State of Exception

The "State of Exception" as deployed in neroni-hilary-the-subject-of-torture-psychoanalysis-and-biopolitics-in-televisio is a psychoanalytically inflected re-reading of Agamben's juridico-political concept. In Agamben's original formulation, the state of exception names the sovereign decision to suspend the normal legal order, producing "bare life" — the homo sacer stripped of political and legal personhood and exposed to lethal power. Neroni accepts this framework as a description of the formal juridical structure enabling contemporary torture (as in the post-9/11 detention regime: "Bush's declaration of a state of exception condemns prisoners to the status of ambiguous detainees and thus facilitates their torture"), but argues that Agamben's account is structurally incomplete because it remains within a biopolitical register that privileges the body and ignores the subject of desire and jouissance.

The concept is thus simultaneously an appropriation and a critique: the state of exception is real as a juridical and political mechanism, but its libidinal underside — the zone of sexualized exceptionality carved out for unrestrained enjoyment — remains invisible to Agamben's framework. Neroni's theoretical move is to show that the exception from the law does not merely suspend rights; it positively produces a space of jouissance. The torturer does not operate in a neutral zone of bare necessity but in an obscene zone where the Law's prohibition is lifted not for epistemological reasons (extracting truth from the body) but for enjoyment. This sexualized zone of exception is, moreover, not aberrant but the obscene underside of normal bourgeois subjectivity — its hidden supplement, not its opposite. A further specification concerns temporality: the urgency structure of the "ticking clock" in media like 24 is identified as a formal ideological mechanism that drives the state of exception forward, making it feel perpetually necessary and neutralizing the subject's capacity to interrogate it.

Within neroni-hilary-the-subject-of-torture-psychoanalysis-and-biopolitics-in-televisio, the State of Exception occupies a pivotal hinge position: it is the concept through which Neroni enters the existing political-theoretical debate (via Agamben and Foucault's biopolitics) before executing a psychoanalytic correction. The concept cross-references Biopolitics most directly — Agamben's state of exception is itself a biopolitical technology, one that reduces subjects to bare life — but Neroni's argument is that biopolitics as a framework is incapable of accounting for the desiring subject. The State of Exception, in Neroni's hands, becomes the site where Biopolitics and Jouissance collide: the exception creates a zone where the body-centered logic of biopolitics is exposed as a cover story for the real motivation, which is jouissance — enjoyment that exceeds and disrupts any administrative or epistemic rationale for torture.

The concept also articulates with Fantasy, Desire, and Ideology. The media representations of torture (in 24, Hostel, Saw) construct a "torture fantasy" — in the precise Lacanian sense of Fantasy as the frame that gives desire its coordinates — in which the state of exception is not merely a juridical fact but an ideological structure producing a certain subject-position for the viewer. The ticking-clock urgency of 24 is an ideological form that sutures the viewer into the torturer's desire, making the state of exception feel natural and inevitable. The State of Exception thus functions in this corpus as an extension and critique of the canonical Biopolitics concept: it is extended by being shown to have a libidinal economy (jouissance, desire) that the biopolitical framework cannot see, and it is critiqued precisely because its body-centred logic forecloses the psychoanalytic subject.

The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and FilmHilary Neroni · 2015 (p.84)

The exception from the law carves out a space where one can enjoy without restraint, and this is a form of exceptionality that Agamben never considers.

The phrase "carves out a space where one can enjoy without restraint" is theoretically decisive because it translates the juridical concept of exception directly into the libidinal register of jouissance — the enjoyment-without-limit that the Law normally forecloses — while the clause "Agamben never considers" names the precise blind spot of biopolitical theory: its constitutive inability to think the desiring, enjoying subject alongside the body of bare life.