The Economic Exception

Simone Polillo, University of Virginia

This paper proposes a new solution to Polanyi's confusing claim about the disembedded economy in market society, focusing on the relationship between the economic and the political/social. Any attempt to separate or re-unite the economic and the social, (whether or not mediated by the political), insofar as it draws attention to the question of boundaries, it also draws attention away from the question of indeterminacy and excess—or the state under which the economic and the social constitute each other through emergency, crisis, and exception. My goal here is to flesh out a theory that derives from such a re-orientation, a theory that, borrowing from Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, foregrounds what I call the “economic exception:” the place in which the social and the economic cohere thorough a suspension of regulation that creates the conditions for the applicability of regulation. The state of economic exception, I suggest, preserves market regulation by suspending it—a paradoxically and seemingly contradictory relationship that, nevertheless, once unpacked, helps us make sense of (1) the role of crisis in reproduction of markets (2) the sources of economic legitimacy that bolster the authority of institutions of governance like central banks. I show the emergence of this mode of governance through a historical analysis of the annual reports of the Bank of Italy between 1960 and 1990—the period immediately following the economic “miracle” of the 1950s and ending with Italy’s adoption of strict austerity measures to join the path towards the Euro.

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 Presented in Session 37. Crisis and Social Transformation