Books in the State of Exception: Censorship and the Sovereign Ban | Emmett Stinson

Summary: To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Emmett Stinson In December 2005, eight books written by Muslim authors expressing anti-Western political sentiments were, on the recommendation of then Attorney General Philip Ruddock and the AFP, reviewed by the Australian Classification Board and classified “unrestricted.” In February 2006, Ruddock announced that both the Classification Board and the Classification Review Board would now be housed under the auspices of the Attorney General’s Department. Unsurprisingly, in June of the same year Ruddock appealed the Classification Board’s decision on those books, with the result that two, Join the Caravan and In Defence of the Muslim Lands, were banned. In this gesture, the system of Australian censorship became explicitly imbricated in global issues of terrorism and security. The decision prompted critical responses from a variety of sources, including the Australian Society of Authors, PEN, the University of Melbourne, and Frank Moorehouse (in his essay “The Writer in a Time of Terror”). While most of these responses attacked the Review Board’s decision through notions of human rights and free speech, I will suggest that these events are better understood through conceptual paradigms in the work of Giorgio Agamben. The Classification Board does not explicitly censor works, but rather places them under an implicit ban in which they are “refused classification.” As a result, these works are not illegal to own, but cannot be sold in bookstores or placed among the regular holdings of libraries. Such books are placed in a “state of exception” in which they are, through a legal procedure, systematically excluded from the very legal processes of classification itself. It is this very paradoxical figure that Agamben attempts to examine, in which sovereign power is able to exempt or exclude human beings (and here books) from normal legal processes through legal means; effectively the rule of law is used to enable its own suspension—a notion that Agamben grounds in the Roman juridical figure of the homo sacer. Following Agamben, I will argue that Australian censorship needs to be considered not under the framework of civil liberties, but as a raw exercise of the state’s sovereign power over its citizens.