THE CRISIS OF THE CRISIS: Is Covid Politics the Real Emergency?

In some ways, our current intellectual panorama now looks like the inverse of the mid-2000s, with the right avidly critiquing the state of exception and the left largely demanding acquiescence to it.

Even beyond partisan motives, this reversal is not surprising. The notion of the state of exception also has an ideologically eclectic pedigree, and this is not the first time it has been handed back and forth between the right and the left. Its elaboration begins, as noted above, with Carl Schmitt, an anti-liberal legal theorist who later became a card-carrying Nazi. But one of Schmitt’s key interlocutors during the 1920s and 1930s was the Jewish mystic and Marxist critical theorist Walter Benjamin, who offered his own elaboration of the state of exception.

It’s worth recalling that, unlike Agamben and his recent disciples right and left, neither Schmitt nor Benjamin framed the state of exception primarily as a danger. On the contrary, both were, in their way, advocates of the state of exception. For Schmitt, a state must be able to step outside the bounds of the law in order to maintain the law. Suspending the law, in other words, is necessary to the law’s survival. Benjamin, for his part, argued that it is the task of communist revolutionaries “to bring about a real state of emergency.” This “real” emergency would supersede the ongoing state of exception by which the capitalist order has preserved its dominance — a state of exception that, in the modern era, has become the rule.

I say, build back normal.