Exceptions There Are That Are Not the Case

Abstract

There is something essential we need to know of power that is visible only when power makes certain exceptions. Power, we are arguing, is fundamentally without content. This occluded piece of information about power is partially illuminated at every exception to a rule but appears to only be fully visible to thought when a state of exception is declared by someone in power. This seems to be the crucial point of the theories of the exception elaborated by Giorgio Agamben, Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. Schmitt because the sovereign decision is content indifferent. Benjamin because it is only if you remove referential content from the terms exception and rule that you could mistake the two words for the same thing. Agamben because according to his theory of signatures, the law appears as ultimately contentless. Through a close engagement with the theories of these three authors, this article suggest that an exception is not some statement or ruling which stands outside the rule, but is the process wherein the interior of the rule, its actual rulings, is either negated or suspended. Is this what the legal exception is, the indifferentiation of law’s specific contents?