Summary
In David Lloyd’s account, following Giorgio Agamben and supplementing him with the colonial record, the condition in which the suspension — or, in the settler colony, the proliferation — of law becomes permanent and constitutive: Israel presses its claim to exemplary normality precisely by maintaining a permanent state of exception over Palestine, and that settler colonial exception, developed in the laboratory of the occupation, is becoming the generalised norm for neo-liberal states (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.5, 13-19 / printed p.63, 71-77).
Details
- Lloyd’s paradox: read as a settler colonial regime, “the more fervently it presses its exemplary status, the more evident becomes its anomalous condition as a permanent state of exception” (PDF p.5 / printed p.63).
- The condition conforms to “the logical space of the exception, that space where the constitutive force of law or state is manifested in its suspension” (PDF p.3 / printed p.61).
- It is an exemplary practice of settler colonies: “The suspension of law in face of the legitimate, violent or non-violent resistance, or, indeed, even the very persistent presence, of the indigenous colonised people, is a given of every colonialism”, and the intimacy of the settler-native interface makes it “a virtually constitutive element of the settler colonial society, inflecting all its relations much as a deep geological formation shapes the permanent features of a landscape” (PDF p.13-14 / printed p.71-72). Its legal continuities include Ireland’s Coercion Acts and Special Powers Act and Israel’s retained British Emergency Regulations.
- Its topology, in Agamben’s formulations as Lloyd quotes them: “The state of exception represents the inclusion and capture of a space that is neither inside nor outside […]. Being-outside and yet belonging: this is the topological structure of the state of exception” (PDF p.15 / printed p.73). Palestinians occupy within it “the peculiar topological location of being the incorporated outside” (PDF p.14); the exception is “the truth of the law, its unacknowledged absent but ever-present foundation” (PDF p.15).
- Agamben’s exemplary spatial form is the camp, concentrating those reduced to Bare Life; Lloyd’s counter-genealogy is that “both the state of exception and the excluded inside have been constitutive elements of colonialism, and in particular of settler colonial formations, from the Indian reservations to Bantustans and pass laws” to slave plantations (PDF p.16-17 / printed p.74-75; see Giorgio Agamben).
- The settler colonial supplement: “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”, so that in Israel/Palestine “what results is a proliferation rather than a suspension of law” (PDF p.17 / printed p.75; see Hyperlegality).
- Generalisation: Agamben is quoted that ‘the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including the so-called democratic states’ (PDF p.17); Lloyd’s model for that generalisation is not Agamben’s Nazi camp but Israel, which “permanently imposes that state of exception that Benjamin found to be the historical norm for the oppressed” and offers “the most pertinent and precocious model” of the new norm (PDF p.18-19 / printed p.76-77; see Naomi Klein, Walter Benjamin).
Related pages
Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, Giorgio Agamben, Hyperlegality, Bare Life, Settler Colonialism, Present Absentees