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suggesting, as Martin posits, “it is not the absence of an answer that
is disappointing but the answer’s anticlimactic presence, which is
never exactly what we expect it to be and thus
leaves us perpetually
waiting for something else
” (2012: 173; italics added), what then is
that “something else” that Landsman is groping for, and what is it
that he has learned from his investigation into Mendel’s murder?
First of all, Landsman finds in Mendel a character who, despite
his alleged potential to be his generation’s Messiah, cracks under the
pressures of too great expectations. The story of Mendel is one that
spills out of its generic boundary as he is expected to fit his role and
satisfy his manifest destiny. In Mendel, Landsman witnesses both the
ambivalence and the paradox of the state of exception. He is called
upon to respond to, in an act of reading or misreading, the state of
exception that Mendel embodies, to determine whether the “state
of exception” signifies one’s subordination to the forces of
sovereignty or one’s exemption from the sovereign power and its
laws.
For Giorgio Agamben, as pointed out by Agata Beilik-Robson,
the “state of exception” carries an assemblage of ideas, some of
which are mutually exclusive, if not mutually cancelling. It may
signify “the redemptive possibility of liberation from sovereign
power,” and it may also signify “a moment of extreme
intensification of power from which there is no escape” (2010:
105).
15
If so, if the state of exception carries both possibilities, one
positive and liberating, the other negative and oppressive, under
what circumstances can the “oppressive state of exception” be
turned into a positive state of exception? How can, that is, the
oppressive state of exception be “converted into a positive,
Benjamin ‘real state of emergency,’ where the human being will
finally lead a ‘happy life’ beyond any imposed project, work, or
15
Bielik-Robson actually identifies eight different definitions that Agamben has used
in his discussion of the state of exception in his various writings: “whatever,”
“limbo,” “the righteous with animal heads,” the tragic hero, “
homo sacer
,” “the
remnant,” “the man without content,” and “
der Muselmann
” (2010: 104).