Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction

Exceptional Intercourse

Ben Davies

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137485885
• eBook ISBN: 9781137485892
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Combining close readings of literature and theory, Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction opens up new ways to consider the sex-time-space nexus. In an exciting and compelling contribution to contemporary literary studies, this book takes the concept of 'exceptionality' as its point of departure as developed through an exploration of Giorgio Agamben's theory of the state of exception and the work of theorists including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Through an analysis of a range of widely read contemporary fiction, including On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, The Act of Love and Room, Ben Davies provides a rigorous exploration of narrative form and offers original theories of the prequel, narrative relations in terms of set theory, and the practice of reading itself.

© The Author(s) 2016

Ben DaviesSex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction10.1057/978-1-137-48589-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Exceptionality

Ben Davies¹

(1)

Social, Historical, Literary Studies, University of Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK

End Abstract

Agamben’s State of Exception

Within the ‘Homo Sacer’ series, Giorgio Agamben predominantly sets out his juridical and biopolitical theory of the state of exception—a state in which the law has been suspended—across three works: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995); Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1998); and State of Exception (2003).¹ The state of exception, whose paradigm is the concentration camp, is ‘a kenomatic state, an emptiness of law’ (2005a, p. 6), ‘anomic’ (p. 39), and alegal. As Agamben argues with reference to an early form of the state of exception, the Roman iustitium (a period when the courts were suspended), a person acting within this sphere

neither executes nor transgress [sic] the law, but inexecutes [inesegue] it. His actions, in this sense, are mere facts, the appraisal of which, once the iustitium is expired, will depend on circumstances. But, as long as the iustitium lasts, they will be absolutely undecidable, and the definition of their nature—whether executive or transgressive, and, in the extreme case, whether human, bestial, or divine—will lie beyond the sphere of law. (p. 50)

As his analysis of the iustitium indicates, Agamben’s historico-theoretical conceptualisation of the state of exception is characterised by a focus on the complex relations he discerns between oppositional terms and their possible indistinction. In his theory of the state of exception—which is informed by a close reading of Carl Schmitt—Agamben is particularly interested in limit concepts, in the way that ‘every limit concept is always the limit between two concepts’ (1998, p. 11), how they relate, problematise, and confuse one another.² The limit concepts and thresholds I trace below are those of norm and exception, the figures of the sovereign and the homo sacer, and, with particular emphasis, spatiotemporal indeterminability.

In Schmitt’s theory, the state of exception is established by the sovereign, who is defined by his very ability to create this sphere. As Agamben explains, however, the sovereign ‘decision is not the expression of the will of a subject hierarchically superior to all others, but rather represents the inscription within the body of the nomos [law] of the exteriority that animates it and gives it meaning’ (pp. 25–6). Sovereignty, then, is not specifically related to the person who occupies the role of sovereign authority at a particular moment; rather, it is the very inclusion of the exception to the law within the law, which thereby makes the law possible. Agamben elaborates this reciprocal relation between law and exception in Schmitt’s theory when he writes:

the sovereign exception is the fundamental localization (Ortung), which does not limit itself to distinguishing what is inside from what is outside but instead traces a threshold (the state of exception) between the two, on the basis of which outside and inside, the normal situation and chaos, enter into those complex topological relations that make the validity of the juridical order possible. (p. 19)

In this conceptualisation, the two spheres—the legal and the alegal state—are complementary and defined in relation to one another; by establishing a state of exception, the sovereign makes possible a state of law, legitimising it and marking it as distinct from the exceptional, anomic sphere. This relationship between norm and exception is, Agamben argues, ‘the originary juridico-political structure’ (p. 19).

