Reasoning about Exceptions”

One of the most important tasks for political theologians today is the cultivation of capacities for democratic reasoning about exceptions to the rule of law. The task is important because liberal societies face – or at least believe they face – a number of threats that seem to require exceptional measures in response. The pressure to make exceptions grows stronger, even as we find ourselves with fewer and weaker resources for thinking about them. Our capacities to reason together about exceptions have eroded with the rise of worldviews that feature networks of perfectly regular laws. These worldviews gained strength from early modern natural sciences that depended on a vision of the universe as ordered by a set of exceptionless rules. As Charles Taylor has argued, these visions of a regular natural order fit closely with emerging visions for politics that emphasized norms of fairness, equality, and the rule of law – norms that had power exactly because their logic pressed them towards universal application. Justified exceptions to these norms became as difficult to imagine as miracles that suspended the laws of nature. This drive to eliminate exceptions in political orders produced some of the greatest achievements of the modern era. Reforms like the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the franchise to all adult citizens, and the elaboration of means to hold powerful people accountable to laws all gained strength from a wariness of exceptions. Any attempt to restore exceptions or singularities to political imaginations should seek to extend these reforms rather than undermine them. But the elimination of exceptions has also come with some cost. When exceptions become intolerable, then extraordinary actions need to be justified in relation to exceptionless rules. Justified in this way, extraordinary actions set precedents. They come to define a new normal. Understanding this process helps make sense of Walter Benjamin’s observation in 1940 that ‘‘the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.’’ In recent years Giorgio Agamben has traced some of the ways that states of exception continue to

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