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Stegiel's avatar

Man is an animal who lives in a Polis said the Stagirite. Some years later Judge Learned Hand observed "The law is not just it is just the law." We dwell in a state of exception introduced under the previous Pretender's eyes and the current Pretender.

Alex Michael Azar II, 2012 to 2017, Azar was president of the U.S. division of Eli Lilly and Company, a major drug company, and a member of the board of directors of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a large pharmaceutical trade association. Thus a swamp creature who is an American attorney, businessman, lobbyist, and former pharmaceutical executive served as the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2018 to 2021. And today former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra serves as head of Health and Human Services

Giorgio Agamben provides a thorough historical and legal contextualization of the state of exception, defining its critical nature and development. Defined as the expansion of executive power in response to existential threats to the nation, the state of exception has become the norm of executive power throughout Western democracies. Analyzing the legal and political theory that has given rise to the state of exception, Agamben delivers a highly detailed description of this legal concept. From its origins in Roman law, Agamben traces the evolution of the state of exception through two political scholars, Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Today, the state of exception has allowed the President of the United States to unilaterally expand executive power into legislative and judicial domains.

Agamben’s Take-Home Points:

The state of exception is the expansion of the executive power to the point where presidential decrees have the force of law, often invoked during “states of siege” or a “state of war.” Through this expansion of executive power, the separation of powers no longer constrains the executive branch. It is not the suspension of law but an extrajudicial state where Presidential power works with and above the current judicial system (Chapter 1).

The importance of continual security has come to produce a continual state of exception in contrast to traditional declarations of war in Western democracies (14).

Abraham Lincoln (20), Franklin D. Roosevelt (21-22), and George W. Bush (3, 22) all serve as case studies for this state of exception and its gradual temporal expansion.

The state of exception depends on a conception of necessity, usually the survival of the state. However, necessity is always subjective (30).

The state of exception has evolved from the Roman law of iustitium, the suspension of law during times of necessity (41).

Western judicial order can be describes as a duality between auctoritas and potestas. Auctorita is the anomic or “metajuridical” whereas potestas is the normative juridical process. That state of exception is what ties these systems together and allows Western politics to access the legal anomie without abandoning conventional legal processes (85-86).

Agamben argues that the perpetual utilization of the state of exception will ultimately undermine Western law and lead to a “global civil war” (87).

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Stegiel's avatar

Praps. The Stack is new each day. International reach is great. On FB I had Chinese guys engaging in Lit conversations using software to get around the Firewall. I have a few folk corresponding from India. Nigeria has two. Germany 1. California 3. 😂

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