Moral State of Exception (Go straight to hell, boy)

The principle underlying the tactics of battle—that one has to be capable of killing in order to go living—has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population.
~Michel Foucault, A History of Sexuality, v.1

Giorgio Agamben’s theory on the logic of sovereignty is largely organized around the notion of the state of exception in which the figure of sovereignty is, at the same time, paradoxically inside and outside the juridical order. Based on the initial work of Carl Schmitt, Agamben proposes that “the sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places himself outside the law,” and in the process, the sovereign defines itself against the juridical exception (Homo Sacer 15): “Here the decision is not the expression of the will of a subject hierarchically superior to all others, but rather represents the inscription within the body of the nomos [law] of the exteriority that animates it and gives it meaning [physis, nature]” (Homo Sacer 26). The current Bush administration seems to regard this logic of sovereignty as “how-to” manual for the management of whole populations—or, biopower.

This logic of sovereignty, this theory of the sovereign exception (ex-capere), is what Agamben describes as a zone of indistinction—a zone that relates nomos and physis along a complex topographic relation of outside (nature) and inside (law) through which we can trace the threshold that defines sovereignty. By drawing on a complex series of analogues, etymologies, and historical references, Agamben develops one of the more important implications of this logic of sovereignty based on the exception—mainly, that at this paradoxical threshold of indistinction, the sovereign and the sacred too become indistinguishable. Bush is the sovereign precisely because he would claim to determine its exception.

We see this quite clearly in the case of the “enemy combatants” whereby the executive administration remains outside the law in order to determine those “combatants” who too remain outside the law—as both a framing of the interiority of law (which is effected through a total collapse of the moral and juridical) and as a total continuity between sovereign power and bare life: Prisoners of the state of exception are reduced to bare life and thus can be tortured, abused, interrogated, and effectively disappeared. Such a relation has certainly not gone without comment, and many journals, conferences, blogs, and protests have brought this to our attention.

In recent weeks, however, despite the determinations of the midterm election—and while the new congress ostensibly positions itself to check the abuses of executive power—the right-wing pundits (who are barely distinguishable anymore from Fox News consultants) are ratcheting up the rhetoric of exception and mobilizing the biopolitical forces that fall along the lines of racism, sexism, classism, ad fucking infinitum.

WE ARE ALL UNDESIRABLES (GIVE US YR POOR!)

Certainly, we have what we might recognize as “traditional” maneuvers from the culture wars that exploit and maintain the biopolitical, historical divide; for instance, Gingrich, who faired surprisingly well in the recent straw polls of the Conservative Political Action Committee, is stoking old Southern racist fears by appealing, again, to that old xenophobic campaign for total English language. Gingrich says, recently: "The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. ... We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.”

What appears most racist about this claim is that Gingrich is effectively naturalizing the existence of ghettoes and thus erasing the real conditions of historical oppression, neglect, and political/cultural sabotage that have engendered such living conditions. Worse, still, Gingrich not only naturalizes ghettos, but he addresses poor America in a strange and uniquely racialized way: Either you speak English, the language of the prosperous, or you speak the language of poverty, which is the language of the ghetto.

Ha Ha Ha, as if all the poor rednecks of the South ain’t runnin’ everywhere yellin’ Git r’ dun! Git r’ dun! No, that’s the language of the prosperous.

But is the logic of sovereignty—organized around the state of exception—different from a more broad sublimation of the biopolitical in general—meaning, there must be a more nuanced relation of power between Gingrich and his supportive constituents who remain simply racists, without any real experience of what we would call sovereignty proper.

EVERYONE IS AN EXCEPTION, SO EVERYONE IS SOVEREIGN!

The question, perhaps, gets at the heart of the difference between Agamben’s theory of the biopolitical and Foucault’s. For Foucault, I’m going to suggest, the effectuations of the biopolitical remain more anonymous with no discernible sovereign agency—that is, like power, we nowhere can isolate the biopolitical agency, but everywhere we see its effects.

But we do seem to be experiencing a strange new development in the biopolitical organization of culture, in that the juridical state of exception has all but collapsed into a total moral state of exception in which everyone can act now as a sovereign precisely because everyone is now ex-cepted (exception in the most egregiously pejorative sense). As the logic of sovereignty slowly assumes the sovereignty of logic, we are confronting an hallucinogenic, surreal logic of exception—of radical hypocrisy—that is transforming logic itself at the very deepest levels.

Amerikkka’s consciousness industry is radically saturated with this new bold state of exception, this saturated white-noise static of fear and cowardness.

Martin Matustik gave a short presentation of his new book on Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope last week, and amidst his numerous examples of acts of radical evil committed across the globe, I asked him if excessive indifference to the suffering Other, on the part of vast majority of Americans, should also be considered as a form of radical evil—and he agreed.

But consider this: No longer are we individuated, as Heidegger wrote, by our own-most-possibility-toward-death; no longer are we individuated, as Foucault wrote, through the investiture of disciplinary power—through the juridical, the medical, or the institutional. Rather, I would argue, we are individuated now according to a certain heroic devotion to the state of exception, which is to say that the moment of radical individuation—of Jemeinigkeit—is the moment in which, as Foucualt astutely observes, we are expected to kill in order to go on living. Or, at the very least, to remain willfully indifferent to the global suffering of poverty maintained by our own ordinary lifestyles and banal debaucheries.

Thus, because the heroic is anathema to the existential, we are effectively erased as humans. We are something else entirely.

KING SOLOMON, HE NEVER LIVED 'ROUND HERE

But we will have to regain our humanity by stripping ourselves of this fetishized sovereignty and unconditioning the Other from this state of exception. It will require pedagogy and love; it will require passivity, patience, commiseration, and hope.

So ends the good news.