate violence. Two of their early texts, especially, Benjamin’s ‘‘Critique of Violence’’ (1921) and Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922), mark a new sensibility in the transformation of sovereignty’s manifestations, which, though secularized, bear witness to a reappearance of theologicopolitical figures of thought.3 In the present essay, I want first to determine the status of theologico-political motifs in the work of Benjamin and Schmitt, simultaneously seeking to lay bare an affinity underlying their seemingly opposed intellectual positions (Critical Theory versus Conservative Revolution). Second, against the background of this theologico-political affinity, I try to reconstruct their respective concepts of sovereignty, relating them to notions of law, violence, and responsibility. Finally, I examine whether Benjamin’s and Schmitt’s theologico -political understanding of the concept of sovereignty can indeed, as Agamben maintains , provide clarification of the violence inherent in contemporary states of exception, that is, in the border zones between positive law and bare life, within the United States as well as outside its territory, in the camp at Guantánamo Bay and its doubles. I will argue— with Benjamin and in a certain sense against Schmitt and Agamben—that it is not so much the absence of positive law that characterizes these states of exception as the possibility of a depersonalizing juridical violence, which tends to escalate in the presence of a certain kind of political theology. A Hidden Dialogue: The Political Theologies of Benjamin and Schmitt Benjamin belonged to the early Frankfurt School, a philosophical movement that attempted to save the critical impetus of Enlightenment thought. In the eyes of the Frankfurt School, the First World War had discredited the Enlightenment’s dominant cultural and philosophical expression in Germany, that is, idealism. Drawing upon Hegel’s justi- fication of conflict as a valuable source of cultural rejuvenation, idealism had succeeded in supplying even a patently senseless war with a reasonable appearance. The crisis of idealism thus caused the members of the Frankfurt School to search for a radical alternative , which they eventually found in an unorthodox Marxist approach.4 Benjamin considered his main philosophical task to be reconciling Marxism’s critical materialism with the tradition of Jewish religious thought. This resulted in his political theology...