Taking Exception to Exception.pdf

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Introduction: Taking Exception to the ExceptionAuthor(s): Jason Frank and Tracy McNultySource: Diacritics, Vol. 37, No. 2/3, Taking Exception to the Exception (Summer - Fall, 2007),pp. 2-10Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20204162 .Accessed: 08/10/2014 18:04

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Drawing of stage (2007)

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INTRODUCTION

TAKING EXCEPTION TO THE

EXCEPTION

JASON FRANK AND TRACYMcNULTY

The exception, Carl Schmitt wrote in Political Theology, is more interesting than the

rule. The ruleproves nothing;

theexception proves everything.

In theexception

thepower of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repeti

tion [15]. Embracing the extraordinary vitality of the event, while decrying the pale

repetition of the norm, contemporary theoretical discourses across multiple fields and

disciplines?law, political theory, theology, history, literature, and philosophy?wouldseem to concur with Schmitt's high estimation of the exception in its absolute purity.

And this high estimation has assumed an obvious and global political urgency in the

wake of 9/11 and the ever-expanding War on Terror. This special issue of diacritics

is motivated by our sense that the contemporary theoretical and political imagination is

captivated by the dramatic logic of the exception. A certain picture of law and normativ

ity seems to hold us captive, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, and our theoretical vocabularies

seem to repeat this picture inexorably. The essays that follow offer critical analyses of this

captivation, while also providing resources?theoretical, theological, literary, and techni

cal?for diminishing its hold (if not definitively refuting its claims). Without retreatingto a lost normativity, foundationalism, formalism, or legalism, the essays in this specialissue raise a number of pressing political and theoretical questions: What conceptualrubrics are maintained and reiterated by the seemingly inexorable logics of norm and

exception? What kinds of theoretical investigation are authorized and precluded by this

preoccupation? How do they structure our political discussions, and direct and constrainour political options?

The timeliness of these questions is suggested by a familiar anecdote. In April of

2006 George Bush, responding to the growing criticisms of Donald Rumsfeld's planningand execution of the Iraq War, said, I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I

hear the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what's best [qtd. in O'Neil]. This

was not the only time that Bush identified with decision and the concomitant category of

the exception; his administration's embrace of the theory of the unitary executive and

its unprecedented expansion of presidential power both domestically and internationallyhas been widely criticized for suspending the rule of law in the name of the higher law

of national security. Bush's invocation of the presidential decider was predictably

lampooned by some in the media. Others, however, saw darker forces at work in this

awkward invocation of sovereign decision. Alongside the often-mentioned, though sel

dom theoretically elaborated, influence of the work of Leo Strauss on neoconservatives

within the Bush administration, some saw the influence of Strauss's interlocutor Schmitt

somewhere behind Bush's remarks [see, for example, Scheuerman; Wolf].

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception, Schmitt wrote in Political Theol

ogy [5]. Sovereign is he who decides when formal law must be suspended to meet the

diacritics / summer-fall 2007 diacritics 37.2-3: 3-10 3



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Freud points to the potential costs of such a captivation when he derives the psychic

agency of the superego from the lawless authority of the primal father, whose unlimited

power ox jouissance is the force of law or spirit that insists in and beyond the law as

its ultimate source of judgment. He reminds us that, even for Paul, slavery to the law

gives way not to freedom, but to a slavery to Christ whose material support is the super

egoicvoice of conscience that

emergeswith the Christian's internalization of the law's

spirit [Freud 110-11].Does this mean that the fascination exerted by the exception in itsmany forms cannot

be fully examined without a more expansive understanding of what is gathered togetherand flattened out under the heading of norm ? When the function of law is reduced to

normativity, what alternative understandings of the law are lost or distorted in the process? What resources might they provide for a critical examination of the exception? Wal

ter Benjamin, for example, suggests that the written law (the laws of the Greek state, the

written commandments of the Hebrew decalogue) offered a first line of defense againstwhat he calls the tyranny of mythic states, distilled in the dictatorship of spirit [ Cri

tique of Violence 249]. In a similar vein, Jacques Lacan maintains that the Ten Com

mandments are nothing other than the laws of speech, insofar as the condition of speechis distance between the subject and das Ding. He argues that the function of the Hebraic

law is not to forbid or penalize transgression, but to erect a barrier against das Ding (the

psychic object that is the bearer of the death drive) and the objects that represent its

deadly force: God, the mother of the incest prohibition, the neighbor [Lacan 174]. Such

formulations suggest that the structures of law are concerned with more than the prom

ulgation of norms, procedures, and codes, or what Alain Badiou dismisses as the logic of

particularism, bound to worldly objects and cemented by ritual obedience. They implythat the role of the law, symbolic, or speech is to take exception to the exception, to cir

cumscribe or erect a barrier against absolute power or the superegoic spirit of the law.

