Obsidional Violence: Imagination and the State of Exception

In addition to its strictly legal meaning, which is a subject of debate among legal scholars, the state of exception can be seen as a philosophical concept. The political philosophy approach does not just provide a genealogical basis for the state of exception, but also sheds light on the process of metaphorisation from which it is derived. Since the French Revolution, the notion of a state of siege has undergone metamorphoses due to the confusion between a state of external war and a state of internal war. The political imagination thus invents an unreal state – i.e. one that does not exist – of siege of a political entity by itself. Fictionalism, or the philosophy of ‘as if’, opens up the possibility of political space understood as the creation and augmentation of reality, and a multiple understanding of political violence.