Abstract
The rise of crisis governance in the United States after September 11, 2001 has raised disturbing questions about the relationship between law and exceptions to the law. The debate over the exception — should it be inside or outside law? — reflects what Giorgio Agamben describes as a threshold where inside and outside meet and blur. I show how this undecidable relation between law and the exception is present in popular culture as well. I argue that legal debates over codifying emergency measures (as in “torture warrants”) reflect the undecidable relation between the exception and the law and that certain cultural representations (Steven Spielberg's The Terminal) work as fantasy to externalize and contain the exception. Law, Culture and the Humanities 2007;
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