AΠΟΣΠΑΣΜΑ
We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them.
—George W. Bush, September 20, 2001
1.
We
are living in the State of Exception. We don’t know when it will end,
as we don’t know when the War on Terror will end. But we all know when
it began. We can no longer quite “remember” that moment, for the images
have long since been refitted into a present-day fable of innocence and
apocalypse: the perfect blue of that late summer sky stained by acrid
black smoke. The jetliner appearing, tilting, then disappearing into the
skin of the second tower, to emerge on the other side as a great
eruption of red and yellow flame. The showers of debris, the falling
bodies, and then that great blossoming flower of white dust, roiling and
churning upward, enveloping and consuming the mighty skyscraper as it
collapses into the whirlwind.
To Americans, those terrible moments
stand as a brightly lit portal through which we were all compelled to
step, together, into a different world. Since that day ten years ago we
have lived in a subtly different country, and though we have grown
accustomed to these changes and think little of them now, certain words
still appear often enough in the news—Guantánamo, indefinite detention,
torture—to remind us that ours remains a strange America. The contours
of this strangeness are not unknown in our history—the country has lived
through broadly similar periods, at least half a dozen or so, depending
on how you count; but we have no proper name for them. State of siege?
Martial law? State of emergency? None of these expressions, familiar as
they may be to other peoples, falls naturally from American lips.
What
are we to call this subtly altered America? Clinton Rossiter, the great
American scholar of “crisis government,” writing in the shadow of World
War II, called such times “constitutional dictatorship.”1
Others, more recently, have spoken of a “9/11 Constitution” or an
“Emergency Constitution.” Vivid terms all; and yet perhaps too narrowly
drawn, placing as they do the definitional weight entirely on law when
this state of ours seems to have as much, or more, to do with
politics—with how we live now and who we are as a polity. This is in
part why I prefer “the state of exception,” an umbrella term that
gathers beneath it those emergency categories while emphasizing that
this state has as its defining characteristic that it transcends the
borders of the strictly legal—that it occupies, in the words of the
philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “a position at the limit between politics
and law…an ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection
of the legal and the political.”2
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