例外状态 | State of Exception

Popular literature

“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away / Now it looks as though they’re here to stay [1].” Everyone gets it: a presumed normality, and the rupture of that normality.

Choose a fucking big television

At twenty you despise it — vulgar, the aspiration of people who’ve given up on life. At fifty you might actually want one — comfort, contentment. But both attitudes point to the same assumption: the existence of a stable, predictable life trajectory. One mocks it, the other embraces it, but neither questions it.

Assumed certainty / stereotype life / no template

School, job, marriage, mortgage, retirement. Every step comes with a standard answer and a standard anxiety. The whole thing feels solid, but its solidity comes from repetition and consensus — everyone follows it, so it looks real. No one ever signed this contract. Average life expectancy of 78 is a statistic, the mean of a distribution, describing a population. People internalize it as an entitlement: I should live to around 78, and the decades in between should roughly follow the template.

Heidegger’s das Man / the design of everyday experience as concealment of finitude

Heidegger’s “the They” (das Man) [2]: people in everyday life use averaging, publicness, to grind away the uncertainty of existence. The function of das Man is to spare you from facing yourself — just follow along. The lights in the shopping mall are always daytime. The office air conditioning is always 22°C. The delivery always arrives in thirty minutes. The design of everyday experience in a modern city is a machine of concealment, systematically removing the finitude of life from view. Heidegger calls the systematic evasion of death a flight from existential anxiety (Angst) — burying Being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode) under busyness, preoccupation, and diversion [2].

Disease / violence / social disorder

Three modes of intrusion. Disease is the most common and the most intimate — a CT result, a phone call from the hospital. Violence covers a broader range, from car accidents to war to physical assault; its shared feature is an uncontrollable physical impact from outside. Social disorder is collapse at the systemic level — economic crisis, pandemic lockdown, political upheaval.

Disease is the most peculiar of the three, because it originates inside the body. Violence comes from an other, disorder comes from the system, but disease is your own body betraying the assumptions you had about it. You’ve been treating your body as a reliable, silently running piece of infrastructure. Suddenly it becomes the problem itself.

Agamben / state of exception

Agamben’s “state of exception” (stato di eccezione) [3] was originally political: the sovereign declares a state of emergency, suspending law and constitutional order. Pulled to the level of individual life: serious illness is the body declaring a state of exception over your daily existence, suspending every rule you took for granted. Tomorrow’s meeting is cancelled. Next month’s business trip is off. Next year’s plans are void. The etymology of exception is ex-capere — to be taken out of the ordinary. You’ve been taken out.

Why me

The first reaction people have to a sudden crisis is often “why me.” This reaction presupposes a “this shouldn’t happen to me,” and “shouldn’t” presupposes some kind of normal, uneventful life template. The reaction itself reveals that before the exception arrived, you had no idea you’d been relying on a fiction all along.

Bayes / three layers of updating the prior

The basic logic of Bayesian probability [4]: prior belief + new evidence → posterior belief. A diagnosis comes in, you update your assessment of your health. So far this is routine information processing.

But a state of exception forces you to update far more than factual judgments. What you need to update is the prior itself — your assumption about what life is. Before that diagnosis, your prior was probably something like “I’ll live healthily into my seventies or eighties, maybe with some minor issues along the way.” This prior was never treated by you as a probability distribution. You treated it as fact. As a promise.

Surface-level update: something bad happened, adjust expectations. Deeper update: my basic assumptions about life need revision. The deepest update — and the most painful — concerns the nature of the prior itself: it was never a certain fact; it was always a probability. “I’ll most likely make it through this year safely” — the operative words are “most likely,” and you’d never noticed them before. You’ve been living as though 90% were 100%. When that 10% actually lands on you, what you face is not just bad news, but an epistemological revelation: you’ve always been living in a probabilistic world, just pretending it was deterministic. Average lifespan is a mean. Average life is a fiction. Losing them isn’t an anomaly. Losing them is what the distribution looks like.

Foucault / hospitals and prisons / heterotopia

Foucault’s “heterotopia” [5] — a place that really exists but operates under a logic different from everyday space. Hospitals and prisons sit side by side in Foucault’s classification: both are institutionalized spaces society uses to handle “deviations from the norm.” Prisons handle behavioral deviation, hospitals handle bodily deviation. The people who walk in are severed from “normal society” — their time is no longer public time, their identity is no longer a job title, but a bed number.

The hospital — functional normality bearing the weight of the abnormal

A hospital is an extraordinarily precise functional machine. Registration, triage, examination, surgery, nursing care, directional signs on the corridor walls, shift schedules at the nurses’ station, drip-rate calculations on IV bags. All this precision, all this functionality, exists for a single reason: to process an utterly non-functional fact — that the human body breaks down and hurts. The hospital wraps the most irrational situation in the most rational procedures. It maintains a bare minimum of functional normality in order to bear what is obviously not normal. The quiet under the fluorescent tubes in an inpatient ward corridor — that’s not calm. It’s suppressed.

Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward

Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward [10]. A cancer ward, its occupants drawn from every stratum of Soviet society — officers, teachers, workers. The ward zeroes out all social identities; people are reduced to their most basic biological existence. Your Party membership has nothing to do with your tumor staging.

In the state of exception, you face yourself / your crisis self is hidden from your social circles

The way a person looks in a state of crisis is almost always hidden from their mainstream social circles and social relations.

Performance / stage / milieu / dramatic conflict

Everyday life is itself a performance (Goffman’s dramaturgical approach [6]): people play their roles on the stage of society. The state of exception is the moment the curtain is ripped away. The source of “literariness” and “dramatic conflict” is expectation violation — the gap between how life is supposed to look (audience expectation) and what life has suddenly become (narrative intrusion).

