The Exception as the Rule in Art, Law, and Science

What is it about?

Why has Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization” (perceptual strangeness) enjoyed, despite its overall vagueness, long-lasting fame? Because, I argue, it matches well the modernist paradigm of thought which in the early 20th century began to displace the methods of positivism. To illustrate this, my paper juxtaposes the Russian Formalist’s understanding of art to Carl Schmitt’s jurisprudence in which “exception” (suspension of the legal order) plays the signal role. Further, it also draws a parallel with Karl Popper’s philosophy of science demarcating the empirical pursuit of knowledge from metaphysics on the basis of “falsification”—the ineluctable fallibility of scientific hypotheses.

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