Abstract
The chapter introduces themes of Agamben’s theory of exceptional politics through Christopher Nolan’s The Batman trilogy and discusses its implications for democratic politics. Giorgio Agamben encounters in his work the border zone of the political: between law and exception, sovereign power meets bare life. Agamben shows how exceptional politics tend to become the new normal of governing, even implicating the biopolitical governance of life itself. Nolan’s The Batman illustrates the paradigm of exception through the quest of billionaire Bruce Wayne, who fights evil in Gotham City as a masked vigilante. In contrast to Agamben, however, it is not the state which stretches the law through exceptional politics. Batman is situated outside of the law but emerges as exceptional Leviathan in situations of emergency. The chapter discusses Agamben’s key concepts through the emblematic figure of Batman, his relations to his antagonists, and the politics of fiction.
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Notes
- 1.
Agamben draws a parallel here to Derrida’s notion of force de loi, the “mythical foundation of authority,” which is also enacted in moment of decision [Derrida (1992); see also Honig (1991) on the problem of founding a republic], as well as to the right to resistance, which is also located in a zone of political undecidability (Agamben 2005).
- 2.
In Latin, the term sacer has a double meaning, holy/sacred and cursed.
- 3.
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Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Anna Büntzly, Anna Ferl, Jos Platenkamp and the student audience, who participated in a presentation in November 2014 at the occasion of the Long Night of Education at the University of Muenster, for their invaluable comments to earlier versions of this chapter.
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Engelkamp, S. (2019). The Politics of Exception as Fiction: Reading Agamben Through The Batman. In: Hamenstädt, U. (eds) The Interplay Between Political Theory and Movies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90731-4_3
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