The Double Articulation of Sovereign Bordering: Spaces of Exception, Sovereign Vulnerability, and Agamben’s Schmitt/Foucault Synthesis

ABSTRACT

With the rise of authoritarian populism and critical border studies, as well as the continued presence of the Minutemen and borderlands studies, it is safe to say that sovereign borders are receiving increasing attention from a diverse set of actors within and beyond academia. One strain of research, building on the work of Giorgio Agamben, has examined the border as a space of exception. However, Agamben’s conceptual development of biopolitical sovereignty has come under fire, as critics assert his uneasy synthesis of Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault is disproven by the agency of migrants proving themselves capable of resisting sovereign control at the border. This article responds to Agamben’s critics by rebalancing the Schmittian and Foucauldian sources of Agamben’s work. While much of the conceptual development of the border-as-exception has focused on the experience of the border-crosser as a capillary manifestation of control, I argue that the exception is as important for the sovereign as for the object of sovereign power. Every decision on the exception is also a process of defining who the sovereign is, and if we understand the border is a space of exception, then we also must recognize the vulnerability that this produces for the sovereign.

KEYWORDS:

• International relations
• Giorgio Agamben
• state of exception
• Michel Foucault
• Carl Schmitt
• border security

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Mark Salter, Kailey Taplin, and the editors and reviewers of the Journal of Borderlands Studies for extensive and helpful feedback on the manuscript. Earlier versions of the argument were presented at the York Centre for Refugee Studies and the University of Ottawa.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Santora (2018).

2 The Use of Bodies, the culminating volume, clearly focuses more directly on Foucault than Schmitt.

3 Contra the premise of articles which see resistance within the state of exception as unlikely given the force of the exception (e.g. Bargu 2017). This discussion of agency is markedly different from those that read Schmitt/Agamben as describing a power mechanism of “unidirectional” importance (see Owens 2009, 574).

4 This leads to Lazar’s (2006) criticism of the Schmittian state of exception on the grounds of “its unpredictability and its totality” (259).

5 Therefore, as Sergei Prozorov has argued, every normal sovereign order is “contaminated” by the exception (2005, 98).

6 For more on political theology and homology, see Murphy (2019b).

7 For a thoughtful reflection on the development of the concept nomos, see Zartaloudis (2019).

8 This is not the first time that paraconsistent logic has been noted in Agamben’s work or in concepts crucial to it (see Abbott 2014, 104n95, 185–6; Murphy 2019a, 42–45, 2019b, 11).

9 See Priest (1989) for the relationship between dialetheism and dialectics.

10 The ability of bare life to cause this kind of rupture has been theorized via Rancière by Montange (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.