If you’re familiar with the work of Giorgio Agamben (he’s all the rage in lit-crit circles these days), particularly his concept of Homo sacer, you know that Homo sacer is a juridical designation that has its root in Roman law and applies to individuals who for legal reasons cannot be sacrificed. That is, they’ve been juridically divested of qualia which conventionally apply to them in ordinary circumstances, like, say, those of a law-abiding American citizen who enjoys rights and protections secured her by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. That being said, I cannot help but continue thinking Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the state of exception quite apposite when it comes to everything that’s going on in the current housing market debacle and the government’s seemingly ineffective, and perhaps detrimental, means to address the problem.

The sovereign’s organs, in this case, the Fed and the Treasury, determine the states of exception that lead to thrifty and prudent people getting screwed by the inevitable inflation to follow. The sovereign and homo sacer, used here in a more attenuated sense as s/he who has been placed outside fundamental economic laws that punish improvident behavior, occupy spaces beyond the thresholds that contain prudent householders and renters, whose own financial well-being has been thrown on the fire in order to deal with the aftermath of the housing bubble. Troubling thing is, though, these thresholds tend to drift and to contract, until the very status invoked as the ideal — “homeowner” as fully realized American citizen — no one any longer actually has. Democratizing access to a certain status, in other words, effectively destroys that status.

I find in the Fed’s current remedies to the mortgage crisis — buyout–bailouts and tax “carry–backs” — a certain homology with the machinations in Bush’s Justice Department. It’s the same logic as that underwriting the notion of “the ownership society” which allows mouthpieces in the DOJ, and even, at the time, Bush and Cheney themselves, to claim that none of the anti-terror legislation ushered in over the past seven years has done anything negative to essential constitutional protections like habeas corpus, when, in fact, habeas corpus has been stripped of all its legal “teeth.” It has been reduced to a purely a formal, conceptual entity, a placeholder in conversations about the constitution and the law; just as “the small business owner” is a purely rhetorical construct for campaign speeches, its objective correlative having been all but driven out of existence by big box stores.