The Exception in Crisis: The Politics of Medical Emergency

• In Event: Examining the Exceptional: Case Studies of Knowledge Production in Biomedicine and Science

Abstract

The Emergency Department of the contemporary American hospital is predicated on the exceptional and its transformability into the everyday material of technical management. It requires, even produces, exception while seeking to recast it otherwise. This paper begins from the Emergency Department to question the constitution and political implications of the exceptional, considering a structural interrelation between the concepts of Marx’s crisis, Schmitt’s emergency and state of exception, and Freud’s trauma as they pertain to historical change. For Marx, the crisis reveals the contradictions of capitalism and is that which will precipitate the revolution and the unfolding of history. But when Benjamin turned upside-down Marx’s Hegelian philosophy of history and posited the revolution not as that which propelled forward motion but rather as the brake on a historical trajectory toward destruction, the crisis fell into an indeterminate position in relation to political and historical change. It is into such indeterminacy that Schmitt injected his emergency and state of exception. Structurally parallel to Marx’s crisis in terms of time and temporality, Schmitt’s emergency and state of exception emerge as moments of historical rupture opening to the assertion of a new (even if conservative) order. Like Schmitt’s emergency and Marx’s crisis, Freud’s trauma also challenges linear temporality and the accumulative, progressive mechanisms of Enlightenment imaginations of history. This paper brings these theoretical frameworks together to consider the political valences of crisis, emergency, and trauma in medical contexts, probing both the political potentialities and limits of framing objects through recourse to the exceptional.

Author

• Eric Reinhart, Harvard University