Homo sacer Book

The machine that will lead to global civil war

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This book can be hardly understood outside the continental tradition of code law, and it makes no attempt at an archaeology of common law - where for example there's no decision-norm cleavage, as Entscheidung (Schmitt and Benjamin's 'decision' ) is exactly what generates law. From a common law perspective the essay might thus appear as a sequence of absurdities, but in its painstaking investigation of long forgotten diatribes and lost constitutions it has the merit to unearth the root meaning of a few relevant political phenomena, casting a new, not necessarily depressing light on them.

The book begins asking "what is political action?" and ends answering that "truly political is only that action, which cuts the nexus between violence and law". And violence and war are conceptually - even if sometimes not explicitly - at the center of the complicated to and fro between ancient texts and present times. Tumultus (uprising in Latin) is the core archaeological finding on which the whole theory of the state of exception, or suspension of law, hinges. This attention to civil war as the trigger to reactions that hollow out constitutions and institutions without ever abolishing them can be usefully transferred from the study of the borderline device of the state of exception to the heart of what we call democracy (by no means is this word used in the book - I'm referencing it at my own risk).

A generalization of tumultus from a democratic perspective is internal conflict. On a continuum from cosmos to chaos , i.e. from order and harmony to disorder and aggression, democracy is always half-way in its appearence and totally bent over chaos in its substance. There should be nothing surprising to this: a myriad of constituencies advancing their own agendas is just mess. And something to be happy about, if your power ends with your ballot. But if the idea of an "excess of democracy", as Samuel P. Huntington put it, gets traction, then tumultus can become the new name of democracy and the state of exception easily invoked and granted. Which is exactly what happens on a regular basis. It has to be clear that the target of all states of exception is democracy itself, or "the enemy within" in the words of Margaret Thatcher, especially when officially specific constituencies are singled out or external enemies and crises blamed. It is through a suspension of the intricacies of democracy that elites can then start thinking of global expansions, focusing their ambitions externally once the internal tumultus has been taken care of. This is why the author can conclude that the mechanism of the state of exception will eventually lead to global civil war.

Finally, what does it mean to undo the nexus between violence and law, or to open a space between the two where truly political action can unfold? Law is said to have been established ne cives ad arma ruant , i.e. so that the citizens not rush to arms. We should start thinking that there is no mechanism - be it law, or its suspension, whether codified in rites, traditions, religions or modern law codes - that can prevent conflict from playing out in our democratic societies. It is only by playing with conflict - and with law consequently - without fear (which is the opposite of violence) that political action can come of age.