The [Rhetorical] Question of Exception, for Now

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Considered this way, Agamben's letter is an echo of his concern for the operativity and stakes of a state of exception. In the order of their original publication, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005); Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

2. Jacques Derrida, “9/11 and Global Terror—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” 2001. Reprinted at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/066649.html#copyright (accessed 5 March 2008).

3. I refer here to 14 September 2001, a day on which George W. Bush both issued a “Declaration of National Emergency” and addressed an audience gathered in the National Cathedral for a “National Day of Prayer and Remembrance” (respectively, see http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010914-4.html (accessed 5 March 2008) and http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010914-2.html (accessed 5 March 2008)). These texts precede and arguably enable the indefinite detention and military trials cited by Agamben as instances of the “biopolitical significance of the state of exception” (Agamben, State, 3, 68).

4. Agamben, Time, 40.

5. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 8, 10–11.

6. Agamben, Time, 105, 38–40.

7. Agamben, Time, 23, 35–40; Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 56.

8. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 21. Less than one-quarter of American citizens hold passports. See Alkman Granitsas, “Americans are Tuning Out the World,” YaleGlobal, 24 November 2005, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=6553 (accessed 5 March 2008).

9. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2007), 49.

10. Foucault, Security, 75, 47.

11. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 57; Agamben, Time, 105–6. The issue has not entered mainstream consciousness. See Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (New York: Chelsea Green, 2007).

12. Agamben, State, 39. Of course, this case rests on Benjamin's thought. See Walter Benjamin, “The Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 236–52.

13. Agamben, Time, 106; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8, 88.

14. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 1948), 383; Agamben, State, 40.

15. See John Brenkman, The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007). With respect to the banal invocation of the “conciliatory,” it is instructive to consult the 2007 testimony of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker before the US Congress. For instance: http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/crocker_preparedtextcro091007.pdf (accessed 5 March 2008).

16. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 59.

17. I draw here from Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 12–20.

18. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell (New York: Routledge, 1992).

19. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 446.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erik Doxtader

Erik Doxtader is a Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of South Carolina (USA) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (Cape Town, South Africa)