by Giorgio Agamben
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Product Description
Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states.
The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt.
In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.
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Average Customer Review:
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
great text, poor translation, 2007-05-06
Agamben's text is filled with relevant historical examples and he makes a clear point, but the translation is lacking. It would have been better if more reference to the original were in the translation that way the reader would have a better understanding of the historical implications of Agamben's terms from within the Western philosophical tradition. It's worth buying for its conceptual value, but I would recommend buying the Italian to read alongside.
3 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
 Post-modern Exceptionism, 2007-03-25
Carl Schmitt serves as a foil for Agamben's reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt. The Rhetoric of Indeterminancy (i.e., deconstructionism) and Francophile intellectual linguistic abuse does not solve the State of Exception, but heightens its Fallacy of Special Pleading.
Today's choices are either a communitarian society (theocracy or Fabian) or a pluralistic liberal democracy that arose in the Age of Enlightenment. Agamben veers toward an Indeterminate Society of Power Relations (akin to Foucault, before Foucault "got" the Enlightenment Ideal) of communitarianism.
Liberty, freedom, self-rule, spontaneity, social safety, autonomy, equality (cf., economic egalitarianism), justice, fairness, pluralism, tolerance, and other liberal principles trump every Exception of Exception. While many objections to the present problems are valid, the prescriptions are just as disagreeable as the problems it thinks it will solve.
An open, free, equalitarian society is a liberal one, not a communitarian screed based on the Rhetoric of Indeterminacy and Post-modernism.
3 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
 Post-Humanism at its best, 2006-12-20
The intellectual ancestor of this work is Foucault and Hiedegger, an Islamist-collaborater and a Nazi collaborator. But dont let that change the view of the argument here, namely that all democratic states today are equivilent 'philosophically' to Nazi Germany, which after all was not 'legally' a dictatorship. THis book is a perfect example of how high falutent language with flowery and latin mixed in, anything can become anything, thus democracy is nazism, refugee camps are concentration camps, dictatorship doesnt exist but if it did than it would be America. The main problem with things like this is it focuses on a tiny philosophical view of seven thinkers, expands that to include four or five countries and tries to make an over-arching argument for a massively diverse world, using value judgements and creating a new language suhc as 'state of exception' which is meaningless, in order to condemn western democracy without offering an alternative.
Therefore it is not a suprise that in the name of 'democracy' and 'the people' philosophies and critiques like this have been used to murder millions and accomplish exactly the opposite of what they pretend to be in favor of. This condemns the current situation as 'slavery' so that real slavery can be imposed, slavery of the mind, which is merely the precurser to the real thing.
Seth J. Frantzman
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Agamben's State of Exception offers a place for political action, 2006-11-09
Agamben begins this work with a critical and historical look at the state of exception as it has developed over the last few centuries. In short, as nation/states developed and citizens entered into contracts with these governments, laws and constitutions were the agreed to rules of conduct. With the advent of war and national security issues, the state of exception has arisen in which the laws of the nation must be--at least for a time--suspended so that the goverment may take whatever means necessary to secure the safety of its citizens. Of course this has little to do with the safety of citicizens and more to do with securing the power for the political entity in charge.
Agamben points out that we are now--with the advent of terrorism and the war on terror--entering into a time of perpetual exception. The laws are now in a perpetual state of suspension due to the pressing need of the state to protect us from the threats--both real and perceived--of the terrorists. This can be clearly seen from the acts of the United States in its treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay. There the law does not extend to those being held who are apparently being held indefinitely and without any legal recourse.
Agamben's point is that the state of exception identifies a place of anomy--no law--wherein one can sieze power and act politically. His argument is that the state is not the only actor who can seize this anomy. If we are willing to exert ourselves within this gap, we too can create change in our world. If you are looking for a book on the philosophy of law and its aporetic nature--this is not the book for you; however, if you would like to read about the beginnings of a theory for social change, this is a good place to start.
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
 The Liberalism of Fear, Contintental Style, 2006-09-18
In Agamben's new book, State of Exception, a sequel to Homo Sacer, he draws explicitly upon lectures he has delivered in New York and elsewhere in the years since 9/11, repeating the central themes of his past work and transposing it to a different key. Here, rather than speaking of "the camp," he argues that "the state of exception" is a primal form of modern government. Agamben has long argued, in a formulation best distilled in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (2000), that "the camp"- the concentration camp as much as the refugee camp-- is the paradigm of political modernity insofar as legal categories and the idea of sovereignty have served as a justification for abondoning `enemy bodies'to zones outside strict legality. While that book's conceptual apparatus is all too reminiscent of quirky Heideggerian readings of Greek politics, and he sometimes leans on tendentious readings of Foucault, Benjamin, Arendt, and Schmitt, Agamben's thesis, when examined closely, is no more "paranoid" than the more redemptive works of Primo Levi or Judith Shklar. Beneath his evasive ethics is yet another post-Holocaust "liberalism of fear." In my view, Agamben can be read as a philosopher of deep ethical concern and originality, but to read him charitably, one must start by getting used to his signature rhetorical devices of hyperbole, paradox, and "indistinctions"-- situations where conceptual opposites (security and insecurity, totalitarianism and civil war) are actually contained within each other. It is helpful to approach a number of these claims as "thought experiments." Moreover, perhaps more than any other concern of legal theory, the discussion of states of exception is an area of inquiry where these discursive vices can actually be seen as virtues: the language of indistinction and undecidibility is often descriptively appropriate.
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