Repoliticizing the Exception: Towards a Political Theory of the Exception(s)

We live in exceptional times and exceptional circumstances require exceptional measures. States of exception have proliferated across the world in the past two decades in response to a seemingly never-ending series of crises, that started with the war on terror and reached its current zenith in the Covid-19 pandemic. A state of exception is an emergency measure whereby a state suspends the rule of law and normal democratic procedures to deal with an existential crisis or threat. Contemporary analyses continue to rely almost exclusively on the theoretical resources developed by legal scholars such as Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, that either reduce the state of exception to the law or sovereignty and thus depoliticize it and obscure its different political forms and dynamics. The proposed paper aims to contribute to the development of a distinctly political theory of the state(s) of exception. It takes the form of an immanent critique and development of Schmitt’s theory of the state of exception, that detotalizes his account of sovereign power and thereby recovers and reinscribes its underlying political dynamics within it. This facilitates the differentiation and analysis of three different political forms of the exception (commissioned, sovereign and revolutionary), as well as their diverging implications for democracy and the rule of law. The proposed paper thus aims to contribute a novel and distinctly political theory of the state(s) of exception and its different political forms and dynamics that can help determine how to safeguard democracy in an increasingly uncertain world.