The Telos Press Podcast: Devin Singh on Sovereignty and the Economic in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Devin Singh about his article “Exceptional Economy: Sovereign Exchanges in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store.

From Telos 191 (Summer 2020):

Exceptional Economy: Sovereign Exchanges in Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben

Devin Singh

One fracture that marks modernity is the disjunction between the economic and the political. This separation is the culmination of a long process of “disembedding,” through which traditional patterns of production, exchange, and consumption become extracted from the network of relations and practices that characterize social interaction in former regimes, such as those marking status, honor, obligation, and promise. The market eventually comes to be conceived as a thing-in-itself to be theorized and managed. Presented as distinct from bonds of reciprocity and culturally coded exchanges, economy is also extracted from the realm of political sovereignty. Signature forces of modernity, including rationalization and secularization, divide the long-standing imbrications and mutual constitution of the economic and political. The most thoroughgoing initial theorizations of modern economics—carried out under the misleading banner of “political economy”—assume as a fait accompli economy’s apolitical character.

The recurrent theme of political antipathy toward the economic realm in Carl Schmitt’s work can be seen as partly a result of this modern bifurcation. Much of his project sought to “establish the political as an independent sphere—and therefore to revoke or reverse the mixing of the political with the economic.” A heritage of classical liberal tradition, which Schmitt engaged and critiqued, facilitated this opposition between the state and economy. His assertion of the exceptional sovereign is ensconced in a broader critique of bourgeois liberalism, which for Schmitt embodies commitment to private economic interests such that political unity, in particular the willingness to sacrifice self for the political community, is undermined. Such liberalism develops in concert with economization, technical rationality, and bureaucratization. This technocracy stifles the personalism and decisionism so important to Schmitt’s notion of authentic political sovereignty. In order to protect a specific model of sovereign authority and decision, Schmitt opposes politics to the course economy has taken in the capitalist West toward quantitative reductionism, disenchanting rationalization, and political privatization, rejecting the effects of such developments upon sovereign autonomy and primacy. As a result, his sovereign who decides the exception inhabits a decidedly noneconomic sphere.

It is telling, therefore, that Giorgio Agamben’s exposition of Schmittian sovereignty and exceptionality covertly reinserts economy into Schmitt’s political logic. Its exposition remains latent in his exegesis of Schmitt, however, for Agamben likewise misses the exceptional economy he lays bare. This economy shows forth in at least two ways. First, Agamben elucidates the structure of exception (exceptio) via that of the example (exemplum), for the two are logically if inversely related. The exemplum, however, etymologically, genealogically, and semiotically reveals fundamental associations with economy and exchange. If exemplum‘s originary deployments link it to economy and if its logic is analogous to that of the exception, this suggests resonances and signatures of the economic within exception itself. Second, Agamben expounds sovereign exceptionality in relation to law, where the legal framework, as founded on exception’s potentiality, captures and encodes life. Law, furthermore, reveals itself to be constituted through repetition and debt-based reciprocal exchanges, economic dynamics that suggest sovereign exceptionality’s own traversal of an economic realm. The indebtedness of law to sovereign exception reveals sovereignty’s own reliance upon and deployment of the logic of debt in its tactics of rule.

Evidence for a latent economy within the sovereign exception raises several questions and presents new possibilities for application. Has Agamben incorrectly interpreted Schmitt’s notion of the exception, given the apparent tension between Schmitt’s counterposing of the political and economic, on one hand, and an exceptional economy, on the other? For the excluded relationality of the sovereign to the governed order as portrayed by Agamben displays an economic logic, one that includes exemplarity, repetition, and exchange. Or did Schmitt import economy unawares into his exaltation of the political realm, and does the linkage between exception and economy belie his sharp opposition, suggesting a fundamental suturing with which theories of sovereignty and economy must reckon?

While Agamben offers a persuasive and generative reading of Schmitt, David Pan provides alternatives that temper the logical extremities toward which Agamben takes Schmitt’s project. Namely, Pan recalls Schmitt’s attention to the consent of the governed and consensus among the ruled that mitigate portrayals of extreme, isolated sovereignty that Agamben then coordinates to violence, chaos, and the homo sacer. This adjustment structurally nuances the position of sovereignty in ways that reduce the exclusionary logic of the exception, and with it the dynamics of economy that appear to follow. The economy that I discern in Agamben’s account of Schmitt need not be sustained as the dominant reading. Nevertheless, I claim that the resultant image of the sovereign concerned with consent and with deciding among the various culturally determined options available in an emergency situation also suggests relations of obligation and exchange with the governed order. In other words, such a sovereign has not escaped economy. Ultimately, it becomes clear that Schmitt’s opposition to economy must be read as contextual and specific, and that his model allows for conceptual rapprochement with the economic realm broadly and alternatively construed. In particular, the telos of Schmitt’s political-economic standoff is not a greater rupture between and disassociation of these realms but a repoliticizing of the economy, bringing it back into the house of the sovereign, as it were.

These economic traces within the structure of exception or between the sovereign and the governed suggest a persistent interdependence between the political and economic, the processes of disembedding notwithstanding. Attending to this economy of the exception is essential not only for a fuller understanding of Schmitt’s legacy and Agamben’s extension and application of Schmittian categories. Shedding light on these traces and submerged exchanges also provides insight into the broader relation of the state to economic forces and to the production and allocation of capital, the importation of economic rationality into political techniques of governance, as well as long-standing links between law, debt, and the legitimation of authority. Laying bare such veiled relations offers another lens to evaluate why refiguring sovereignty implicates not only political processes and institutions but also networks of value, bonds of reciprocity, and patterns of exchange.

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