Giorgio Agamben is professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona. He is the author of ten previous books, including the prequel to this one, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Kevin Attell is a writer and translator living in Berkeley, California. He is the translator of Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal.
"State of Exception is an impressive and disquieting meditation on
the state of the democratic institutions by which political power
is organised in the West. Written in a simple and lucid language,
this is an erudite, meticulous, and precise examination of the long
and complex history of the ideological framework underpinning the
present obsession with the state of exception as the 'new
form-of-state' as it obtains at least in the USA and UK."--Tony
Simoes da Silva "International Journal of Baudrillard Studies"
(7/1/2005 12:00:00 AM)
"State of Exception is a timely and compelling inquiry into the
capacity of state power to withdraw the guarantees of legal
protection and entitlement, at once abandoning its subjects to the
violent whims of law and intensifying state power. Not to be
conceived as merely occasional and conditional, invocations of a
state of exception have come to constitute the basis of modern
state power. Agamben deftly considers the historical and
philosophical implications of this power, offering a brilliant
consideration of 'life' and its tense relation to normativity. This
is an erudite and provocative book that calls for us to 'stop the
machine' and break the violent hold that law lays upon life."
--Judith Butler "Judith Butler, author of Precarious Life: Powers
of Violence and Mourning" (8/6/2004 12:00:00 AM)
"The impact of Agamben's thought since the publication of the first
volume of Homo Sacer . . . has been immense not merely in the field
of continental philosophy but also in political and legal theory,
sociology, and in literary and cultural studies."--M. Canstantinou
and M. Margaroni "Continental Philosophy"
"When a conservative member of the U.S. Congress recently
designated the Guantanamo prisoners as 'those who were missed by
the bombs' and thus forfeited their right to live, he almost
literally evoked Agamben's notion of homo sacer, a man reduced to
bare life no longer covered by any legal or civil rights. What you
hold in your hands is simply the book for all those who do not see
in 9/11 a mere pretext for patriotic mobilization, but an impetus
for a deeper reflection on where we stand today with regard to the
very fundamentals of our civilization."--Slavoj Zizek "Slavoj
Zizek, author of Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle" (8/6/2004 12:00:00 AM)
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