* * *

The first three essays in this volume consider how these problematics have been treated

by three of the thinkers who have most profoundly influenced current debates about the

exception: Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, and Slavoj Zizek.

Jeffrey Librett, in From the Sacrifice of the Letter to the Voice of Testimony: Gior

gio Agamben's Fulfillment of Metaphysics, considers how the Pauline dialectic againstthe dead letter of the Jewish law is echoed in the work of Giorgio Agamben by an in

dictment of thegraphocentric

bias of muchcontemporary thought,

and acorrespondinginvestment in voice and testimony as expressing most fully the Being of language?an

argument that undergirds not only Agamben's early work on poetics, but his hugely influ

ential Homo Sacer and State of Exception. In a polemic with the work of Jacques Derrida

that Librett reads as one of his guiding preoccupations, Agamben proposes that it is the

insistent privileging of the letter or writing, and not the voice, that has most profoundly

shaped the development of Western metaphysics. But while Agamben's thesis is grounded in a reading of Heidegger, Librett argues that this reading is filtered through an unex

amined Christian theological grid that at once distorts Heidegger's account of the Beingof language and makes Agamben's own account of language uncomfortably proximate to

the critique of the letter in National Socialist ideology, which attempts to rid itself of the

letter by sacrificing not only Judaism but the (biologically, racially construed) Jews [12].

Agamben's readings of the camp and of the problematic of sacrifice, he argues, fail to ac

count for the particular logic of sacrifice at stake in the Final Solution, because Agambenis blind to the Christian dimension that subtends not only Nazi racist ideology but his own

understanding of language.

diacritics / summer-fall 2007 5



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In The Commandment against the Law: Writing and Divine Justice inWalter Ben

jamin's 'Critique of Violence,' Tracy McNulty considers a similar problem from the

opposite standpoint, arguing that Benjamin's notorious critique of lawmaking and law

preserving violence has too often been read as a generalized indictment of law as media

tion in favor of a transcendent, immutable authority or force, identified with the figure

of divine violence. This reading, she suggests, tendsto

align Benjamin's analysis withPaul's neo-Platonic critique of the letter of law as a distorting representation of an intel

ligible truth, the Law of God that he identifies with its living spirit against its sinful

letter. Instead, McNulty argues that the key tension at stake in the opposition of mythicto divine violence is not the tension between the letter of the law and its spirit or force,but between two different understandings of law: as a representation or mediation of a

force or violence and as a structural limit. Noting that one of Benjamin's key examplesof divine justice concerns the function of the commandment, McNulty argues that for

Benjamin the commandment form?like the first written laws of the Greeks?testifies

to the indispensable function of language (and writing in particular) in calling a halt

to mythic or lawmaking violence, a violence that is in turn identified with the tyrannyof spirit. Like his predecessor Immanuel Kant, she suggests, Benjamin reads the Jewish

commandment tradition as proposing a solution to the impasses inherent in all positivelaw, suggesting that the negative form of the written commandment acts as a barrier to the

tyranny implicit in the imaginary dimension of law.

Erik Vogt, in Exception in Zizek's Thought, admits that the sheer proliferation of

instances of exception in the work of Slavoj Zizek might easily lead one to conclude that

his thought tends to universalize the exception. But while Zizek is often read as a theorist

who affirms the exception, Vogt argues that he is a persistent critic. Beginning with a

consideration of Zizek's earliest works, Vogt shows that initially, the concept of exceptionis elaborated in terms of the notion of the symptom. Zizek's reinvigoration of the critique

of ideology argues for a consideration of the social symptom both in terms of its exceptional status and in terms of its phantasmatic structure, demonstrating that an updated

ideology critique has to account for both dimensions of the social symptom as exception:its dimension as master-signifier and its dimension as objet a. In subsequent works Vogtshows that the logic of exception is again central, this time guiding the way Zizek inter

prets the relation between Kantian and Hegelian philosophy, on the one hand, and the

logics of Judaism and Christianity, on the other. Finally, even Zizek's interventions into

recent discussions in contemporary political thought might be understood in light of his

attempt to formulate a critique of exceptionalist politics. His thesis is that philosopherssuch as Adorno, Heidegger, Badiou, and Agamben all share a fatal misunderstanding

regardingthe relation between the

exceptionand the

universal,in that

theyconceive of

the exception (symptom) as an outside intruding at certain moments upon the existingsocial order. For Zizek, in contrast, the symptom (exception) is itself the universal: and,

conversely, each universal is an exception.

