“the sovereign state of exception is a politico-theological weapon designed to neutralise the threat posed not so much by liberalism but by more radical forms of politics, especially anarchism. Curiously enough, the state of exception – the condition in which the rule of law is suspended – itself resembles a form of anarchy, perhaps what Hannah Arendt referred to as the ‘anarchy of power’ that characterised totalitarian regimes. However, Schmitt is quick to distinguish the exception from anarchy and chaos: order in the juristic sense still prevails, even if it is, he says ominously, ‘not of the ordinary kind’. This is a kind of artificially induced ‘anarchy’, designed to preserve rather than overthrow the existing order, or – as we saw in Schmitt’s welcoming of the Nazi revolution – overthrowing it in order to preserve it. To borrow the concept of ‘immunisation’ from the theorist Roberto Esposito, the exception might be seen as gesture in which, in order to protect oneself from a virus, one injects oneself with it so that the system’s immune response is triggered. In the same way, to immunise itself against the threat of anarchy, the state suspends the rule of law and becomes ‘anarchic”