Structural features of a society in a state of exception: K. Marx, C. Schmitt, G. Agamben

Abstract

The article focuses on the structural aspect of society in a state of exception, on its interpretation by K. Marx, С. Schmitt and G. Agamben. The goal was to reconstruct the understanding and conceptual description of extraordinariness in their direct statements about the structural elements of this state in their publications. Of course, such fragments are few, so the main difficulty was to read out intuitions from the texts that allow them to extend beyond the sphere that is the defining subject of these authors’ analysis. The final result is a certain list of terms and concepts, a kind of thesaurus of structural features of a society in a state of exclusivity. All of these authorities in various fields of knowledge recognize events, such as revolutions, wars, and epidemics, as an inevitable impulse that modifies the state of society. Something that upsets the circumstances of living together within nation-states is something like a devastating earthquake, which can be predicted but not prevented. It is something that abolishes the rules and regulations that are, or are only imagined to be, normal, actualizing a mode of action called the politics of extraordinary. The authors named above look at and try to understand the organics and mechanics of extreme, unusual, exceptional cases, i. e. , states of exceptionality from different paradigmatic perspectives (extraordinary, extraordinary are synonymous with exception). The vocabulary of structural features, which is distinguished from the works reviewed in this article, forms the core of the concept, which can be the methodological basis for studying the state of exceptionality in Ukraine, which is a consequence of the Russian aggression of February 24, 2022.