Volume 59, Issue 4, Fall 2015
The Emergency of Philosophy
Adrian Parr
Pages 671-684
Green Scare
Despite the massive infringement upon civil liberties and human rights that states of emergency have been used to justify, environmental emergencies harbor within them a new mutation of the philosophical problem of order versus anarchy, one where civil disobedience enters the murky waters of corporate power and anarchical rule. The failure of liberal democracies to confront the reality of their own historical excesses in concrete terms is basically what apocalyptic images of debris covered landscapes, drowned and charred bodies, or parched and thirsty fields present. This paper will critically evaluate the figure of sovereignty as it appears in theories of emergency politics—state of exception, deliberation, and de-exceptionalizing the exception—arguing for a slight shift in theoretical focus, from a sovereign figure to a sovereign force, as the basis of transformative politics.