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a “force of law”, in which potentiality and act are radically separated, is
certainly something like a mystical element, or rather a fictio by means of
which law seeks to annex anomie itself [11] .
To emphasize the fictitious character of governmentality is not to
say that the machine of power is not efficient. On the contrary, it has
worked almost without interruption from WWII to Terrorism Act,
Guantanamo and today’s emergency decrees, passing through fascism
and Nazi Camps:
[…] the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide
deployment. The normative aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted
with impunity by a governmental violence that – while ignoring
international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception
internally— nevertheless still claims to be applying the law [12] .
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Intuitively, we can follow Agamben on this [13] : even if we just take
into consideration the specific case of the emergency decrees in Italy,
we can see this fictional, contradictory character of today’s power. In
Italy there is a systematic and increasing recourse to the issuing of
emergency decrees in such an extent that now many jurists call this
situation, not without complaining, an “ordinary” way of law-making [14] .
Given such a situation, the span of time between august-september 1999
becomes something really exceptional. And this is because in those
two months no decree was in existence. Something similar happened
in the fifties; before the fifties there was fascism, were the “normal”
policy was made, again, by emergency decrees. It is difficult to say how
this daily and endless emergency could not be a fiction.
Our problem is with Agamben’s somewhat lacking treatment of
this notion of fiction. There is no explanation on how this fiction exactly
11
Agamben (2005): p. 38.
12
Ibid.: p. 87.
13
Agamben has developed his notion of exception also in Agamben (1998; 2000). We are
well aware that a deep study on the merits and appropriateness of analysis of exception
in Agamben is needed, but this is certainly out of the limits of this essay. For an overview
of the criticisms against Agamben’s position on exception see Neal (2007).
14
Marazzita (2003); Simoncini (2006).