Broken: Thought-images of life in the state of exception

The concept of the state of exception in the work of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben presents a challenge to contemporary continental philosophy, particularly with regard to theories of radical exteriority, such as one finds in the eternal return in Nietzsche, the philosophy of language in Heidegger or, the theory of affect in Deleuze. These theoretical legacies of extremity and exteriority posit thought and being as radical exposure and vulnerability. Yet life in the state of exception is that which is profoundly and radically separated from itself---including our exposures, encounters, and relations with any extremity or outside that we could be said to have an encounter with. How can we think radical exteriority as the non-essential foundation for thought, politics, and being in the context of the exception? This dissertation answers this problem through the development of a concept of the failed encounter. Just as bearing witness in Agamben exposes a radical non-language that would precede all language, and just as Deleuze and Guattari postulate a non-philosophy that would subtend all philosophy, the present work argues for a thinking of affect in the exception as a failed encounter. Every encounter is preceded by a radical non-encounter, a failed encounter that did not take place (or, an encounter with that which one was unable to "have" an experience, encounter, or relation). This non-encounter, or non-experience, that precedes every experience in the exception can be thought as an experience with that outside which is broken. Our ability to have an exposure, encounter, or relation with outside, the world---what Nietzsche called the "abyss" and Spinoza called "God" or, immanence---is broken. This is precisely why the broken, the ruined, and the experience of radical failure calls to us: to bear witness to an encounter that did not take place. This dissertation develops this concept through the encounter between the work of Deleuze (including his work with Felix Guattari), Agamben, Benjamin and Michel Foucault.