Abstract:
Walter Benjamin’s famous statement in the eighth of his “Theses on the
Philosophy of History,” that “the state of [exception] in which we live is
not the exception but the rule,”1 has become as normalized as its proposition
asserts. Few turns of phrase have become as easily convertible, turning
the “special property” (of the definition of a Greek idioma) through collocation
into an implicit signified conventionalized by common usage. In
the phrases turning on the elements “the exception” and “the rule,” the
antonyms are being assimilated to each other, neutralizing their oppositional
relation—not as a matter of a mystical “attraction of opposites,” nor
even as a matter of a special type of Schmittian complexio oppositorum,
but rather, in Michael Marder’s terms,2 as a matter of a “metonymic abuse
of modernity.” Without examining the antonymic relation between the
terms, their specific figural emergence tends to be relegated to oblivion.
This process of conventionalization is transported into the philosophical discourse in which these terms acquire further attributions. The semantic
fields of “the exception” and “the rule” have provided fertile ground for
such transpositions—prime examples being the phrases “the exception
proves the rule” and “the exception has become the rule.”
