Abstract

Emergency powers are shaped by representations of war. For proof of this, we not only need to observe the origins of a large part of this kind of law, but also the more or less explicit model provided by war in many interpretations of emergency legislations, at least since the French Revolution. Nevertheless, from the outset, this relationship has been particularly ambivalent. It remains ambivalent today, when governments apply emergency legislations during the fight against terrorism or during the health crisis, which were both escorted by heavy war rhetoric. And yet, never has the war model seemed so far removed from the real changes affecting the management of crisis, particularly in terms of temporality. On the contrary, this management reflects an increasingly continuous administrative handling of emergencies – often referred to by the ambiguous formula of “permanent state of emergency”. It is this tension between a transformation of the temporality of emergency legislations, and the use of a whole rhetoric that continually refers to an apparently anachronistic, discontinuous model of war that this article seeks to address, by attempting to think through the relationship with time that is paradoxically expressed in it. More specifically, the aim is to shed light on a curiously nostalgic representation of the “wars of yesteryear”, based on the Derridean concept of the spectre.