As Agamben indicates in the 1989 preface to the English translation of Infancy and History, the key question that unites his disparate explorations is that of what it means for language to exist, what it means that “I speak.” In taking up this question throughout his work, and most explicitly in texts such as Infancy and History, Language and Death, and most recently, The Open, Agamben reinvigorates consideration of philosophical anthropology through a critical questioning of the metaphysical presuppositions that infor… Pp. However, because the sovereign as living law and thus identified with it: He is held in relation to it and is indeed posited as the anomic foundation of the juridical order. The state of exception is the expansion of the executive power to the point where presidential decrees have the force of law, often invoked during “states of siege” or a “state of war.” Through this expansion of executive power, the separation of powers no longer constrains the executive branch. Such theorizations are fictitious because the authority so described only acquires its appearance “from the suspension or neutralization of the juridical order–that is, ultimately, from the state of exception” (85). ). The foundation of this senatus consultum, Agamben contends, was a decree proclaiming an emergency situation caused by foreign war, insurrection, or civil war (i.e., tumultus) which often lead to the declaration of a suspension of law as such (i.e., iustitium) and thus produced a “juridical void”  (41-2). The relevant passage of the famous funerary inscription reads: “After that time I [Augustus] surpassed all in authority, although I had no more power than those who were my colleagues in each magistracy” (81). Law seems able to subsist only by capturing anomie, just as language can subsist only by grasping the nonlinguistic. A very important idea in political philosophy from Giorgio Agamben - what is the State of Exception? Are Proposals For A World Republic Defensible? In State of Exception (2005), Agamben advances three theses. While some approach it as a juridical phenomenon and regulate the state of exception through various legal and constitutional frameworks1, others approach it as an extra-juridical phenomenon and authorize unbridled executive power during the state of exception2  (10). Turning to the Roman Republic, Agamben examines the “extreme figure of authority” that arises in relation to the senatus consultum ultimum and the iustitium which suspends the juridical order (78-9). It is, rather, only the stake in a conflict over the state of exception, what results from it and, in this way only, is supposed prior to the law20” (60). The connection between iustitium and mourning, according to Agamben, reveals its “true meaning” within this context: If the sovereign is a living nomos, and if, for this reason, anomie and nomos perfectly coincide in his person, then anarchy (which threatens to loose itself in the city upon the sovereign’s death, which is to say, when the nexus that joins it to the law is severed) must be ritualized and controlled, transforming the state of exception into public mourning and mourning into iustitium. Translated by Kevin Attell. Corresponding to the undecidability of nomos and anomie in the living body of the sovereign is the undecidability between state of exception and public mourning in the city. Secretly nestled between the abstract universal norm and its concrete application, therefore, is the ephemeral decision which vanishes into thin air just as quickly as it is enunciated (norm-decision-application). Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about the real state of exception [...]” (1942). “Because it brings about a standstill and suspension of the entire juridical order” (47), the state of exception is best understood, as a “kenomatic state, an emptiness and standstill of the law” (48). As we will see in chapter 4, the relationship between law and reality characteristic of the modern Western nation-state is applied in a way that denies the existence of a reality external to its abstract empire and in this way molds and curtails what is in fact politically possible. The anomic character of this new figure of supreme power, the sovereign as living law, is evident in the eponymous neo-Pythagorean theory of the sovereign27 (basileus nomos empukhos) which finds its analogy in the modern theory of sovereignty (69). The integrated State-Spectacle (or spectacular democracy) constitutes the extreme point of evolution of the state form, towards which monarchies and republics, tyrannies and democracies, racist regimes and progressive ones are swiftly moving. For legal scholars or those interested in the expansion of executive power, this book provides a great deal of pertinent analysis. 1.1. And how can it be distinguished from the force of law? It is a power that suspends or reactivates law, but is not formally in force as law” (79). LibraryThing is a cataloging and social networking site for booklovers But what, precisely constitutes the “purity” of “pure violence” [reine Gewalt] ? Finally, Agamben points to the aporias that  arises out of the attempt to define necessity as an objective situation (29). The Exceptional Life of the State: Giorgio Agamben Õs State of Exception Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception. It is a field of juridical tensions in which a minimum of formal being-in-force [vigenza] coincides with a maximum of real application, and vice versa” (36). While the quality of Agamben’s legal analysis and research cannot be questioned, he neglects to analyze the state of exception from a political science lens, specifically in terms of institutions and structural limitations. Reflections on Thomas Aquinas’ “Treatise on Law”: What is the law? It suspends the juridical order where the law looses its ability to guarantee social order25 (46). 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