For Schmidt, the essence of sovereignty consists of deciding what is the exception and making the decision appropriate to that decision, where having one without the other makes no sense. It is precisely this idea of indeterminacy of the state of exception that this review will attempt to trace as it is one of the most important features in Agamben’s book.īefore demonstrating this paradoxical nature of the state of exception, it is first important to outline Schmidt’s motivations, being the legal thinker who first came up with the term ‘state of excpetion’. As Agamben puts it, “the state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have a legal form” 2. This paradox arises due to the decision being no longer guided by law, but by exception. What this concept of decision ultimately amounts to, is the paradoxical nature of the state of exception that appears as a legal form, while being legally undetermined at the same time. As Schmidt formulates at the very beginning of his Political Theology, the “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” 1. On one hand, the democratic state entails a check of power that usually consists of the president, the legislative branch, and the parliament on the other hand, a state of exception can be declared which grants absolute power over the whole political check of power, entailing a cancelation of legislative procedures such as individual rights, along with a cancellation of protection over the exercise of sovereign power over some or all citizens. Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception regards the conceptualization of the ambiguity between sovereignty and exception and the way these two terms have become interrelated within the legislative and executive procedures of contemporary democratic states.
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