State of Exception and Democracy

Extract

[...] Artifice because it embodies the delegation of power by individuals. These authorize it to act in their name, thus conferring absolute authority on the sovereign. Now, if the state is an artifice, what allows maintaining the balance between our individual rights and obligations, that is to say the laws, can they also be seen as artificial, in the sense that they derive from the power of the state and more precisely from the legislative power. In a certain way, the laws can represent the behavior of individuals. [...]

[...] Moreover, for him, there are only enemies in politics. Furthermore, in the notion of politics of Carl Schmitt, it is indicated that the true essence of politics is the discrimination of the friend and the enemy. This criterion allows Schmitt to show that politics is irreducibly conflictual. The notion of friend and enemy is not mentioned as an invitation to conflict, but as a recognition of the fact that any political community defines itself in the face of a perceived alterity that is seen as a threat. [...]

[...] First, it is possible that it constitutes a means of establishing a fearful authority politically. Then, power and violence would refer to a totalitarian mode of government exercised despite the legal framework, a dictatorship in short. Finally, it would take the form of an extraordinary magistracy, a necessary decision taken urgently to respond to another limit of power: an external or internal danger, that is to say what the Sovereign may be confronted with. This response taken by the power can dispense with democratic and liberal norms to adopt a unified and totalizing form, aiming to ensure collective survival. [...]

[...] It is by looking at the limits and ambiguities of the social contract that we can understand this. First, on the formation of the contract. When Man passes from the state of nature to the civil state, this situation does not reflect an observable reality, but rather a necessary hypothesis to justify sovereignty. Just as the idea of a free and voluntary agreement is illusory. Then Hobbes develops the idea that laws are useful only if their respect is shared. [...]

[...] We can refer here to Hobbes to understand these notions. Indeed, Hobbes in the Leviathan, Leviathan, after having developed the theory of the state of nature to make understandable the necessity for Men to move to the state through the social contract, demonstrates that society is a voluntary ordering of a conflictuality always on the point of taking over. The stake of the nature-society couple, moving from nature to civility, is the justification of a new conception of legitimate political power. [...]