Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19926 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-15
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 104 pages

From the Inside Flap
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 working 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.

About the Author
Giorgio Agamben is professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona. He is the author of ten previous books, including the prequel to this one, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Kevin Attell is a writer and translator living in Berkeley, California. He is the translator of Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal.

Customer Reviews

great text, poor translation
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.

Post-modern Exceptionism
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.

Post-Humanism at its best
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