The exception and the rule : fictive, real, critical

dc.contributor.authorKistner, Ulrike
dc.date.accessioned2016-09-06T09:38:57Z
dc.date.available2016-09-06T09:38:57Z
dc.date.issued2011
dc.description.abstractWalter 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.”en_ZA
dc.description.departmentPhilosophyen_ZA
dc.description.librarianam2016en_ZA
dc.description.uriwww.telospress.comen_ZA
dc.identifier.citationKistner, U 2011, 'The exception and the rule : fictive, real, critical', Telos, no. 157, pp. 43-59.en_ZA
dc.identifier.issn0213-084X
dc.identifier.other10.3817/1211157043
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2263/56621
dc.language.isoenen_ZA
dc.publisherFundación Telefónicaen_ZA
dc.rights© 2011 Fundación Telefónicaen_ZA
dc.subjectExceptionen_ZA
dc.subjectRuleen_ZA
dc.titleThe exception and the rule : fictive, real, criticalen_ZA
dc.typeArticleen_ZA

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