The war on terror, the globalization of politics and the emergence of international law have shaped our recent history and brought about new questions and challenges for politicans as well as for the sciences concerned with understanding the dynamics at play. With contributions from philosophy, the history of ideas, social science, political science and literature studies, Spheres of Exemption, Figures of Exclusion offers thirteen investigations into the co-constitutive relationship between subjectivity and political and legal order, combining theoretical reflection with empirical and historical case studies. The result is an interdisciplinary kaleidoscope providing the reader with distinct and original perspectives on what is at heart a singular concern: the significance of order and its limits for the exercise of freedom of thought and action for the human being.