“Cubans are not going to fight over the last few crumbling homes,” said Nicolas J. Gutiérrez Jr., a 42-year-old Cuban-American lawyer in Miami who represents many business claimants and for himself seeks the return of two sugar mills, 15 cattle ranches, a food distribution center and more. “Out of the hundreds of people I represent and the thousands I talk to I’ve never met anyone who says he’s going to go back there and kick people out. On a base level, that would be immoral.” Immoral, perhaps, but illegal?

In this book, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1942- ) tackles the concept known as “state of exception” (“suspension of law”). Agamben is primarily known for his first and most influential book, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. (1) With State of Exception (2), originally published in 2003 in Italian under the title Stato di eccezione, Agamben continues the narration of a political and juridical problem, a four-part sequel of which this is the first.

The trouble with style in contemporary architecture has three sources. One cause is artistic: the absence of a canonical set of forms sustained by authoritative standards of expression and representation. The second basis is social: the inability of any one group in society to get its anxieties recognized as the ones that count. The third root, and the most important, lies in engineering: the increasing failure of physical constraints to determine the shape of buildings. The attempt to disclose in the outward appearance the internal structural necessity — an ideal most fully satisfied in the emergence of late Gothic and early modernism — now seems to have lost its promise if not its point. As a result, the commitment to a particular style may appear to be both coercive and gratuitous. The architect’s stylistic positionings may seem tainted by narcissism and pandering.