In recent years political theorists have typically engaged the dynamics of norm and

exception through the rubric of political paradox, emphasizing the precarious self-suf

ficiency of norms and their (frequently disavowed) reliance on unjustified heteronomic

supports. Democratic theorists in particular have repeatedly returned to the paradoxes

inhabiting projects of collective self-authorization, dwelling on how, in Alan Keenan's

words, the very conditions of freedom and autonomy?the lack of natural, unquestionable grounds for judgment and action?seem to rule out the possibility of full political

autonomy [33]. Rousseau's lawgiver is the exemplary canonical figure around whichthese debates often turn. On one side stand those radical democratic theorists who affirm

the productivity of paradox, who see the legitimation deficit at the core of democratic au

tonomy as a catalyst of ongoing democratic contention and change. Agonistic democrats

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like Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau are influential representatives of this approach.On the other side stand liberal democratic theorists like J?rgen Habermas who attempt toovercome this legitimation deficit through an evolutionary project of deliberative proceduralism. The various iterations of deliberative democracy, which have become nearlyhegemonic in contemporary Anglophone democratic theory, broadly exemplify this ap

proach. While the essays by Honig, Frank, Shapiro, and Norris are broadly sympatheticwith those who affirm the irreducibility of paradox, they also resist the terms in whichthese debates are typically cast. Each of their essays aims to dispel the captivating holdthat political paradox?and its attending rubric of norm and exception?has on the political theorists who both affirm and reject it. Each of these essays articulates, in Bonnie

Honig's words, a position between decision and deliberation.In The Miracle of Metaphor: Rethinking the State of Exception with Rosenzweig

and Schmitt, Bonnie Honig explores the democratic resources of Franz Rozsenzweig'sdistinct conceptualization of the miracle and the alternative political theology it offersto the sovereign decisionism of Schmitt. While Schmitt turns to the disavowed miracleas a

wayof

underminingthe

purportedlyDeist

presuppositionsof liberal constitutional

ism and legal positivism, Honig engages Rosenzweig to provide an alternative politicaltheology to both, one that emphasizes the dispositional attributes of popular receptivityover the procedural formalism of law on the one hand, and the sovereign imperatives ofdecision and command, on the other. Prophecy is democratically refigured in Honig'sessay, replacing the sovereign focus on the prophet/lawgiver with the prophetic power ofthe people themselves, understood not only as receivers of prophecy but as themselvesan incipient prophetic power, a precarious potentiality which invariably produces remainders. Departing from the influential interpretation of Rosenzweig offered by Eric Santner,and ultimately departing from Rosenzweig himself, Honig's essay reexamines key biblical texts to argue that prophecy is indispensable to democratic politics. Her focus on the

miracle of popular prophecy deflates the opposition between the norm and the exception,as it draws theoretical attention to the worldly conditions under which the miracle is received.

In 'Unauthorized Propositions': The Federalist Papers and Constituent Power, Jason Frank is also engaged with the worldly conditions under which the exception appearsas a (democratic) problem. He situates the theological dilemmas surrounding the spiritand the letter of the law within very localized arguments surrounding the constitutionalcrises of late eighteenth-century America. Frank turns to the practices of early American

popular constitutionalism and to a close reading of James Madison's Federalist No. 40 in

particular, to argue that the Schmittian articulation of the problem of constituent power?

the sine qua non of a state of exception?blinds contemporary theorists to how the paradoxes surrounding self-authorization were navigated during the constitutional ratificationdebates?the great national discussion ?of 1787-89. Frank argues that there are les

sons to be learned from this productive historical example that significantly depart fromSchmitt's theological understanding of both the norm and the exception. Frank takes issuewith Schmitt's affirmation of constituent power as an absolute beginning that springsout of normative nothingness and from concrete disorder [Schmitt, ?ber die drei Arten

23-24], instead emphasizing lines of normative continuity that accompany the disruptionof legal order and assist in navigating the transition to a new legal order. In Madison'sinvocation of the informal and unauthorized propositions of the Philadelphia Convention (that is, the unauthorized

propositionsof the United States Constitution

itself)Frank finds an alternative way of understanding these dramas of self-authorization, onethat diminishes the epochal significance of the founding and attends instead to how the

extraordinary inhabits and sustains the democratic ordinary, how constituent capacitiesare continually elicited from within the midst of political life [118].




