Can There Be Politics Without Sovereignty? Arendt, Derrida and the Question of Sovereign Inevitability

Abstract

In this essay I look at Arendt and Derrida and the way that they seem forced to compromise with sovereignty despite their ardent opposition to it. In both cases, the sense of the inevitability of sovereignty comes from a particular understanding of time, that is to say, it comes from an eschatological perspective that sees the unity and continuity of sovereignty as the only possible form of politics. I show how both thinkers seek to bypass the sense of temporality. Arendt, by looking to a pre-sovereign, classical past and Derrida, by looking at a democracy “to come.’’ I read these temporal maneuverings as a kind of subversion of these authors’ own sense of being trapped in time. By providing alternative “pasts’’ and “futures’’ both Arendt and Derrida — perhaps especially when read together — are not so much seeking to escape the present as they are recognizing the way the present is infused with these other temporalities and possibilities. Such moves are thus oriented neither to past nor future but to the present itself.