This book proposes a paradigm shift in the way that ‘the state of exception’ – as it is usually named in legal and political theory – is to be understood. Building on the assumption that the exception is a heuristic idea that is still a relevant category for a critical deconstruction of law, this book argues that it needs to be rethought outside the boundaries of its traditional understanding. To this end, the book offers two strategies. First, it develops the ideas of ‘exceptionality’ and ‘exceptionalisation’ in order to grasp how measures, norms and mechanisms that clearly have an exceptional character are no longer confined within the boundaries of classic institutions such as the state of exception, martial law, the state of emergency, and so on. As demonstrated recently during the COVID-19 pandemic, legal systems may dissimulate the exceptional as the normal, avoiding the use of formal states of exception and adopting measures that are of exceptional nature. As such, this book maintains, it is necessary to think of ‘exceptionality’ outside of its usual legal footholds. Rather, emergency laws are considered here as part of a more general sphere of exceptionality that must be understood as the product of a process of the accumulation of symbols, practices, notions, and images that are only partially expressed through law, despite having long populated the legal imagination. Second, the book offers an analysis of the inner exceptional life of liberal constitutionalism: the subterranean authoritarian drives dissimulated by the rule of law.

This book will interest scholars and researchers in legal and political theory, as well as continental philosophy.