As his reading of sovereignty shows, and as explored in the opening analysis of The Human Stain (2000) in the Preface, Agamben emphasises the complexity of the concept of the exception and its intricate relation to the norm. In fact, he argues that the exception’s relation to the law is created through the very act of its being placed outside the law—a relationship that is, he shows, inherent in the etymology of the word ‘exception’, which means ‘taken outside (ex-capere), and not simply excluded’ (1998, p. 18). Thus, making an exception—taking something outside—is not the same as excluding it, as a relation between exception and norm always remains in place. Continuing his problematisation of exceptionality, Agamben argues that as the state of exception is the foundation for all juridical spheres, it itself must be ‘essentially unlocalizable (even if definite spatiotemporal limits can be assigned to it from time to time)’ (p. 19). Therefore, Agamben splits the Schmittian connection between localisation and order in the latter’s concept of the legal sphere, contending that this connection ‘at its center, contains a fundamental ambiguity, an unlocalizable zone of indistinction or exception that…necessarily acts against it as a principle of its infinite dislocation’ (pp. 19–20). From this initial problematisation of localisation and order, Agamben argues that Schmitt’s dyad contains a fundamental ambiguity: as the exception is infinitely locatable, it irreparably breaks apart the structure of localisation and order; the state of law and the state of exception become spatially indistinct. Having dismantled the Schmittian construction of localisation and order, and norm and exception, Agamben contends that modern political life is itself defined by the increasing indecipherability between exception and norm—a proposition I turn to later.

In Agamben’s theory, two figures play significant, related, and parallel roles—the sovereign and the homo sacer. Both figures take on exceptional relations to the law and are connected through the role of violence in the state of exception. Concerning the former figure, Agamben articulates what he sees as ‘the paradox of sovereignty’ (p. 15): by being able to suspend the law, the sovereign must necessarily be outside it, whilst also creating and embodying the law itself. Therefore, the sovereign is both inside and outside the law simultaneously, a complexity made more evident by the way in which Agamben uses multiple formulas to express this position: ‘“the law is outside itself,” or: “I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law [che non c’è un fuori legge]”’ (p. 15, citing Schmitt). For Agamben, then, ‘sovereignty thus presents itself as an incorporation of the state of nature in society, or, if one prefers, as a state of indistinction between nature and culture, between violence and law, and this very indistinction constitutes specifically sovereign violence’ (p. 35).

The sovereign’s parallel figure, the homo sacer—the sacred man—also exists in a threshold position with respect to the law, as ‘he who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable’ (p. 28). As the abandoned figure placed in the state of exception, he is utterly naked and vulnerable, ‘not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life)’ (p. 88). In his analysis, Agamben likens the homo sacer to the excluded person in early German law, who is ‘friedlos, without peace, and whom anyone was permitted to kill without committing homicide’ (p. 104), and it is this particular quality that marks the homo sacer’s very relation to the law that has abandoned him: he ‘is included in the political order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed’ (p. 85). This excepted, naked figure has no political subjectivity and no recourse to the law; he is life only and collapses the classical distinction between zoē and bios, simple biological life and a way or form of living, political living; the homo sacer’s existence is political and politics is grounded in his or her biological existence, which can be seen as a basic meaning of the term ‘biopolitics’. Indeed, for the excepted figure, life is ‘a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis [nature] and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life of the loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither’ (p. 105). Between the two, neither fully human nor fully animal, the excepted figure is reduced to a form of bare life. He embodies sacredness, which, as Agamben explains, ‘is invoked today as an absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, [but] in fact originally expresses precisely both life’s subjection to a power over death and life’s irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment’ (p. 83). Moreover, just as he cannot be murdered in the sovereign sphere, the homo sacer cannot be sacrificed either: he is a sacred not a sacrificial figure.

Agamben’s two central figures offer complex and significant forms of relationality. Firstly, their relation to one another is complementary as well as parallel: the homo sacer is completely in thrall to the sovereign power that excepts him and remains related to it, as ‘the ban is the force of simultaneous attraction and repulsion that ties together the two poles of the sovereign exception: bare life and power, homo sacer and the sovereign’ (p. 110). Secondly, sovereign and homo sacer define the people around them: ‘the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns’ (p. 84). Therefore, whenever a sovereign or a homo sacer is present, multiple instances of the sovereign–homo sacer relationship are made possible; the instantiation of one or the other of these figures has wide-ranging and complex consequences.

