n his account of the state of exception, Agamben repeatedly relies upon what Hegel would have called emWesenslogik/em or #39;transcendental thinking#39;. Because of this reliance, the state of exception appears in Agamben#39;s account as the hidden ground of modern liberal democracies. When conceived as such a ground, it appears to be a condition of possibility that inexorably persists in the modern state. Moreover, within the state of exception all juridical order is suspended, leaving no normative or juridical criteria on the (...) basis of which to decide what the structure of any emergent political order should look like. This means that from the state of exception we can just as easily land in a totalitarian as we can in a liberal democratic or democratic socialist state. Without such criteria - lacking due to the total suspension characterizing the state of exception - Agamben#39;s own alignment with Benjaminian revolutionary messianism over Schmittian authoritarianism is arbitrary, and he leaves us with no basis for making any such decision ourselves. Drawing upon Hegel#39;s dialectic of freedom and his critique of transcendental thought, this paper argues that within the state of exception there is an implicit logic that points the way out of it. Furthermore, it does so in such a way that the state of exception is neither annexed by the structure of a predetermined juridical order along the lines proposed by Schmitt on the one hand nor posited it as a transcendental structure underlying or always preceding modern liberal democracies on the other. This alternative is overlooked by Agamben precisely because of his own insistence upon conceiving of the state of exception in a transcendent way. (shrink)

"These essays make a splendid book. Ignatieff's lectures are engaging and vigorous; they also combine some rather striking ideas with savvy perceptions about actual domestic and international politics.

In this paper I first explicate and then critically compare and contrast the political philosophies of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. Their writings intersect at a number of crucial issues and texts, sometimes lightly touching, sometimes crossing at the same point, going, so to speak, in different directions, and thus often resembling each other without, however, there being an actual identity of viewpoint. The differences, although sometimes subtle, are real. My thesis is that, subtle though these intersections and differences are, (...) they reveal two incompatible yet inextricable axes of contemporary political thought, blueprints of the competing visions of the political between which, for the foreseeable future, the most advanced philosophical thinking on the political will have to choose. Here, by way of an organizing principle, I attempt to show that these axes can be articulated around two ways of inheriting Nietzsche's intellectual legacy -- one that interprets the essence of political action in fundamentally ontological terms (Agamben), and the other that interprets it as fundamentally ethical (Derrida). (shrink)

I am trying...to go back through all those places where I was exiled-enclosed so he could constitute his there. To read his text to try to take back from it what he took from me irrecoverably...I am trying to re-discover the possibility of a relation to air. Don’t I need one, well before starting to speak?

This article seeks to deepen Giorgio Agamben’s brief investigation of the Foucauldian technical term dispositif, by locating it (and the triple structure which articulates it) in the larger context of his own contribution to the genealogy of “governmentality.” Following Agamben’s reconstruction of the Christian paradigm for the divine government of the world, it explores the singular relation between governmental dispositifs and concurrent modes of subjectivation. It argues that the contingency of human action must first be secured for the governmental machine (...) to be able to operate. (shrink)