State of Exception

Title: State of Exception
Author: Giorgio Agamben
ISBN 0226009254 , ISBN-13: 978-0226009254
Binding: Paper
Date: 2005
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Number of Pages: 104 pages
Price: $15

"State of Exception is an impressive and disquieting meditation on the state of the democratic institutions by which political power is organised in the West. Written in a simple and lucid language, this is an erudite, meticulous, and precise examination of the long and complex history of the ideological framework underpinning the present obsession with the state of exception as the ''new form-of-state'' as it obtains at least in the USA and UK." (Tony Simoes da Silva International Journal of Baudrillard Studies )

"For Agamben, fingerprinting is not just a matter of civil liberties: it is symptomatic of an alarming shift in political geography. We have moved from Athens to Auschwitz: the West''s political model is now the concentration camp rather than the city state; we are no longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo not by any difference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated--or unexpectedly executed by a missile from an unmanned aircraft. . . . But although his recent examples come from the war on terror, the political development they represent is not, according to Agamben, peculiar to the United States under the Bush presidency. It is part of a wider range in governance in which the rule of law is routinely displaced by the state of exception, or emergency, and people are increasingly subject to extra-judicial state violence."--Malcolm Bull, London Review of Books (Malcolm Bull London Review of Books )