It has been a month since the internet was cut off in Iran. I know nothing—and it is precisely this not-knowing that allows me to think from multiple positions at once: from myself, from my brother, from my father, and from my mother. Each of us occupies a different role, a different exposure, a different vulnerability. The question that emerges from this enforced silence is not merely political or technological. It is legal and existential at once: what role do we occupy, and how are we defined within the text of international law?
This is not a rhetorical question. It is a question born out of a condition that contemporary legal theory struggles to name with precision: the state of exception. A concept invoked frequently, governed ambiguously, and operationalized increasingly without formal declaration, the state of exception today resists any final or stable definition. Yet it continues to structure lives, suspend rights, and redraw the boundaries between legality and force.
This essay argues that the state of exception no longer functions primarily as a territorial or juridical suspension of law, but rather as a virtualized condition—a shifting, mobile, and adaptive mode of governance. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s foundational work on bare life and exceptionality, Judith Butler’s reframing of precariousness, and Georges Scelle’s theory of international legal subjectivity, I contend that contemporary sovereignty increasingly operates through permanent, virtual states of exception, and that the Iranian internet shutdown exemplifies this transformation.
The State of Exception and the Problem of Definition
The state of exception has long occupied an unstable position in legal theory. Carl Schmitt famously defined sovereignty as the power to decide on the exception, situating the concept at the threshold of law and politics. Yet as later theorists have shown, this definition fails to capture the lived reality of exceptionality in modern governance.
As Giorgio Agamben argues, the state of exception is neither fully inside nor outside the legal order. It is a zone of indistinction, where law is suspended in order to preserve itself. Importantly, Agamben emphasizes that the exception has become normalized: what was once an extraordinary measure is now a permanent technique of rule. However, even Agamben’s account encounters a conceptual limit. If the exception is everywhere, then it risks becoming analytically indistinguishable from ordinary governance. This difficulty suggests that the problem is not merely one of frequency, but of form. The contemporary state of exception does not always announce itself through martial law, emergency decrees, or visible military tribunals. Instead, it increasingly manifests through administrative, technological, and infrastructural mechanisms—often without formal legal rupture. This is where Judith Butler’s intervention becomes crucial.
Bare Life as a Relational Condition
Judith Butler reframes bare life not as a biologically reduced existence, but as a politically induced condition of precariousness. For Butler, certain lives are rendered ungrievable, unrecognizable, and legally suspended—not because they lack legal status altogether, but because their status is perpetually contingent. In this sense, bare life is not a static category but a relational and performative condition. It is produced through legal ambiguity, selective recognition, and differential exposure to violence. Importantly, Butler resists the idea that bare life exists outside social and political relations. On the contrary, it is generated through them.
This insight allows us to rethink the state of exception not as a clearly bounded legal moment, but as a dynamic field in which subjects are continuously repositioned. Individuals move in and out of visibility, protection, and recognition. Rights are not simply revoked; they are modulated, delayed, rendered inaccessible. From this perspective, the lack of a definitive legal definition of the state of exception is not a theoretical failure. It is a structural feature. The exception must remain flexible in order to function.
From Territorial to Virtual Exception
My central claim is that the state of exception in contemporary legal philosophy has become virtual. By “virtual,” I do not mean unreal. I mean something closer to its philosophical sense: that which is real but not fixed, actualized differently across contexts, constantly changing form. A virtual state of exception does not require a single space, a single decree, or a single moment. It operates through networks, infrastructures, and informational regimes.
The month-long internet shutdown in Iran exemplifies this shift. No formal declaration of martial law was issued. Courts continued to function. The constitution was not officially suspended. And yet, millions were abruptly removed from the global communicative order. This was not merely a technical disruption. It was a legal transformation. Access to information, economic participation, political expression, and international visibility were simultaneously curtailed. Iranian citizens were not imprisoned, yet they were detained digitally. They were not stripped of nationality, yet they were temporarily excluded from their status as international subjects. This is what I call a virtual state of exception: a condition in which sovereignty operates through infrastructural control rather than explicit legal suspension.
Role Multiplicity in the Virtual Exception
In this virtual exception, individuals do not occupy a single juridical role. They become multiple at once: citizen, suspect, data point, foreign observer, silenced speaker. The absence of information—not knowing—forces a proliferation of perspectives. When the internet disappears, I think not only as myself, but as my family members, each differently exposed. This multiplicity is not accidental. It is a form of resistance. The virtual state of exception depends on predictability, on stable identities that can be governed. Role-shifting undermines this stability.
Paradoxically, people become more virtual precisely because the state of exception seeks to fix them. They migrate between platforms, vocabularies, and legal frames. They translate their condition into global terms: human rights, international law, digital freedom. In doing so, they redefine the exception itself. This is why the virtual state of exception is dangerous for sovereign power in the twenty-first century.
Georges Scelle and the International Legal Subject
Georges Scelle’s theory of dédoublement fonctionnel offers a crucial legal framework for understanding this transformation. For Scelle, international law is not merely a law between states. It is a law for human beings, who function simultaneously as national subjects and international legal actors. According to Scelle, individuals—not governments alone—are the true subjects of international law. States act as intermediaries, but legitimacy ultimately derives from human agency and social function.
Applied to the Iranian context, this perspective is radical. If individuals are international legal subjects, then an internet shutdown is not an internal administrative matter. It is an international legal event. It interrupts individuals’ capacity to act as participants in the global legal and communicative order. Under this framework, the global community’s attention should not focus solely on state compliance, but on human connectivity as a condition of legal subjectivity. Cutting off the internet is not just censorship; it is a partial suspension of international legal personhood.
Redefining the Exception From Below
What is striking about the Iranian case is that people do not passively endure this condition. They actively reinterpret it. Through alternative technologies, linguistic innovation, and transnational solidarity, they reassert their international presence. They redefine the state of exception using their own vocabulary. They insist on being seen not merely as citizens under a sovereign state, but as participants in a shared global legal space. This is not merely political resistance; it is a jurisprudential act.
In this sense, the state of exception is no longer decided exclusively from above. It is contested, rearticulated, and destabilized from below.
Conclusion
The state of exception has no final definition—and it never will. This indeterminacy is not a weakness, but a revelation. As Judith Butler shows, what is at stake is not the absence of law, but the production of bare life through legal ambiguity. As contemporary governance demonstrates, this ambiguity has become virtual, infrastructural, and permanent. Yet as Georges Scelle reminds us, international law does not belong to states alone. It belongs to human beings who continue to act, speak, and connect—even under conditions of enforced silence.
The Iranian internet shutdown reveals both the danger and the promise of the virtual state of exception. It shows how sovereignty adapts—but also how people adapt faster. In the twenty-first century, the exception may be everywhere. But so, too, is resistance. And perhaps this is the most important legal insight of all.
AmirAli Maleki is a researcher specializing in international law and the philosophy of law, and the Editor of PraxisPublication.com. He works in the fields of political philosophy, Islamic philosophy, and hermeneutics.
