Part of what makes Battlestar Galactica such an interesting show has to do with the way it invokes and works through the contemporary American political situation. The human race, under attack from a terroristic threat of robots that appear human, finds itself in a situation in which the difference between friend and foe becomes impossible to articulate. The war situation produces--as it has these days, and perhaps as it must inevitably--a great deal of pressure on the human political system, which at the end of season one results in the military leader (Commander Adama, played by Edward James Olmos) placing the President under arrest and, at the beginning of season two, in the declaration of martial law.

The idea that a war situation will produce just that sort of political pressure, and thus the erosion of democratic systems believed to be completely natural, is fast becoming one of the familiar stories of our era. This is true even at the level of the show's smaller details: when President Roslyn escapes the prison she is held in early in season two, a lieutenant who refers to her as "the President" is corrected by a senior officer who insists that she is now a "fugitive," the reference to Donald Rumsfeld's insistence that the Iraqi "insurgents" be referred to as "Enemies of the Legally Elected Iraqi Government" was hard to miss.  

That such a sense of the world is now the one through which many Americans operate is perhaps refreshing. The more people understand the limited capacity of idealized political structures to resist certain forms of pressure  on them, the more likely it is (I hope) that they will come to realize the need to work to maintain those political structures. Understanding that a political structure can change empowers people to understand that they need to work to retain it (and, concomitantly, that they can work to change it--but the work of maintenance is always less obvious). This is a lesson that seems to need repeating once a generation.

The larger context in which one might think of the changing face of American democracy--and here I mean the illegal NSA wiretaps, the Patriot Act, the repatriation to overseas prisons, the torture, and more generally the production of an imperial presidency  that feels itself authorized (often by none other than the Attorney General or future members of the Supreme Court) to simply rewrite the meaning of laws passed by Congress--should not be limited, however, to the most obvious historical comparisons: Nixon's America or Hitler's Germany.

That's why the work of Giorgio Agamben is so important. In two books--Homo Sacer (1998 in English) and The State of Exception (2005 in English)--Agamben has produced devastating historico-theoretical analyses of the fate of representational democracies of the modern type.

Agamben argues that the possibility within every representational system of the "state of exception"--what we call in English "a state of emergency" or "martial law," in French an etat de siege, in German Notstand--exists as a limit of the political system. The earliest constitutional democracies, including the French, opened the possibility that the rights of the citizen established by the constitution could be abrogated when the constitutional system itself was threatened. Laws permitting the executive branch of the government to declare a state of exception were thus designed to temporarily suspend the constitutional system in order to save it.

The state of exception is thus simultaneously inside and outside the law--as Agamben notes, it is the law's recognition of the possibility of its own suspension. He writes: "The state of exception is neither internal nor external to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other" (State 23).

The danger of the state of exception--and it is a danger inherent in any system that acknowledges the right of its own self-defense--is the possibility that the exceptional situation will become normal. In the American Constitution the possibility of the state of exception is recognized in Article 1, which holds that "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." Agamben also finds that recognition in the Constitution's giving Congress the right to declare war while making the President the Commander in Chief of the Army. Hence the rhetoric of the current Bush administration:

President Bush's decision to refer to himself constantly as the "Commander in Chief of the Army" after September 11, 2001, must be considered in the context of this presidential claim to sovereign powers in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct reference to the state of exception, then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible (22).

Those sentences were written in 2003; how much further we are down that path today. But we have also been down the path before. Agamben cites Abraham Lincoln, for instance, on his suspension of habeas corpus and censorship of the mails by executive order: "Whether strictly legal or not," he told a reconvened Congress in 1862, the measures he adopted were taken "under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public necessity" (20). And Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 assumed exceptional powers in order to combat the Great Depression:

I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack on our common problems. ... in the event that the Congress shall fail to take [the necessary measures] and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis--broad Executive power to wage war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe. (Agamben 21-22)

The expansion of the logic of wars against foreign foes to wars on things like poverty has appeared in these pages before (here and here). The war on terror--the global war on terror, as I believe the administration prefers we call it, in a telling expansion of the field of the state of exception that doesn't tell us much about secret prisons that we don't already know)--is thus a kind of apotheosis, at least until the next apotheosis comes along, of the state of exception. (Consider for instance Guantanamo Bay in this context: its location outside the geographic borders of the US mainland somehow makes it into a Constitution-free zone, a kind of laboratory of exceptionalism, in which new definitions of human beings [as foreign combatants rather than prisoners of war] effectively subject them completely to the whims of state power).

Agamben's analysis is powerful not because it reveals to us for the first time the crimes against constitutional democracy of the Bush administration, but because it explains so clearly the logic of those "crimes," showing them to be located at the core of the notion of constitutional democracy itself, and of the possibility of political sovereignty more generally. I have focused this time on the ways in which the analysis can provide a historical context for the current situation, in the hopes that such an analysis will help clarify the possibilities for resisting such changes in the immediate future.

But the larger challenge here has to do with the nature of representational governments themselves, and with the "crises" to which they seem to be subject. Agamben cannot get through two books on these subjects without proposing some solutions; next time I will outline those solutions and say why I think they are disappointing.