Excerpts from video above:
"If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called a dictatorship."- Carl Schmitt
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"In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system... The state of exception is not a special kind of law (like the law of war); rather, it is a suspension of the judicial order itself and opens up a space in which application and normativity become indistinguishable."-Giorgio Agamben
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"The camp is the paradigm itself of a political space at the point of which, politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen."-Giorgi Agamben
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"The situation created in the exception has the particular characteristic that it cannot be defined either as a situation of fact or a situation of right, but instead a paradoxical threshold of indistinction between the two. It is not a fact, since it is only created through the suspension of the rule."-Giorgio Agamben
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"Laws develop through their enforcement."Agamben argues application is the key. Laws develop through their application and enforcement. They aren't merely categories separate from how they are applied. This is exactly why, in "State of Exception" within the chapter "Force of Law" Agamben marks out law, force of law: "It's not about the rule, it's not about the law itself, it's about a sovereign interpretation and execution the overarching force.
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“There is little need to stress the fact that monism, and faith in a single criterion, has always proved a deep source of satisfaction both to the intellect and to the emotions. [...] Pluralism, with the measure of 'negative' liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal [...]. It is truer, because it does, at least, recognise the fact that human goals are many, not all of them conmensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another. To assume that all values can be graded on one scale, so that it is a mere matter of inspection to determine the highest, seems to me to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents, to represent moral decision as an operation which a slide-rule could, in principle, perform. [...] 'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions', said an admirable writer of our time, 'and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.' To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.”- Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958
Monotheism is a theological ideal. But Sparta had two kings, and the Roman Republic, two consuls. Pluralism. And the tendency of every Republic is to eventually devolve into an Empire, and for its' former pluralism to become a monism
Polyphemus* Guarding the Gate
The Mirror Stage is the experiential human (tree of life/ego from pleasure principle) process that frames and amalgamates the psyche and the demands of the various bodily organs into a single subjective consciousness. As for human individuals, the same holds true for their human collectivities (ie- family) where the Oedipus Complex establishes the hierarchical order (tree of knowledge of good & evil/superego/ Thanatos-death drive) for framing the psyche's outward-facing/exteriorized amalgamate thereby entrapping the individual into his subsequent socialized fate through acceptance of limits, and thereby forming his character.
Angola State Penitentiary
Sovereign = one with the ability to grant or make an exception to the rule
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