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Frank concludes his essay with a reexamination of the lawgiver of Rousseau's Social

Contract, and Kam Shapiro begins Politics Is a Mushroom: Worldly Sources of Rule

and Exception in Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin with a provocative discussion of

the same figure. For Shapiro, however, Rousseau's attunement to the immanent virtual

sources of normativity and to the virtuosity of the lawgiver in tapping those sources is

analogous to the arguments of Schmitt himself. According to Shapiro, there are immanent resources in Schmitt for overcoming the latter's own tendency toward metaphysical exceptionalism. Shapiro is particularly interested in the dynamic interplay between

the virtual sources of normativity in the receptive dispositions of the people and the

virtuosic enactment of these sources in the figure of the lawgiver. Like Honig, Shapirofocuses on dispersed popular sources of sovereignty and decision instead of the unitaryand transcendent figure of the sovereign. Walter Benjamin's work provides Shapiro with

examples of what he calls democratic virtuosity. Benjamin's rejection of the Schmittian

scenario of lawmaking and law-preserving violence in favor of an ongoing collective

habit-formation [122] suggests that attention to techniques is one way to diminish the

hold of the formal rubric of norm and exception and the sovereign and juridical conception of the political that underwrites it.

In Willing and Deciding: Hegel on Irony, Evil, and the Sovereign Exception, An

drew Norris also finds resources in Schmitt to combat the uptake of Schmitt in contem

porary theoretical discourse. Pursuing arguments first offered by Karl L?with, Norris

argues that Schmitt's early critique of romantic occasionalism in Political Romanticism

can be productively mobilized against Schmitt's own influential later work on decision

ism. In order to elaborate on this claim, but also to offer an alternative way out of the

normative dead end of Schmitt's decisionism, Norris reconstructs Hegel's analogous cri

tique of Schlegel's occasionalism. Like Schmitt, Hegel does not deny the necessity of

the moment of the decision and the confrontation with theexception

it entails; however,neither does he surrender all normative considerations to it.According to Norris, Hegel'sdiscussion of this issue has the great virtue of relating to much more broadly acceptednotions of subjectivity and freedom. Norris provocatively finds Hegel's navigation of

these problems neither in the subjectivism of Kantian Moralit?t nor in Sittlichkeit, but in

Hegel's critique of the sickness of modern ironism. Instead of reading Hegel as a statist

reactionary, Norris emphasizes the movement in his work between particular, universal,and individuality: To move through particularity, Norris writes, entails a confrontation

with the exception but makes that confrontation part of a larger process if what is soughtfor is a set of universal concepts that will allow us to become the individuals that we are

[154], That is, Norris emphasizes the process of mediation itself between the universal

and particular in order to situate the exception within a broader normative project irreducible to a given norm or law.

Finally, the third set of essays considers a problem that is implicit in many of the

preceding contributions, even if none addresses it centrally: the aesthetics of power, or the

indispensable role of figuration and visuality in securing the metaphysics of the exception. While the critical literature on sovereignty and the discourse of the exception has

long underscored the complicity of metaphor and image in the myth of sovereign powerand the metaphysics of meaning on which it depends, the final three contributors insist

that figurai language and visual representation also have the capacity to undercut these

myths, to deallegorize narrative and render the exception unexceptional.

In 'Above and beneath classification': Bartleby, Lifeand Times

ofMichael

K,and

Syntagmatic Participation, Gert Buelens and Dominiek Hoens point out that despitetheir many differences, what every discourse on the exception ultimately exposes is that

the rule cannot do without the exception, and that the exception is equally dependent on

the rule. They propose to consider how this problem affects literature, and in particular

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how literature is read: suggesting that in the literary context, the rule goes by the name

of 'allegorical reading' and the exception by that of 'singularity' [158]. They focus on

two critical texts that have attempted to theorize the literary interplay of rule and exception, with very different results: Derek Attridge's recent attempt in /. M. Coetzee and the

