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The ‘state of exception’ is a tool of power and turns out to be always more than the dominant paradigm of ruling.Following the attacks in New York and Madrid his book State of Exception makes it possible to envisage a political understanding of how forms of government that suspend the law can be permanently institutionalized.Europe’s great cities are being transformed into high-security experiments in survival.The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben remains a force to be reckoned with. For the series ‘favourite theory’, German art critic and theoretician Marius Babias discusses Agamben’s most recent book, State of Exception.Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri are seen as the two great meta-philosophers of our time. While Antonio Negri holds fast to the idea that class struggle is the motor of history, even if in a globalized world classes are fragmented and the struggles are multiple, Giorgio Agamben investigates the biopolitical arena between politics and the law that in his view structures and forms our lives. In his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), a philosophical project planned to run to four volumes, he presented the provocative thesis that human rights and concentration camps shared a common origin in sovereign state power. This sovereign power, Agamben argued, produces ‘homo sacer’, a category derived from ancient Roman law denoting a person with no rights – a naked and defenceless object of state power. Agamben wishes to locate zones of indifference between life and death – on the one hand in medicine (the human being as an object of research and an organ bank) and also in politics (the human being deprived of all rights and reduced to bare life). Whether he is a prisoner in Auschwitz or a political refugee, ‘homo sacer’ possesses only his bare existence. Since Aristotle, Western thought has been determined by the opposition between the ‘political’ and the ‘biological’ body, and only the ‘political’ body possesses any rights. Democratic systems of law are only a veneer, and the real modernist paradigm is the ‘camp’, where people are subjected to violence beyond the law.Agamben’s arguments strike a fundamental note, and his historical analyses are based on wide reading (even if he uncritically follows philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, with their evident affinity to National Socialism), and yet his consideration of possible political consequences remains very vague. If law and the absence of law derive from one and the same sovereign state power, then democracy and dictatorship are no longer distinguishable one from the other. Precisely because this criticism of his Homo Sacer was voiced so loudly, the new volume State of Exception was eagerly awaited – in the hope of clear answers in place of apocalyptic prophecy. But State of Exception too is vague and polarizing in its basic message and therefore not readily suited to political use; this short book does contain an explanation in terms of legal philosophy for the suspension of legal systems as a means of maintaining order from antiquity to today, but a clear line on the subject from the author is still lacking. As in Homo Sacer, Agamben sees the camp as the location of the ‘state of exception’, a state which was originally intended to suspend the validity of the law for a short time so as then to return to the old order after successful normalization of the crisis. The ‘state of exception’ is a tool of power and turns out to be always more than the dominant paradigm of ruling – this is the book’s basic thesis.In State of Exception Agamben makes no comment on the politics of our time, but in articles and interviews he leaves no doubt as to who he sees as the primary manager of the ‘state of exception’ today: the USA and the security policy of Pax Americana. In particular his comparison of the American base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba – where alleged Islamic terrorists are held in a provisional lawless zone – with Nazi concentration camps led to criticism and anger: ‘The situation of the prisoners in Guantanamo is legally speaking really comparable with the Nazi camps. The Guantanamo detainees do not have the status of prisoners of war; they have no legal status at all. They are subject to mere factual domination, and have no legal existence’. 1 This comparison clearly shows where Agamben’s generalizations and abstractions can lead – to the use of Auschwitz as a metaphor and the blurring of the distinction between perpetrators and victims, and also to the denial of an increasingly severe relationship of exploitation between rich and poor and north and south. In spite of all his contradictions and vagueness – the philosopher Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky accuses Agamben of using violent anti-Semitic terminology from Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereign power – Agamben has indeed struck a nerve. 