Abstract
How might one read a collection of transcriptions—such as The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1—that exemplifies how to read other texts deconstructively? In the spirit of Derrida’s text, a response to this question remains radically undecided; however, it certainly does not imply the absence of exegesis through the course of a particular reading. On the contrary, the event of a reading fixes itself out of specific interpretative horizons and traces of past understandings. In what follows, my exegesis is contoured by past readings that have engaged diverse phenomenological and existential perspectives declining commonsense invitations to relay fixed, singular meanings that align with the purportedly real meanings and/or intentions of the author. Following a partial suspension of that familiar angle, I propose an epoche of sorts. Provoked by Derrida’s text, I shall reorder words into new assemblies that appear on the following pages, and that surface from my situated readings of Derrida’s deconstructive renderings of other writings.
Highlights
How might one read a collection of transcriptions—such as The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1—that exemplifies how to read other texts deconstructively? In the spirit of Derrida’s text, a response to this question remains radically undecided; it certainly does not imply the absence of exegesis through the course of a particular reading
Contouring the following interpretations, this inclination leads me to adopt an epoche of sorts; it refuses a conventional call to relay fixed, singular senses that align with the real meanings and/or intentions of the author
In my selective reading of The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, I shall initially return to his earlier Rogues as a foreground, which is a background, to Derrida’s reading of a conceptual terrain in which politics has been calculated through tropes of absolute sovereignty
Summary
One might suggest that unconditional elements of sovereignty could be held apart, or extruded, from current appropriations of the term in different contexts. The oft forgotten, local power plays whose partitions and divisions trace the emergence of a given sovereign being can imperceptibly come to ground subsequent institutions that operate in the name of, for example, ‘legitimate sovereignty’ This is perhaps why Derrida does not wish to oppose sovereignty and the beast, or criminal, as if each of these was an a priori entity sufficiently robust and stable to allow for fixed comparison. Derrida’s unfolding thresholds through the course of his writing could be used (perhaps partly exceeding his texts) to respond to a longing—to leave behind a vastly expanding technocratic, technically focused, age with its underlying myths of iron-clad certainty, its emphasis on ideas around a politics of absolute state sovereignty, its vacuous promises that one (technically focused) kind of reason alone will solve everything, and its morose demand to live lives marked by a narrowly conceived economic purpose In any case, this is the manner in which I have considered the terms at hand
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