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VIOLENCE IN THE STATE OF EXCEPTION

with ‘‘martial law.’’ The state of exception is, on the contrary, beyond the scope of positive
law. There are no legal limits whatsoever to the sovereign’s emergency powers.
Schmitt is fully aware of the risks involved in this suspension of the law. The emer-
gency powers designed to defend the legal order can instead erode it. The sovereign could,
for example, seize the emergency merely as a pretext to create a situation in which funda-
mental norms can be ignored with impunity. Schmitt suggests that the legal order cannot
be defended from the sovereign body that was created in its defense.^23 As long as those
invested with emergency powers choose to take responsibility for the legal order, trans-
gressing the law only in order to preserve its underlying aims and convictions, the state
of exception might in the end be suppressed and the rule of law might prevail. The legal
order will inevitably crumble, however, in the face of a sovereign who doesn’t support its
most fundamental principles. In that case, the transgression of the law threatens to result
in the destruction of the norms, and the ‘‘state of exception’’ is in danger of becoming
the rule. Thus, Schmitt warns, within the state of exception the legal order is always
exposed to the risk of being abolished by an irresponsible sovereign.^24
Within the state of exception, Schmitt argues, a sovereign violence comes to light
that simultaneously constitutes and threatens the existing legal order. This violence is
essentially normalizing; it consists in ‘‘a normal forming of life relations [eine normale
Gestaltung der Lebensverha ̈ltnisse].’’ Because positive laws cannot apply to chaos, the force
of law presupposes a normalization of life itself. ‘‘The exception,’’ Schmitt claims, ‘‘ap-
pears in its absolute form when a situation in which legal prescription can be valid must
first be brought about.’’^25 In the state of exception the sovereign’s normalizing violence
creates and shapes a ‘‘homogeneous medium [ein homogenes Medium],’’ in which the law
mirrors itself, forcing its image and form upon actual life relations. Only thus, by creating
a homogeneous medium, can juridical norms acquire the force of law. In Schmitt’s under-
standing, this ‘‘normalization is not merely an ‘external presupposition’ [of the norm],
which can be ignored by the jurist’’; instead, normalization belongs to the ‘‘immanent
force [immanente Geltung]’’ of juridical norms.^26 In the state of exception, Schmitt sug-
gests, the sovereign ruler violently coerces his subjects to adopt fundamental norms, so
that the normal legal order can have force and effect.
Contrary to the claims of some commentators, Schmitt’s concept of ‘‘life relations’’
should not be read as referring to a somewhat naı ̈ve ‘‘philosophy of life [Lebensphiloso-
phie].’’^27 Schmitt’s is a politically mediated concept: when he writes, for example, that ‘‘in
the exception the force of ‘real life’ breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has
become torpid by repetition,’’ he is not referring to some kind of unmediated authentic
life but to life as it is produced by the decision.^28 The decision, moreover, does not pro-
duce life as such but a violentseparation of life relations. As the German philosopher
Jakob Taubes points out in his reading of Schmitt, theEnt-Scheidung, the decision, is
simultaneously aScheidung, a separation—thisScheidungbeing, in the final analysis, a
separation of friend and foe. The concept of real life is thus parasitic upon the political.

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