The State of Exception as the Rule - Jason, Hugues and Jon

The state of exception searches for means to suspend law. A totalitarian motive, fascist regime’s often take advantage of and/or fabricate emergency measures to modify juridical law and thereby achieve a mode of total cultural hegemony. In the state of exception, legislative and executive powers are indistinguishable, diminishing the parliament’s substantial role in monitoring government affairs. In Schmitt's conception of ‘Dictatorship’, the philosopher reasons the state of exception as a motive to expand the powers of government by removing opposing commissional and sovereign dictatorships and abolishing juridical order. In Giorgio Agamben’s thesis ‘The State of Exception as a Paradigm of Government’, the author investigates various Western dictatorial regimes that have experienced a state of suspension in the past. Considerable events such as those of the first and second world wars, England’s Defense of the Realm Act, and Germany’s Weimar Constitution are analyzed to help make meaning and legibility over their affect in the transformations of bills and juridical laws. Agamben argues that it is the absence of resistance that encourages the overthrowing of executive powers in emergency situations. The state of exception is vulnerable to turn a democratic state into a totalitarian occupancy through a pre-determined legislative agenda. Ironically, these new laws whose objectives are to ultimately protect democratic rights, in essence abolishes them. The infamous passing of ‘Article 48’ in the German Weimar Constitution in 1919 established their governments complete dictatorship over its nations. In affect, the tyrannical events of the Second World War still persist in the legislative bodies of many governments today. In France, many laws of the Constitutional Act of July 11, 1490, which granted its government the power to proclaim a state of siege throughout the country as a result of German occupancy, have not been changed since. (14) The necessity to ensure people the survival in the state of an emergency further removes the rights of citizens, obliging yet more power to a greater authority. In this case, the state of exceptions can be resolved as a basis of Marxist theory, the constructing of norms and ideas in accordance to the interest of the ruling class. To retain its involvement in government affairs, the Republican government of the United States of America has materialized many gimmicks and strategies to invoke sentiments of paranoia and fear across its nation. By having a country that appears to be frequently faced with a state of emergency, assigns the government total power over its legislation. Thus if we are living in a reality faced with a constant threat of ‘terror’, and if the state of siege is the exception applied to take extreme security measures against such threats, collectively as a group we concur with Agamben’s notion that the state of exception has become the rule and not the exception. (9)