"I Can't See": Sovereignty, Oblique Vision, and the Outlaw in Hawks's Scarface
2004; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/ncr.2004.0024
ISSN1539-6630
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoCarl Schmitt's famous formulation,"sovereign is he who declares the [state of] exception," accompanies Schmitt's view that sovereignty is not only the law-making force, but also the authority that defines the law and the extent of the law (Schmitt 1998, 5). For Schmitt, sovereignty determines the situations in which the law is inapplicable, or to be held in abeyance. Schmitt's term for these situations—such as possible circumstances in a revolution or coup d'état, or in the dismissal of an elected government—is "the state of exception." Thus, sovereign power exceeds the law, being both juridical and extrajuridical, working inside and outside the law. If sovereignty is a declaration of power over a state of exception, how can counterstatements to this claim be figured? Can we express exceptions to the state of exception [End Page 211] visually? That is to say: how can images subvert, and expose the paradox in, the violence produced by a declaration of the state of exception and the state's suspension of "normal" politico-juridical procedure? What are the stakes of producing such subversive images? How does visibility change these stakes? In Howard Hawks's film, Scarface (1932), such questions are given elaborate and problematic visual expression through the figure of Tony "Scarface" Camonte, a Chicago gangster in the early 1930 s. Camonte (played by Paul Muni) is a figure who bears close identification with the wargus ("wolf," "werewolf," the bandit, or outlaw) that Giorgio Agamben and Rodolphe Jhering, among others, identify in German and Scandinavian antiquity (Agamben 1998, 104). I will try to apply Agamben's discussion of the wargus in Homo Sacer to Scarface, while reading the film's figuration of the violence enacted by the outlaw.
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