The final chapter of my book attempts to rethink political theorist Carl Schmitt’s classic formulation of the ‘state of exception’ to try to account for the current practices of selective exemption and self-impunity in the Spanish State for measures that are paradoxically called ‘exceptional’ even as they escape Schmitt’s historical definition of sovereign exceptionalism. Some of these undemocratic measures include: parliamentary mandate by decree, the cancellation of the State of the Nation debate, parliament’s refusal to hold public hearings for corruption charges, the conservative party’s purging of journalists from Spanish public television and radio (RTVE), and recent laws that criminalize protest, to name a few. Returning to Nicos Poulantzas’s writings on state authoritarianism amid the economic crisis of the 1970s, I propose straying from Poulantzas’s original proposals to reconsider the current conjuncture as a form of (il)legible exception that, instead, could perhaps be understood more accurately as a plural, micropolitical field of struggle against the practices of selective exemption and impunity within and beyond the state.
Given the current state of affairs, I've made this selection available (below) on my webpage.
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Thoughts on paper
in an analog world |