SOVEREIGN EXCEPTION, DESTRUCTIVE EXCEPTION

This chapter discusses Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which refers to a regime of sovereign representation where the state of emergency is the rule. It explains the paradigm of sovereignty that is constituted teleologically from exception, as the foundation and conservation of representational regimes. For Benjamin, the state of emergency is equivalent to “progress as a historical norm.” The chapter also looks at the commissary-sovereign state of exception that is functional to a policing critique and a politics whose prerogative is to put the regimes of representation into crisis. It analyzes a prerogative that subsumes the destructive character of the exception within a dialectical concentration of the rule, making the spectrality of destruction a function of the system of representation.