/lit/ - Literature

What is an exception?
More than once, last year, we insisted on the character of absolute
exception
that pardon must maintain, a pardon worthy of the name, a pardon that
is always unforeseeable and irreducible to statement as well as to contract,
to determinative judgment, to the law, therefore, a pardon always outside
the law, always heterogeneous to order, to norm, to rule, or to calculation,
to the rule of calculation, to economic as well as juridical calculation. Every
pardon worthy of that name, if there ever is any, must be
exceptional
, should
be exceptional, that is in short the law of the pardon: it must be lawless and
exceptional, above the laws or outside the laws.
The question then remains: what is an exception? Can one pose this
question? Is there an essence of exception, an adequate concept of this sup-
posed essence?
One may have one’s doubts, and yet we commonly use this word, as if it
had an assured semantic unity. We regularly act as if we know what an exception is or, likewise, what an exception is not, as if we had a valid criterion
with which to identify an exception or the exceptionality of an exception,
the rule, in short, of the exception, the rule for discerning between the exceptional <and> the non- exceptional — which seems, however, absurd or a
contradiction in terms. And yet, people commonly speak of the exception,
the exception to the rule, the exception that confirms the rule; there is even
a law or laws of exception, exceptional tribunals, and so forth.