On the example: The need for a complementary contraposition to Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of the exception
Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of the exception marks a shift in geographical scholarship and other social sciences. I argue, however, that although equally crucial, the example remains a surprisingly understudied phenomenon even though Agamben views it as the symmetrical opposite of the exception. I thus push forward Agamben’s theorization of the sovereign not only through a reading of the exception but also the example. The provocation of the article, and its key contribution to knowledge, is to step back from the point where Agamben positions these two as indistinguishable and to clearly distinguish between them—simultaneously marking a shift in the current scholarship of the exception by bringing the example in. To achieve this, I present two cases from Bangladesh and Finland that demonstrate how one sovereign’s exception might be depicted as an example by another, and how both the exception and the example can coexist within the same system. Finally, I highlight the importance of reading the sovereign through the figures of both a homo sacer and a homo exemplar because the sovereign’s power is manifested not only via the production of a state of exception but also equally through the creation of a state of example.
Funding
Research Council of Finland postdoctoral grant (No. 347212)
The Karelian Institute at the University of Eastern Finland, Finland
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Published in
Annals of the Association of American GeographersPages
1 - 15Publisher
Taylor & Francis Group LLC (Routledge)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The Author(s)Publisher statement
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.Acceptance date
2025-03-06Publication date
2025-04-11Copyright date
2025ISSN
0004-5608eISSN
1467-8306Publisher version
Language
- en