Summary
Theorist of the State of Exception whose classic formulations David Lloyd both uses and supplements: Lloyd takes Agamben’s topology of the exception — being-outside and yet belonging — and his camp as its exemplary spatial form, and argues against him that the exception and the excluded inside were constitutive of colonialism, and in particular of settler colonial formations, long before the Nazi camp, and that in Israel/Palestine the exception works by proliferation of law rather than its suspension (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.15-18 / printed p.73-76).
Details
- Agamben as quoted by Lloyd: “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, citing State of Exception, 2005, p.35).
- For Agamben, drawing on Carl Schmitt on sovereignty and the ‘decision’, no judicial procedure governs the state of exception, since it is a suspension of law; note 37 records that Agamben sees Schmitt’s thinking of the exception as in dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s 1921 ‘Critique of Violence’ on violence and ‘law-making’ (PDF p.15, 21).
- His material instance is the camp: “The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule” (PDF p.16 / printed p.74, quoting ‘What is a Camp?’, 2000, pp.37-38), a territory ‘captured outside, that is, it is included by virtue of its very exclusion’ (p.39 as cited), concentrating those reduced to ‘bare life’ (see Bare Life).
- Lloyd’s critique: Agamben “ignores the long history of colonial genocide and domination in which the techniques and spaces of the Holocaust were first developed”, expressly dismisses the concentration camp’s origins in settler colonial and plantation societies, and so “ignores the absolute normality of the state of exception under colonial regimes” (PDF p.16 / printed p.74).
- Agamben as quoted by Lloyd on the present: ‘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 / printed p.75, citing State of Exception, p.2) — but for Agamben, Lloyd notes, it is the Nazi model that has become generalised, where Lloyd argues the settler colonial one has.
Related pages
Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, State of Exception, Bare Life, Hyperlegality, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Achille Mbembe