sovereign power (rather than vice versa)
(Agamben, 1998). This crucial decision – in
the original German sense of ‘a cut in life’ – is
at once performative and paradoxical. It is
performativebecause it draws a boundary
between politically qualified life and merely
existent life wilfully exposed and abandoned
to violence and death (‘bare life’) that has the
most acutely material consequences. And it is
paradoxical, and all forms of life are thereby
made precarious, because the boundary is mobile
and indistinct (cf.zone of indistinction).
Agamben writes about both a ‘state’ of
exception and a ‘space’ of exception, and his
argument bears onspatialityin at least three
ways.
(1) Agamben uses Set Theory to argue that
the exception – from the Latinex-capere,
which literally means that which is ‘taken
outside’ – is a paradoxical spacing be-
cause it ‘cannot be included in the
whole of which it is a member and can-
not be a member of the whole in which it
is always already included’ (1998, p. 25).
This limit-figure must be captured topo-
logically (seetopology), he concludes,
because only a twistedcartographyof
poweris capable of folding such propri-
ety (the invocation of the law) into such
perversity (the suspension of the law).
(2) Many analyses of the space of exception
focus on enclosed sites (the Nazi concen-
tration camp at Auschwitz,immigration
andrefugeedetention centres, and the
US war prison at Guanta ́namo Bay,
Cuba: see, e.g., Gregory, 2006b) or ter-
ritorialized configurations of power (the
shattered fragments of occupied Pales-
tine: see, e.g., Gregory, 2004b), but by
their very nature, spaces of exception
may be much more indeterminate than
these exemplary spatial formations imply.
(3) The state of exception is typically associ-
ated with the declaration of a national
emergency and the imposition of martial
law by astate, and Agamben argues that
the growth of a national security state
and the intensification of its sovereign
powers through theglobalization of
the ‘war on terror’ has turned the state
of exception into a newparadigmof late
modern government (Agamben, 2005,
pp. 1–31: cf. governmentality). But
thesenationalframings are also affected
by transnationalgeopolitics and geo-
economics, and by international law
(Gregory, 2007). dg
Suggested reading
Gregory (2006b); Mbembe (2003); Pratt (2005).exceptionalism The view that ‘geography is
quite different from all the other sciences,
methodologically unique’ (Schaefer, 1953,
p. 231). The term was coined by Fred K.
Schaefer to disparage this, the dominant con-
ception of Americangeographycodified by
Hartshorne (1939) in his enormously influen-
tial prospectus forThe nature of geography.
Instead, Schaefer argued that geography was
just like every other science, sharing a meth-
odology based on identifying and mobilizing
universal laws (seelaw, scientific).
Hartshorne’s position was based on the writ-
ings of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
German geographers. They did not merely
influenceHartshorne’s interpretation:they were
his interpretation. The nature of geography was
determined ‘in light of the past’. That past, or at
least the past on which Hartshorne drew, was
strongly influenced by neo-kantianism that
separated geography and history from other sci-
ences because they were concerned with the
unique and non-repeatable. Geography and
history, Hartshorne argued, were ideo-
graphic, notnomothetic. While geography
was ascience, in that it provided ‘organized,
objective knowledge’ (Hartshorne 1939,
p. 130), the geographical units in which facts
were organized, of which the most important
wereregions, were unique and non-repeat-
able. Geography was ‘the study of areal differ-
entiation’ and was ‘most clearly expressed in
regional geography’ (Hartshorne, 1939,
p. 468). Methodologically, what followed –
and marked geography as exceptionalist in
Schaefer’s sense – was an inability to deploy
scientific laws, because laws were predicated
on generalization and repetition of phenom-
ena. Hartshorne (1939, p. 446) wrote, ‘We
arrive, therefore, at a conclusion similar to that
which Kroeber has stated for history: ‘‘the
uniqueness of all historical phenomena. ...
No laws or near laws are discovered.’’ The
same conclusion applies to the particular com-
bination of phenomena at a particular place.’
Geographers, therefore, were not able scientif-
ically to explain, or predict or knowingly inter-
vene, but only describe: ‘Regional geography,
we conclude, is literally what its title expresses:
... [I]t is essentially a descriptive science con-
cerned with the description and interpretation
of unique cases. .. ’ (Hartshorne, 1939,
p. 449).
In contrast, Schaefer, who was an economist
and statistician before and during the SecondGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_E Final Proof page 226 1.4.2009 3:17pmEXCEPTIONALISM