Recent literature has pointed out that "the jargon of exception" -especially the one adopted by Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben- has, as its drawback, the fact of completely erasing the fundamental role of societal forces into the modern political arena. Thus, if it seems to be unavoidable to use the notion of exception, at the same time the main frameworks provided on it appear to be somewhat lacking. To address this very difficult issue a new theoretical analysis is needed. I will start by considering an apparently unrelated piece of literature --the one on constitutive rules, developed mainly in analytical philosophy. More specifically, my investigation, to give a contribution to the topic of exception, needs to find an answer to the following question: what happens when something goes wrong while following this kind of rules, viz. when either a mismatch between rules and facts or an internal contradiction among rules causes an impasse?