Revisiting the idea of legalized lawlessness

Abstract

To diagnose present-day legalized lawlessness as the normalization of the exception as a stable political form rather than as a temporary measure, the article draws on the account of sovereignty presented by Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of ‘bare life’ and the camp, and Hannah Arendt’s critique of bureaucracy and thoughtlessness. It argues the government today produces places in which law is still officially in force but used to wield discretionary power and maintain impunity. The exception becomes ordinary not solely through the suspension of sovereign power, but through bureaucracy that removes judgement, relocates responsibility, and obscures the political visibility of injury. Drawing on literatures on structural and slow violence, the article shows how harm becomes ordinary as an environment of exposure that deepens democratic exhaustion and depoliticized subjectivity. What follows introduces responsibility without redemption as an ethical-political orientation that operates within conditions of implication, vulnerability, and routinized exception to support judgment and accountability. © The Author(s) 2026.