2 Following the attacks in New York and Madrid his book State of Exception makes it possible to envisage a political understanding of how forms of government that suspend the law can be permanently institutionalized and thus change life inside Western democracies.The Conflict between Politics and MoralityWhat so-called ‘international terrorism’ on the part of Islamic groups is engendering goes far beyond the actual bombings and attacks. After New York and Madrid a number of new security laws and the use of the military to preserve public security were implemented, and not only in the USA where the Bush administration’s Patriot Act suspended general civil rights and produced institutional racism against US citizens of Islamic origin. The militarization of internal security is also being pushed forwards at a fast pace in Europe. Europe, where once the idea of the free city and public space originated, is now in the process of making the state of exception the predominant paradigm of urban life, and Europe’s great cities are being transformed into high-security experiments in survival. In Greater London (7.1 million inhabitants) 10,000 police officers patrol the streets every day, while the inner city and the underground and commuter train public transport networks are under constant blanket CCTV surveillance. The airports are protected by tanks, and there is a twenty-four-hour observation plane in the skies over the city. In Greater Paris (10 million inhabitants) 2,500 police officers and gendarmes (who belong to the military) are on duty at railway and metro stations, and 500 paratroopers und foreign legionaries watch sensitive buildings and tourist attractions such as the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. In Berlin (3.5 million inhabitants), where there are 4,000 suspected Islamists of which one hundred are thought to be trained for operations, the city government relies less on the presence of the police and the military on the streets and more on obtaining information in advance through the Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution) and other police state protection authorities.The state of exception is not only on the march inside democracies, it also dominates foreign and security policy at the EU level. In the medium term the EU intends to advance to become a world power that can compete politically and militarily with the USA. Without making reference to Agamben, the volume of essays on the business of war published by Dario Azzelini and Boris Kanzleiter, Das Unternehmen Krieg – Paramilitärs, Warlords und Privatarmeen als Akteure der Neuen Kriegsordnung, gives a shocking overview of the institutionalization of the state of exception as a permanent political state of affairs in Columbia, Chiapas, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Angola, Congo and Turkey. In an essay on the Yugoslavian war economy, Boris Kanzleiter shows that the privatization of the military led to a permanent predator economy. The wars in Yugoslavia were run by warlords, combining political and military with mafia and business interests – this has become the norm. Inciting conflict between ethnic groups conceals the greed for profit of the war elites; the military presence of the West in the Balkans guarantees that the state of exception becomes the rule, and this is in particular in the interest of the hegemonial aspirations of the Europeans.The basic conflict between politics and morality, which has been discussed in ever more controversial terms in recent years and now threatens the security policies and material interests of the elites, could also serve to explain Agamben’s success. The conservative zeitgeist, shocked by the world best-seller Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt that bestowed new impetus on the critics of globalization, demands a biopolitical order for the world. Agamben supports and delivers this message with his compelling philosophical discourse by making philosophy into the primary valid form of politics. Whether they concern a refugee camp in Australia, ‘sans papiers’ in France, the persecution of immigrants on the EU’s eastern borders or the treatment of Taliban and Al Qaida prisoners, Agamben’s analyses encompass the increased loss of rights and dignity for people today. They refrain however from calling for change implying instead an irreversible historical necessity. The difference between law and justice, which Agamben with his apocalyptic world-view no longer sees, is still the basis of a political critique of violence. To level out this difference is the same as to bow to one’s fate, whereas to continue to recognize the difference amounts to a struggle against injustice. This is ultimately the difference between Giorgio Agamben, the apocalyptic chronicler, and Antonio Negri, the counsel for those deprived of their rights.Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, University of Chicago Press, 2004, $ 30, ISBN 0-226009-24-6D. Azzellini, B. Kanzleiter (ed.), Das Unternehmen Krieg. Paramilitärs, Warlords und Privatarmeen als Akteure der Neuen Kriegsordnung, Assoziation A, Berlin -Hamburg-Göttingen 2003, 14 euroISBN 3-935936-17-61. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6. 4. 04.2. ‘Homo sacer, das bloße Leben und das Lager. Anmerkungen zu einem erneuten Versuch einer Kritik der Gewalt’, in: Die Philosophin, no. 25/02.