Революция и/или суверенитет?
Revolution and/or Sovereignty?

Critique of the Uses of ‘Exception’ in the Radical Political Discourses

Summary/Abstract: Here I deconstruct the terms ‘exception’ and ‘state of exception’ – as well as some of their substitutes – in the far right and far left discourses. In the line of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben I show that Carl Schmitt defining 1) ‘the dictatorship’ and later 2) ‘the sovereignty’ through ‘exception’ revises the revolutionary Marxism of his time. But it is not just Walter Benjamin who plays the part of his left adversary in their nearly direct intellectual exchange. More than that, Schmitt inherits the exceptionalism and inverts the meanings of the Marxist terms ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and ‘revolutionary situation’ as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky rework them in the second decade of 20th century. Schmitt shares wilt Lenin and Trotsky their anti-legalist and decisionist attitude presupposing ‘lawless power’ – a power eliminating the existing law and constituting a new law ex nihilo, in an exceptional situation. But Schmitt makes a dramatic change replacing the source of that power: no more the revolutionary masses illegally subverting the law from below but the sovereign legally reestablishing the law from above is the one who exercises ‘lawless power’. More generally and despite of the important differences, both, the far right and the far left discourses, are akin to use ‘exception’ as a totalized metaphor (as an empty signifier) justifying some kind of ‘lawless power’, i.e. terror. The revolutionary terror and the state terror (in its strict sense: as an exercise of power/violence beyond the law) are mirror concepts. Only as a hypothesis, we can suggest that they are interconnected vessels in practice: the more the terror increases, the more the exceptional measures fighting ‘against the terror’ increase; and vice versa.

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