We are all exiles : implications of the border as state of exception THURSDAY

" The state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order " (Agamben, 1995: 169). " At the border, however, the exception becomes the rule. At the border, the Australian government conduct is mostly ungoverned by statute and, therefore, almost ungovernable by the courts. Our willingness to accept this situation reflects our understanding of the 'state' as our only defence against 'the state of nature' " (Taylor, 2005:75-6). In attempting to make sense of the break with normal politics that the attacks of September 11 th have come to represent, scholars have come to rely on the work of Giorgio Agamben, whose provocative work on the " state of exception " has provided fertile territory for critical work on the meanings of torture, the accrual of emergency powers to the executive, and the camp. The exception has become the rule. Jumping off from criminology, critical legal studies, social theory, and sociology, this paper argues that governmental procedures institutionalize a continual state of exception at the border that in turn performs the spatio-legal fiction of territorial sovereign and the sovereign subject in each admission/exclusion decision. This argument is made not from extraordinary cases or even from the consideration of the adjudication of asylum claims, but rather from the mundane, ordinary evidence of the everyday passage of millions of 'normal' travelers across the border. Rather than view the border as a simple line indicating sovereign jurisdiction, this article adopts the performative view of borders, indebted to Wonders and indirectly Butler. Following Butler's analysis of the performativity of identity, Wonders argues that " although