The remnants of the law. Under the sign of urgency
The remnants of the law. Under the sign of urgency

Summary/Abstract: The insidious but tenacious instauration of the state of exception in contemporary states erodes not only the architecture of democracy, but the very foundation of human cohabitation – which is the law. Rigidly necessary – to ensure robustness, but flexible enough – in order to be able to claim adaptability to the contexts that demand it, the law is recommended to be the impartial mark of good coexistence. The declaration of “urgency” corresponds to the vehement eviction of the norm in the name of a pseudo-norm for imposing the paradoxical (non-) rule, in which the fact and the law overlap indiscriminately. Legal requirements become superfluous. Emptied of content, the law imposing the state of exception has only force, not significance; it re-unfolds itself in self-suspension. Institutionally dislocated, abruptly formulated and discretionally applied, the law emerging under urgency is a simulacrum, a vicious corpus of biopolitics. The study of its vestigial aspects makes sense in the prospect of salutary attempts to dismantle the resorts that allow the abuse and ultimately to relocate it to a space of “glass bead game”, post-legal, but revealing its original meaning. W. Benjamin, quoted by G. Agamben, announced the liberating dissolution of the law and its replacement, in a timeless indefinite horizon, with a nonconstraining meta-justice. Wandering in the exceptional state and ignoring its debilitating mechanisms postpones this messianic fulfilment of the law.

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