Démocratie et état d’exception
Democracy and state of exception

Summary/Abstract: The author tries to clarify the complex and dialectical relations between democracy and the state, starting from the different circumstances and reasons in which the state of exception is declared as the only solution for overcoming social and political deadlocks. In the context of modern societies, which have assumed the imperative of perpetual change, the fundamental problem has become not just to regulate the changes themselves by establishing an exceptional state but to ensure a perpetual political availability for change. Therefore, the power of a democracy resides precisely in this living and creative capacity of its everyday adaptation to change. Starting from a few concrete political and legal cases, the study demonstrates the relationship between sovereignty and the state as well as the latter's ability to reduce the lives of its citizens only to the biological one. However, the constant risk is to turn the state of exception into a new political regime, whose essence thus becomes an entirely antidemocratic one. A strong argument to deprive the state itself of its right to declare the state of exception and to prepare democratic regimes for the production in their very own state of exceptional status.

• Details
• Contents