Deslocamentos da soberania: percursos de um conceito-limite em Carl Schmitt e Giorgio Agamben

Abstract

Jurist and political theorist, Carl Schmitt was one of the great names who set out to think the problem of sovereignty from the state of exception. In the turbulent context of political-economic instability that marked Europe in the post-World War I era, which nation-states were hitherto anchored in liberal doctrine and its model of parliamentary government, Schmitt revisits the tradition of studies on sovereignty, stating the impossibility of neutralizing the political as well as authority’s subjectivity, while political liberalism tried to limit the exercise of sovereign power by law. In this bias, with the paradigmatic affirmation “sovereign is the one who decides on the state of exception”, Schmitt affirms the inescapability of the decisive moment about an exceptional situation and that identifies the public enemy, which is a normalization moment that conforms both the identity of the sovereign and of the political unit, consubstantiating as a true process of institution of the law. Hereafter, as the identity of the sovereign is defined from the decision on the exception, Schmitt presents its possibility of displacement to other non-State fields, so that even the decision guided by a technical know-how may conform itself as a sovereign decision, provided it has sufficient strength to identify the public enemy. It is from this reflection that Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher of the 21st century, will continue the studies on sovereignty, radicalizing the possibility of its displacement to the microphysical relations of power that occur in the social field, as he comprehends the decision on the exception not only as a moment of identity conformation, but mainly as an inclusion-exclusive structure of life in the legal order.