The real at the origin of sovereignty

Since the concept itself has become increasingly debatable in today's world, the endeavour is to produce a new interpretation which combines stability with perpetual change. The article first considers a Spinozist-Lacanian interpretation of human nature, seen as relational and desire-driven, centred around an absence that operates as a driving force of human action. However, this drive is individual, not communal, hence political association is needed which, in turn, necessitates some equality in substance. Here the nature of sovereignty as the ability and duty to determine the essence of that sameness kicks in. Sovereign decision functions as if there was a primordial criterion but, in doing so, masks both the lack at the heart of existence and the equally groundless nature of competing options. As such, it is permanently open for contestation.

The concept of sovereignty has long preoccupied philosophers and political theorists as far as the formation of state authority and the structures by which it operates are concerned. I will attempt to follow the narrative backbone of Jaques Derrida in the Seminar The Beast and the Sovereign and create the portrait of the sovereign subject, drawing upon the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2007

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Sovereignty'' confounds, and the fate of the ''subject'' thus appears uncertain. Thus, sovereignty is perpetually rethought by critical philosophers, borders perpetually reconceptualized, and the ''political subject'' perpetually resurrected from abandonment. In this essay, I present a different, decolonial, view of sovereignty as a philosophical invention. I begin by identifying three incommensurable conditions of subject-beingness: the precarious citizen-subject, the abject subject of ''exceptional'' bans, and the trans-territorial subject of ''exemptional'' license. Rather than aberrations, these are co-constitutively regulated and enforced by the invention of sovereignty that constructs the materialities of differentiated subject-beingness within a global biopolitical regime of (b)ordered bodies-within(/out)-territory based on the incommensurable rationalities of license, containments, and bans. The aim of this correction to the philosophy of sovereignty is to further the tasks of denormalizing the coloniality of (b)ordering that has captured, emplaced, and banned imaginations of being(-otherwise). Conversely, a decolonial philosophy normalizes the oppositions to sovereign presents and naturalizes the many witnessed refusals and rejections of the present normalities of violence and dispossession. To deinvent sovereignty is to therefore re-invent philosophy as decolonial praxes.

Derrida today, 2017

This paper surveys Derrida's discussions of political sovereignty in order to highlight his preference for a cosmopolitan world order and show how the deconstruction of sovereignty cannot proceed on the model of his earlier analyses of concepts such as justice, hospitality, forgiveness and democracy. How does one deconstruct the unconditional and apparently undeconstructible concept and institution of sovereignty? Two elements of Derrida's response are then critically examined. First, I explore his qualified defence of the principle of sovereignty and his reluctance to unconditionally reject it on the grounds that it is implied in the 'classical principles of freedom and self-determination'. I argue that the critique of the ideals of personal agency and freedom based on a conception of individual sovereignty ought to be pursued but that this need not imply rejection of the normative priority of individuals. Second, I examine his efforts to distinguish between sovereignty and the unconditioned that he aligns with deconstructive thought. I argue that, while the institutions and exercise of sovereignty are deconstructible, there is a sense in which pure sovereignty remains a necessary foundation for political liberalism and for a cosmopolitan world order. * Derrida's engagements with political sovereignty are troubling to commentators, some of whom find it difficult to grasp the force and intent of his analyses. 1 No doubt this is because they raise difficult

Law & Critique, 2010

The paper explores the role of Jacques Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis in debates in law and legal philosophy. It proceeds by considering a debate between Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler over Lacan’s concept of the real, which forms part of a larger discussion over the future of democracy and the rule of law (Butler et al. 2000). Through reference to discussions of the relationship between law and ethics based on the Antigone tragedy, I argue that the difference between Žižek and Butler’s positions should not be understood in terms of the correctness of their reading of Lacan, but in terms of the political commitments that inform their respective interpretations. I explain the implications of this debate over one of Lacan’s most enigmatic concepts, thereby showing how Lacan’s theory can be used to rethink the politics of law in light of the increased emphasis on ethics in contemporary legal debates.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2008

This paper attempts to provide, through a reading of Derrida's Rogues, an account of the political phenomenon where regimes of sovereignty are resisted in the name of the very values-freedom, democracy and human rights, for example-they purport to stand for. To Derrida, sovereignty must simultaneously conform to a logic of both self-identity and of unconditionality. However, the unconditionality that makes sovereignty possible will always threaten and exceed it, something that other accounts like Agamben's try implicitly to deny. In the end, for Derrida, our present political challenge is to recognize, and even affirm, the way the unconditionality of sovereignty is turned against itself. Sovereignty, then, is most effectively dealt with not by imagining a world in which it will no longer occur, nor by simple opposition, but by committing to the very logic of sovereignty itself.

Philosophica Critica, 2018

The purpose of this article is to investigate one of the most interesting and debated issues within the philosophical dis-cussion about politics: the metaphor of the body politic and its relation with the theory of sovereignty in contemporary political theory. After an opening section, which proposes a brief sketch about the origin of the body politic within phi-losophy (especially in Plato’s and Aristotle’s contributions), the article provides a theoretical insight of such a theory, by dealing with three of its definitions: Kantorowicz’s “king’s two bodies”; Hobbes’ Leviathan and Schmitt’s theory of sove-reignty. The article aims at presenting some arguments to define these three perspectives, by examining – in the last section – how this paradigm has evolved into the more complex and articulated theory of the rule of law in contemporary de-mocratic societies.

2018

The concept of sovereignty is one of the major concepts that have elicited response from political thinkers in one form or the other throughout the ages. Discourses and contributions by thinkers as it were are divided into two strands, the classical theory of sovereignty and the constitutional theory of sovereignty. The difference that exists between these schools of thought ramifies the question of how the concept of sovereignty relates to state authority. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) also contributed to discourse on the concept of sovereignty. This he did while putting forward his thoughts on the social contract. In Rousseau's contractarian thought, sovereignty is popular, unlimited, inalienable, and resides within the people and as such, the people in Rousseau's thinking "calls the shots" in any democratic political configuration. This paper engages the expository and analytic method of data analysis in its bid to appraise the Rousseauan conception of sovereignty with the intent of bringing to the fore, its inherent merits and demerits and to accordingly extrapolates its implications for democratic legitimacy in an age where democracy has been accepted in the world over as the world-best practice in governance. In the final third, the paper holds that the inherent demerits of the Rousseauan conception of sovereignty notwithstanding, Rousseau seems to have laid down the prototype of all legitimate government through his exclusive conferment of sovereignty on the people. It concludes that legitimate democratic regimes can be realized in Africa through the adoption of the Rousseauan model of contractual governance.