Surrender: An Essay on the Theory of Sovereignty and Alternative Possibilities

Abstract

Paul W. Kahn, in Sacred Violence, stresses that the popular sovereign of liberal democracy remains sovereign nonetheless, and so the demand for sacrifice maintains a powerful hold on the civic conscience. A distinction in Hobbes’s Leviathan between contract and covenant provides the basis for a critique of the so-called social contract tradition, including its liberal variants, which argues that it persists in the mistake of characterizing as voluntary that which is not, and thus continues to justify a collective fantasy of transcendental authority. If we accept Kahn’s defense of an indissoluble theoretical link between sovereign power and sacred violence in the modern political imaginary, then an effort to move away from this bloody paradigm requires us to conceptualize an alternative to sovereignty or to the violent experience of the sacred or, likely, both. In the effort to re-imagine politics as a realm of freedom and power in direct opposition to sovereignty and violence, I take for granted both Arendt’s understanding of power and her critique of sovereignty; Bakunin’s materialist theory of anarchism and the fertile metaphysical speculations of novelist Henry Miller then provide inspiration for a principle of surrender that may act as alternative experience of the sacred.