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The state of exception is a juridico-political mechanism that temporarily suspends the law so governments can act more directly in an emergency situation. According to the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, contemporary politics should be understood as a permanent state of exception. This article explains what Agamben means by this permanent state of exception and how it relates to his analysis of biopolitics. According to Agamben, we have reached a point in history where the difference between law and politics on the one side, and mere biological, unpolitical life on the other has vanished. As such, even in modern democracies the positive, constitutional rights of citizens can potentially be suspended at any moment, thereby reducing them to ‘bare life’: life that is radically exposed to unmediated sovereign power. Agamben reveals how the mechanism of the state of exception is based on the fictional idea of a necessary relation between law and human life, and how this fiction legitimizes and renders possible the production of bare life. On top of explaining Agamben’s idea of a permanent state of exception, I relate this theory to the global autocratization that is taking place in order to reveal some of its underlying juridical processes.