An essential aspect of Agamben’s theory of the state of exception—and one I particularly wish to stress—concerns the ways in which this state also in-determines various spatiotemporal relations.³ Indeed, for Agamben, the state of exception is characterised by its distinct topological structure and, throughout his work, he explains and illustrates his theory by drawing upon a series of spatial figures. This is evident, for example, in his examination of the relation between the state of nature and the state of exception:

The state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two sides of a single topological process in which what was presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a Möbius strip or a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception), and the sovereign power is this very impossibility of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception, physis and nomos. The state of exception is thus not so much a spatiotemporal suspension as a complex topological figure in which not only the exception and the rule but also the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another. (p. 37)

The Möbius strip (see front cover), the Leyden jar, and the Klein bottle (another of Agamben’s favourite spatial models) are figures in which the inside and outside surfaces are one and the same; in these figures, the ‘exterior and interior in-determine each other’ (2000, p. 25).⁴ In his analysis concerning the state of nature and the state of exception, Agamben uses the Möbius strip and the Leyden jar to explain the way in which the state of exception in-determines the supposedly external state of nature and the internal state of law. Furthermore, he uses these figures to effect a theoretical shift from arguing that the state of exception is a form of spatiotemporal suspension to proposing that it is topologically complex. Despite this manoeuvre, however, Agamben is somewhat inconsistent about the concept of suspension, and he repeatedly returns to juridical suspension to explain the alegal quality of the state of exception.⁵ Moreover, the way in which inside and outside pass through one another in the state of exception would result in a suspension of temporal and spatial determinations.

In addition to theorising the complex topological relation between the state of exception and the state of nature, Agamben also conceptualises the spatiotemporal qualities of the state of exception itself. For example, and again with reference to the Roman iustitium, he argues that the suspension of the law created by the state of exception ‘seems to call into question the very consistency of the public space; yet, conversely, the consistency of the private space is also immediately neutralized to the same degree’ (2005a, p. 49). In this reading of Livy and Cicero, Agamben argues that the ‘paradoxical coincidence of private and public’ (p. 49) results from the lack of a juridical hierarchy that would differentiate public officials from private citizens. Underlying both the confusion of the private and public spheres and the interrelationship of states of law and states of exception is the implication in Agamben’s theory that inside and outside themselves pass through and in-determine one another. Indeed, when discussing the paradigmatic concentration camp, Agamben claims that the camp’s ‘fence…delimits an extratemporal and extraterritorial threshold’ (1998, p. 159), and that ‘whoever entered the camp moved in a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit’ (p. 170). Thus, the concentration camp fence marks the ultimate point at which temporal and spatial relations become indeterminate, and those who enter this extra-spatiotemporality experience exceptionality in its most intense form; they exist within a threshold, within a spatiotemporality in which inside and outside become indeterminable and confused.

Agamben provides his most detailed exploration of the spatiotemporal conditionality of existing within the state of exception in Remnants of Auschwitz. Through an analysis of the Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin’s psychological development of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), Agamben argues that the state of exception decisively problematises our understanding, and in-determines our experience of—or, indeed, suspends—temporal structures, sequences, and the correlative divisions of past, present, and future. During this phenomenological turn, Agamben specifically brings spatial and temporal indetermination together, and, with reference to his paradigm, contends:

The camp, the absolute situation, is the end of every possibility of an originary temporality, that is, of the temporal foundation of a singular position in space, of a Da. In the camp, the irreparability of the past takes the form of an absolute imminence; post festum and ante festum, anticipation and succession are parodically flattened on each other. Waking is now forever drawn into the inside of the dream: ‘Soon we will again hear/the foreign command:/Wstawac!’ (2008, p. 128)⁶

Adopting Bin’s psychological terms ‘post festum’ and ‘ante festum’ (before and after the celebration), Agamben argues that in the concentration camp it is impossible to separate the past from the future, as one cannot locate oneself in a specific time in space, in a Da. This reasoning also implies the inverse impossibility of locating oneself in a specific space in time. In this exceptional situation, the past is absolute imminence—it is always approaching—and both after and before, anticipation (of the to-come) and succession (sequence and progression from one thing to the next) are made indistinct. Thus, the standard temporal demarcations of past, present, and future are superimposed one onto the other and are made indeterminable; without a Da, temporal positions and the concept of sequence become unrealisable. In his final analysis, Agamben emphasises the experiential effect of this spatiotemporality by describing a situation in which waking up to the outside world is forever folded into the inside of the dream; correlatively, then, sleeping must be forever folded into the outside of reality. Therefore, the excepted person is figuratively ‘living’ in a Möbius strip, unable to distinguish reality fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Exceptionality
• 2. Hymenality: On Chesil Beach
• 3. Incestuous Implications: Gertrude and Claudius
• 4. Sexual Sets: The Act of Love
• 5. Exceptional Existences: Room
• Backmatter