The Beast and the Sovereign, Biopolitics and Derrida's Menagerie

Abstract

two-volume set of Beast and Sovereign is a product of seminars delivered in 2001-03, including Derrida's written texts with supplementation from transcripts of sessions. Both volumes are timely in feeling connected to particular times and places. first volume is haunted by occasional mentions of 9/11, terrorism, and rogue states, written with clear weight of a work still reeling in face of political violence. second volume also turns more personal with a consideration of solitude and a contemplation of death as limit of sovereignty. At beginning of one lecture Derrida marks passing of his friend Maurice Blanchot and, for reader, Derrida's own death hangs as a shadow over his careful contemplation of Heidegger's sense of how we make ourselves mortal. Readers of Derrida will recognize many of themes that wind their way through eclectic texts including concept of sovereignty--sovereign power, national sovereignty, and sovereign selves--at heart of Rogues (2005) and Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Borradorri, 2004), and other work produced in this time period. focus on beasts and sovereigns, prescient of some of major themes in political and social theory today, moves unpredictably through texts in ways that defy a simple summary of argument and conclusion. Derrida reflects on question of is proper to man, a question with ontological dimensions (what is essential nature of man that differentiates him from other beings), an ethical dimension (what is it proper for us to do), and a potential political dimension. text is masterly in weaving its way through first two dimensions, demonstrating troubling relationship between sovereignty, law, and violence and always unstable boundary between human and animal. figures of beast and sovereign are brought together in part because of their differences, former a feminine noun in French and a symbol of nature, latter a masculine noun and a figure of artifice. Yet both terms have a similarity in relationship to law, a distinction he draws from Hobbes. beast lies below law as that which cannot be properly obedient to law, sovereign above law as that which must enforce law and cannot be beholden to it. He suggests, the beast and sovereign resemble each other in that they both seem to be outside law, above or alongside law. And yet, even if they resemble each other, they are not fellows. Nor are they, or so we think, our fellows (Derrida, 2011, page 45). As a set of readings, Derrida's works create a sense of unease, presenting world through alien eyes that undermine ontological security and ethical certainty. And his texts often erupt with scenes of violence--the event of terror, horror of war, bloody abattoir--that indicate that these exercises are not merely academic. However, even as he turns to Heidegger's concept of walten--to or to rule--the question of political, of immense stakes of these questions, remains, as he says, to be shown in time, a pas de loup, a time that never arrives. He twice quotes Zarathustra: what is most pardonable thing about you is that you have power and you do not want to reign (quoted in Derrida, 2009, page 3). It is this central problem, thinking both about ways that Derrida carefully unfolds political stakes in thinking through beast and sovereign and about ways that this discussion mirrors larger questions about political import of Derrida's work, that will guide my discussion of these texts. I want to unfold question of is proper to man through, first, his discussion of La Fontaine's The Monkey and Dolphin and its illustration of problem at hand and, then, an examination of two bodies--the executed versus consumed body--as presenting ethical and political stakes of ontology of humanity. …