The sudden in cinema / expectation violation

David Lynch [7]. The opening of Blue Velvet: a quiet American suburb, the lawn trimmed immaculately, then the camera burrows under the grass — writhing insects everywhere. Lynch’s horror is never imported from outside. Those things were always already there, inside every respectable household. The perversion within middle-class life is especially perverse precisely because the smoother the surface, the more violent the contrast when it’s torn open.

Lars von Trier, The House That Jack Built [8]. Takashi Miike, Visitor Q [9]. More extreme methods, pointing at the same question: how normal is your so-called “normal life,” really? How thin is that layer of solidity?

Mental illness — the most sudden of all

With a physical illness, you’re still “you” — it’s just your body that has a problem. Mental illness destabilizes the continuity of “you” itself. Someone you’ve known for twenty years suddenly says things you can’t comprehend, does things you can’t predict at all. The voice hasn’t changed, the face hasn’t changed, but something fundamental has broken. Is the person in front of you still the person you knew?

The alteration of mental states is biochemical — humoral, neurotransmitter-based, neurochemical — entirely material changes, but manifesting at the level of meaning and behavior. A person’s serotonin levels shift, and their entire “world” shifts with them, yet that world is invisible to you, impossible to enter directly. The boundary between material and virtual blurs. Of all forms of “the sudden,” a familiar person suddenly becoming unpredictable is the most sudden — there isn’t even a discrete “event” to mark it. It’s gradual, diffuse. There’s no CT scan you can point to.

Children / every day is a state of exception

For children, every day is a state of exception. They have no template, no pre-existing framework to map onto experience. They’ll squat to watch an ant for half an hour. They’ll wail when a balloon floats away. Their laughter and their crying are the most raw and intense emotional responses, because every experience is a first. The “stability” that adults claim to have is a kind of impoverishment of perception — through accumulated experience, you build a filter system that screens out the world’s novelty and unpredictability. This filter makes you efficient. It also makes you blind.

The state of exception throws you back into something resembling a child’s condition: everything is new, uncertain, demanding fresh sensation and judgment; old frameworks are all void. People who’ve been through major upheaval often say that during that period their perception was abnormally vivid — colors brighter, sounds louder, time slower. Because the filter was shattered.

The body — the most fundamental unpredictability / technology and social development as concealment

The unpredictability of the body is the most immediate and the least welcome unpredictability a person faces. You can move to escape violence, buy insurance to hedge risk, stockpile supplies to prepare for disorder, but you can’t escape your own body. It’s been counting down since day one.

Medicine extends lifespan, insurance distributes risk, urban planning isolates danger, consumer culture fills the void — the entirety of modern civilization can be understood as a vast machine for concealing death. Layer upon layer of institutions and technologies, serving a single function: pushing “you will die” out of the field of vision.

The complexity of modern society vs. antiquity

The complexity of modern society makes people more frantic when sudden events hit. Faced with a diagnosis, you have to choose between surgery and conservative treatment, compare protocols across five hospitals, check insurance coverage, plan the logistics of post-operative care. The complexity of decision-making saturates all available cognitive bandwidth.

In antiquity, illness left few options, which also left people room. Modern society provides more tools for dealing with the practical consequences of a state of exception, while simultaneously providing more ways to evade its existential significance.

AI and the longing for immortality

The fascination people have with AI may not be purely instrumental. AI represents a form of intelligence unconstrained by the body, capable of persisting indefinitely. People project “humanity as a collective” onto AI, treating AI’s potential immortality as a vicarious immortality for the species. This admiration-of-the-stronger isn’t necessarily conscious, but its structure is continuous with traditional longevity culture and the perpetuation of family lineage — all variants of the survival drive.

“Who can outlive you?”

AI dissolving functional value / action as zazen

When AI can do functional tasks better and faster than you — writing reports, organizing data, researching options — the functional value of “doing a functional thing well” is itself dissolved. If you’re still doing it, your reason can no longer be functional; it has to be something else — the experience of the act itself (something like zazen), self-expression, becoming yourself in the process of doing. The arrival of AI can force people out of their attachment to surfaces: of the things you do, how many do you actually want to do?

Knowing life is finite / doubting the everyday / but the things you truly need to do

Knowing that life is finite makes you start to wonder what all the things you do every day are actually for. For many of those things, the doubt is warranted. But the things you truly need to do — self-expression, conducting your life through what you do, becoming yourself — these need to be identified amid the rubble of that doubt. Individuation [11].

The occasion for individuation / Simondon / Stiegler / Yuk Hui / zone of indetermination

Both Stiegler [12] and Yuk Hui [13] have discussed Simondon’s concept of individuation. The state of exception is an occasion for individuation: all default settings are zeroed out, and you are forced to choose anew. The “zone of indetermination” — a space where things have not yet been decided, at once freedom and anxiety.

Gurdjieff / remember yourself

Gurdjieff’s “self-remembering” [14]. Not memory, but present-moment awareness — being conscious that “I am here, I am doing this, I am I.” Gurdjieff’s observation: in everyday life, people are asleep, running mechanically. You drove to the office but can’t remember what you saw on the way. You finished lunch but can’t remember what it tasted like. You got through an entire day, but “you” were never present.

He himself failed at it repeatedly. Self-remembering is not a once-and-for-all achievement. It is a practice of constant repetition, constant failure, constant renewed attempt.

Dissatisfaction with Buddhist detachment

Buddhist detachment promises an endpoint — letting go, nirvana, renunciation. But the endpoint itself seems to cancel the meaning of the process. The intuition that “it doesn’t seem very interesting” may be pointing at this: if detachment becomes another template (the template of spiritual practice), it becomes structurally identical to what it was trying to transcend.

The sum of human experience is that nothing matters

Over time.