Constitutive Exceptions

Giorgio Agamben has caused some excitement with his political theory of the exception.  The political world is one of bio-power - of cooperation and competition among persons.  But underlying that world is the real world in which a person is also just an intelligent animal.  This is the condition of bare life, and Agamben ties it to homo sacer , a special class of condemned person in ancient Rome.  The conditions on homo sacer were rather like those on Cain after he killed Abel - no longer part of society, yet unable to be killed, living a-politically.  (Cain of course, marries a woman from another city, in a verse that has caused a lot of literalist christian fibonacci calculations.)  Agamben's framework can be interestingly applied to Guantanamo Bay and my wife tells me of some work applying it to elite cyclists, where their rights are almost completely surrendered to training, anti-doping rules and competing.

I have been interested in the other end of the scale.  Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan argue that there is something healthy about having a human being as your constitutive exception - that humans need to honor political power, and that it is safest to reserve the greatest honour for unweilded, unweildable power like that of a constitutional monarch and leave those responsible for actually getting things done trying to earn glory by getting things done.

I'm sure this is not a very original connection, but the Queen of England is something of a homo sacer, especially in relation to the machinery of government.  Being England, she is not ever permitted in the House of Representatives - practically, to prevent her or her heirs from taking over power.  But more importantly, to prevent a breakdown of the symbolism of the throne.

This reminds me of something from Lacan that was covered in Tim Morton's lectures - that we all have a store of imaginary dreads stored up from the terrible time of total vulnerability in our infancy - and that what is so destructive about torture or sexual abuse is not that they make real what is supposed to function symbolically in imagination.  Similarly, pure, directly elected democracy is a recipe for mania and despair, for unjust meritocracy, while the constitutive exception of a monarch at once enlarges and bounds the world.