From political emergencies and states of exception to exceptional states and emergent politics: a neo‐Durkheimian alternative to Agamben

Agamben's Homo Sacer (1998) here serves as a stimulus for developing a neo‐Durkheimian approach to the political. Durkheim's sociology of the sacred and government is read symptomatically to highlight the extent to which sacralisations refer to a real but underdetermined ontology of the social that threatens to break loose into violence against the mechanisms of rule that regulate institutions, actions and the broader normative terrain in which collective fates are thought about and problematised. This neo‐Durkheimian approach is deconstructive of Agamben and reconstructive of an alternative to his state‐focused conception of sovereignty, the political and sacralisation. The political field is reconceptualised as structured by the sacred difference between politics and rule, instantiated by a limen – a door – through which the violence of politics may break, opening social life to the field of the contingency of history. This alternative thus shifts the focus from a political emergency to which states of exception, decided by state sovereignty, are a violent response, to exceptional states of an emergent politics grounded in the sacred power of popular sovereignty that may result in violence against rule.