Towards the City of Thresholds. Stavros Stavrides
that demand exceptional measures, such as those that suspend basic civil rights.
Agamben’s (2005) idea of exception can be used to understand and conceptualize the contemporary city of enclaves. Central to this idea is an essentially juridico-political understanding of exception: exception must be compared to a rule. For Agamben, exception is not the opposite of the rule; it is the founding condition of the rule.
There is a historical component to this reasoning as well as a logico-mathematic component. Historically, the state of exception describes moments or periods during which law is suspended in the name of society’s protection from internal or external crucial threats. During a state of exception, a sovereign authority is justified in taking such a decision to suspend the law in its promise to reinstitute law and order as soon as the threat is eliminated. This situation, Agamben argues, reveals what is essential about authority: the legitimate ability to decide when and for how long the law will be suspended. In this act, authority reveals itself to be the precondition of law and not vice versa.
During the state of exception, a very peculiar relation between law and power is revealed. It is not that naked power simply replaces the regulating force of law. Law is present in its suspension as a legitimate force, a power to impose certain actions and prohibit others, a power with the ability to punish. The force of law as a legitimate force is passed over to the executive power while law is simultaneously suspended. A kind of ambiguous zone of indeterminacy is thus created “where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other” (Agamben 2005, 23).
Agamben characterizes this situation as a “threshold of undecidability … at which factum [concrete events and acts] and ius [law] fade into each other” (ibid., 29). It is interesting to observe how and why Agamben employs the image and concept of the threshold here. The threshold appears as an intermediary zone where supposedly distinct areas—in spatial terms, inside and outside; in juridical terms, law and anomie—lose their margins and “blur with each other.” Had he used the image of border or limit, he would have described the state of exception as a situation of trespassing, of exceeding or crossing a limit. The exceptionality of the state of exception would have been conceived as the complete outside of law, the complete other of law. Agamben, however, insists that the law is present in the state of exception as the legitimating element of a sovereign decision. Law is present in its suspension. In the threshold-like condition of the state of exception, opposing parts are co-present and indistinguishable (as their defining perimeters are replaced by a zone of indistinction) and thus no longer exclusive. In terms of the historical analysis of the exception, the threshold is an in-between period during which crucial differences (between law and anomie) are suspended.
There is, however, a certain inconsistency in using the image of the threshold in historical terms. If the period of threshold is an in-between period, “before” and “after” should exist as concrete and differentiated periods, their essential difference being created by the act of passage from one to the other. But the state of exception is supposedly not a period that produces qualitative differences and changes, rather, it is an intermediary period of difference during which a threat to the social status quo is eliminated. This period of difference mediates between two periods of order, that is, two periods that share the same defining characteristics.
We know from anthropology that the social experience of threshold crossing is an experience of change. This change does not have to be collectively created, as in an uprising or any other qualitative leap in terms of social relations. It can be a change affecting specific groups of people in specific periods of their social life. Anthropologists have provided us with many examples of spaces that periodically host ritualized transitions from one social position or condition to another. Famously, Arnold van Gennep has described “rites of passage” (van Gennep 1960) as those ritual acts connected with spaces that symbolize transitions. For example, from childhood to adolescence, from single to married life, from the status of the adolescent to that of the citizen, warrior or hunter). Ritual acts supervise the passage from one social identity to another, thus ensuring the overall stability of society and the corresponding social relations. In Agamben’s threshold, however, there seems to be a kind of circular movement. The state of exception equates “before” and “after,” to ensure that after this in-between period order is restored as before. The state of exception renders before and after indistinguishable.
In terms of a logico-mathematic analysis, the period of a state of exception presents itself as a logical paradox: opposing terms such as inside and outside, terms that are logically mutually exclusive as in set theory, have to be described as possibly indistinguishable. Agamben attempts to use a “complex topological figure” as the Moebius strip to represent this state “in which not only the exception and the rule but also the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another” (Agamben 1998, 37). In this image there is a slight shift towards a different understanding of this zone of indistinction. As with a Moebius strip, where one has to move (literally or speculatively) along the strip to discover that opposites “pass through one another,” so in the state of exception a movement between law and lawlessness creates the dynamic situation of a temporary suspension of law. In other words, the logico-mathematical analysis of this threshold period gives to Agamben’s use of the threshold image-concept a dynamic component that is closer to the actual social experience of crossing thresholds. As we will see throughout this book, it is in the performed or virtual act of crossing that the threshold is constituted as a space of potentiality.
In Agamben’s conceptualization of the state of exception this element should have been crucial, since it radically influences the understanding of a further antinomy inherent in the history of the state of exception: the exception becoming the rule. How can a temporary state, a state characterized by a temporary condition and legitimated as a critical part of the necessary rights of sovereign power, become permanent? And, since in terms of history nothing can be described as immune to change, what does it mean exactly to characterize a condition, a state, as permanent?
What Agamben probably has in mind is that in the temporary character of the state of exception, law and lawlessness must be equally present in the process of passing through one another. The zone of indistinction he describes should be understood as a mechanism rather than a state. Law and anomie are constantly compared during this period. Because the force of law is necessary for the state of exception to be imposed, the mechanism of exception has to remain at work, endlessly performing the law’s suspension. In a way, law is continuously present while power suspends it. The zone of indistinction therefore is an active zone of blurring the differences. Because differences exist, differences are socially perceived and posited in order to be suspended. This mechanism’s fuel, so to speak, is the legitimating temporariness. The mechanism works only because it constantly withdraws law from a situation where law is still regarded as the necessary force for ensuring social order.
Exception versus thresholds
When the state of exception becomes the rule, the mechanism turns into a “killing machine” (Agamben 2005, 86). We could say that in this case the mechanism is immobilized. The constant passing through opposing elements (spatial as well as juridical) comes to a halt. Instead of being an area of active comparisons, the zone of indistinction becomes an area where opposing elements coincide.
What Agamben wants to describe is exactly this “permanent” coincidence of law and anomie: suspension no longer needs to offer any justification. What the camp represents is the final obliteration of a crucial distinction: the distinction between exception and rule. Exception becomes normal. “The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule … a permanent spatial arrangement which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order” (Agamben 1998, 169).
That the camp is a “permanent spatial arrangement” essentially means that it is no longer a zone of indistinction, given that the comparison between outside and inside (spatially as well as juridically) is no longer possible. “The camp is a hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become indistinguishable” (ibid., 170). There is a slight difference in expression that actually reveals a qualitative