Abstract

ExcerptWalter Benjamin's famous statement in the eighth of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” that “the state of [exception] in which we live is not the exception but the rule,”1 has become as normalized as its proposition asserts. Few turns of phrase have become as easily convertible, turning the “special property” (of the definition of a Greek idioma) through collocation into an implicit signified conventionalized by common usage. In the phrases turning on the elements “the exception” and “the rule,” the antonyms are being assimilated to each other, neutralizing their oppositional relation—not as a matter of a mystical “attraction…