Summary
Nasser Hussain’s term, as David Lloyd uses it, for the regime of the contemporary counter-terrorism state in which the exception works by multiplication of laws and legal categories rather than by law’s suspension — the form the State of Exception takes in Israel/Palestine, where Saree Makdisi’s ‘hyperregulation of everyday life’ proceeds through a labyrinthine web of civil law and military decree (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.17 / printed p.75).
Details
- “The regime of permits, closures, controls, dispossessions, demolitions, all proceed according to a labyrinthine web of civil law and military decree, the ‘5,000 Israeli military orders, regulating Palestinian life’, that form the legal counterpart to the material and physical obstacles to movement in the occupied territories, all painstakingly detailed by Saree Makdisi” (PDF p.17 / printed p.75, citing Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out (2008), p.6).
- “What Makdisi describes as ‘Israel’s hyperregulation of everyday life’ conforms to what Nasser Hussain has termed the regime of hyperlegality that typifies the contemporary counter-terrorism state: the multiplication of laws and legal categories rather than the state of anomie that Agamben explores” (PDF p.17, citing Hussain, ‘Hyperlegality’, New Criminal Law Review 10, 4 (2007), pp.514-531).
- Lloyd’s supplement to Giorgio Agamben rests on it: in the settler colony “the exception was governed less by the absence or sheer suspension of law than by innumerable legal and quasi-legal protocols instituted for its regulation”, and the combination of hyperlegality with the topology of ‘zones of exclusion’ constitutes the exemplary new state of exception (PDF p.17).
Related pages
Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, State of Exception, Nasser Hussain, Saree Makdisi, Closure system, Occupation by bureaucracy