To legal theorists such as Hans Kelsen, for whom sovereignty could be Sacer series,* starts out as an elaboration of Carl Schmitt's provocativeĪccount of sovereignty in his Political Theology of 1922. It is part ofĪ wider change in governance in which the rule of law is routinely displacedīy the state of exception, or emergency, and people are increasingly subjectĪs developed in the first three books of the projected four-volume Homo Peculiar to the United States under the Bush presidency. The political development they represent is not, according to Agamben, But although his recent examples come from the war on terror, Is sustained chiefly through such US exports as Chomsky, Gore Vidal and Of contraflow at a time when European opposition to American imperialism Seeminglyĭesigned for the current situation, Agamben's work is one of the few instances or unexpectedly executed by a missile from an unmanned aircraft. The inmates of Guantanamo not by any difference in legal status, but onlyīy the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated

The West's political model is now the concentration camp rather than theĬity state we are no longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from Is not just a matter of civil liberties: it is symptomatic of an alarming Unwillingness to share this information with the American state is still Photo, might constitute an aspect of anyone's subjectivity, Agamben's Hard to see how fingerprints, as opposed to the monstrous Other in a passport

the body'sīiological life' part of the system of state control.

Most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity. Relationship between citizens and the state'. What is at stake, he explains, is the 'new bio-political Most European critics of the evil empire, he has been willing to foregoĪn academic visit to the United States in order to prevent it happening. Giorgio Agamben does not want his fingerprints taken and, unlike like States don't really mind their citizens dying (provided they don't all do it at once): they just don't like anyone else to kill them Malcolm Bull reviews State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben, trans.