Society Must Be Defended, or, the Archaeology of the Exception

Andrew Neal spoke about different theoretical approaches to the problem of ‘exceptionalism’, which is the problem of exceptional practices legitimated by exceptional events/situations. As such, he dealt with Carl Schmitt, ‘securitization theory’, and finally the work of Michel Foucault, using the latter to provide a critique of the first two and sketch an alternative. Carl Schmitt poses the problem of the exceptional limits of law, politics, liberalism, and predictability regarding the future in order to argue for the necessity of exceptional sovereign power. Schmitt deliberately conflates the sovereign response to the exceptional with the sovereign declaration of the exceptional. As such, Schmitt’s sovereign has the prerogative to declare the existence of the very thing - the exceptional event/situation - that gives it its raison d’etre. Although Schmitt’s approach contains a barely-concealed fascist ethic, he still poses the challenge that the exception takes primacy over the rule.

Securitization theory goes some way to meeting this challenge. It argues that security situations, or exceptional situations, have no objective qualities that necessitate certain forms of politics. Rather, security is a process by which issues are made into security issues through securitizing ‘speech-acts’. Securitization theory treats security as a discourse or field that is characterized by certain types of language, ways of speaking, subject positions, institutional structures and so on. Neal argued that although this approach is needed and welcome, it still tends to reify security as an identifiable and unified special category, thus maintaining the norm/exception split and therefore supporting Schmitt’s argument that the exception takes primacy over the norm.

Neal instead sketched a different approach using Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge. He suggested that to avoid reifying a special category or field of security/exceptionalism, we must describe discourses not as discrete discursive unities with identifiable limits, but as dispersed formations - as scattered archives of the already-said , multiple conceptual horizons, competing strategies and opposed subject positions. In order to meet the challenge of exceptionalism, it is essential not to reify discourses as exceptional or sovereign-centred.

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