Ethics of Reading to determine what he has called literature's singularity, and Gilles

Deleuze's reading of the ?ventai dimension of literature inMelville's Bartleby the Scrivener. While they share Attridge's suspicion of allegorical modes of reading, Buelens and

Hoens question his nonallegorical alternative, which they see as relying heavily on a process of identification between readers and protagonists that actually amounts to a varia

tion on the allegorical theme. They maintain that [literature is not something that simply

exists?waiting for a theoretician who will use it as an illustration or for a reader who will

only understand what he or she already knows?but is an event, something that brings

something new into a given situation [159]. They find the building blocks of this more

persuasive nonallegorical alternative in Deleuze's reading of Bartleby, which emphasizesthe readers' syntagmatic participation in the text rather than paradigmatic identification

with itsprotagonists,

and in theprocess suggests

that readers canexperience

a condition

divorced from any perspective ... a singular perspective that is in the process of beingformed [158].

Susan Buck-Morss offers a fitting close to the issue with Visual Empire, a rich

and wide-ranging examination of the relation between the image and sovereign powerthat asks why it is so difficult to cut off the head of the king so that it stays off, [and]

why popular sovereignty consistently resurrects an aura of quasi-mystical power around

the sovereign figure [172]. The first part of the essay traces the emergence of an ico

nography of sovereignty in Byzantine visual aesthetics, where the iconocity of imperialRome merged with that of the Incarnation to create an immense force-field of affective

power [178] whose potency is echoed today in the iconographie power of global media.

But while she argues that the events of 9/11 could be read as an iconoclastic attempt to

destroy the visual economy of power [182], Buck-Morss cautions that they also exposethe extent to which iconocrat and iconoclast are equally invested in the political power of

the image: they differ only in their ways of managing that power and directing it for theirown aims. By way of contrast, the second part of the essay turns to a trilogy of recent

films by Russian director Alexander Sokurov, each dealing with a different twentieth-cen

tury ruler who was an icon of absolute power: Hitler, Lenin, and Hirohito. Buck-Morss

argues that these films are not about the sovereign power of national leaders; they are

about the sovereign power of the visual, the experience of the image and how it relates to

political belief [186]. Sokurov depicts these modern icons not at their heights of power,

but as impotent, powerless, and dying men: not the exceptional tyrants we expect, butmen absolutely unexceptional in their visceral humanity. If the iconoclastic desire is for

evil rulers to be responsible for historical catastrophes, so that true sovereignty can be re

stored, and humanity redeemed ?a desire that ultimately sustains the myth of sovereign

power?Sokurov turns this logic inside out. The sovereign is not responsible. Absolute

rulers are powerless. And the audience disappointment begins to set up its own economy[186]. The emphasis here is on the popular dispersion of power instead of its mythic unityin the figure of the sovereign ruler. Buck-Morss's summary understanding of the chal

lenge of Sokurov's films may therefore be applied to all of the essays in this special issue;

they each offer up for critical examination our complicity?theoretical and practical?inthe construction of

sovereign power throughits

captivating apotheosisof the state of

pureexception.




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WORKS CITED

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Benjamin, Walter. Critique of Violence. Selected Writings, Volume I: 1913-1926. Ed.

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-. On the Concept of History. Trans. Harry Zohn. Selected Writings, Volume 4:1938-1940. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard UP,2003.

Buck-Morss, Susan. Visual Empire. Diacritics 37.2-3 (2007): 171-98.

Buelens, Gert, and Dominiek Hoens. 'Above and beneath classification': Bartleby, Lifeand Times ofMichael K, and Syntagmatic Participation. Diacritics 37.2-3 (2007):

157-70.

Frank, Jason. ' Unauthorized Propositions': The Federalist Papers and Constituent Pow

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Scheuerman, William. Carl Schmitt and the Road to Abu Ghraib. Constellations 13

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Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans.

George Schwab. Cambridge: MIT P, 1988.-. ?ber die drei Arten des rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens. Berlin: Dunker &

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Shapiro, Kam. Politics Is aMushroom: Worldly Sources of Rule and Exception in Carl

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Suskind, Ron. The One Percent Doctrine: Deep inside Americas Pursuit of Its Enemies

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Vogt, Erik. Exception in Zizek's Thought. Diacritics 37.2-3 (2007): 61-77.

Warner, Marina. Angels and Engines: The Culture of Apocalypse. Raritan (2005):

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