Agamben e Kafka: apontamentos sobre estado de exceção

Abstract

This study analyzes the use of the state of exception as a legal instrument employed by the State beyond emergency situations, often transforming it into a technique of governance aimed at maintaining power. Although formally legitimized by the legal order, the state of exception authorizes the temporary suspension of fundamental rights; when prolonged or instrumentali- zed, it constitutes a legal anomaly incompatible with the principles of the democratic rule of law. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s theory, the paper examines the normalization of the ex- ception and the consequent production of what he defines as bare life, understood as life redu- ced to its biological dimension and subjected to sovereign decision, thus excluded from legal protections without such exclusion being formally recognized as illegal. In this context, a dia- logue is established with Franz Kafka’s The Trial, interpreted as a literary representation of the permanent incidence of a state of exception over the individual. In Kafka’s narrative, the subject is subjected to an opaque, unlimited, and arbitrary legal system in which guilt is presumed and defense becomes impossible, symbolically anticipating the structure of the modern state of ex- ception described by Agamben. It is concluded that the recurrent use of this legal mechanism reveals anti-democratic practices that promote suffering, dehumanization, and the erosion of fundamental guarantees, highlighting the authoritarian potential of States that govern through exception.