Lines of Insecurity: International, Imperial, Exceptional

Abstract

Recent literatures have become sceptical about the concept of an international, preferring to make claims about new forms of imperial or exceptional politics. This article examines the relation between these three concepts as conventionally understood within discourses of internationalism; expresses scepticism about the use of the term ‘imperial’ for capturing what is at stake in challenges to international order; and seeks to clarify what is at stake in contemporary practices of exceptionalism. Where exceptions were conventionally declared at the limits of the sovereign state, qualified by the ordering capacities of a system of sovereign states, enabled by a theory of history marking the modernity of sovereign authorities and inhibited by resistance to imperial and theological order, exceptions are now enacted in ways that exceed official cartographies of sovereign authorization. Consequently, traditions and debates about what it means to secure the modern subject that have largely reproduced options laid out by Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen in the 1920s and 1930s must become engaged with questions about the limits of specifically modern forms of political life. If exceptions are not being made where they are supposed to be made, subjects will not be secured where they are supposed to be secured.