(Un)Exceptional Trauma, Existential Insecurity, and Anxieties of Modern Subjecthood: A Phenomenological Analysis of Arbitrary Sovereign Violence

This article examines the lasting phenomenological consequences of inhabiting “spaces” of exception by rethinking the operation of sovereign violence therein. Taking as its point of departure Giorgio Agamben’s suggestion that the ‘state of exception’ is the ‘rule’ of modern politics,  I argue  that  arbitrary sovereign violence  has taken the place of the ‘sovereign decision’ of Carl Schmitt’s original theory.  However, recognizing that  it is neither enough simply to articulate the institutional grid of intelligibility of the state of exception nor expose the  logics  of sovereignty that make possible arbitrary violence, it draws on phenomenology, affect theory, and trauma studies to reorient our focus  from the  sovereign  to the  subject  upon whom sovereign power is executed. Ultimately  it proposes  a new understanding of modern subjecthood as one of  existential insecurity  generated by the ‘new age of anxiety’  permeating social and political life  today.