The Sovereign Exceptions: Colonization and the Foundation of Society

Abstract

This article seeks to both re-examine the legal and political basis for the denial of Aboriginal `sovereignty' in Australia and to question the universality of the discourse of sovereignty itself. Drawing on Foucault's recently translated lectures from the Collège de France, Society Must Be Defended, it endeavours to show how the discourse of territorial sovereignty was mobilized in the colonial context (as a myth of foundation) to shore up the position of the British Crown and extinguish alternative conceptions of politics and justice. The article argues that the institutionalization of British sovereignty in Australia does not represent the beginning of the reign of law (more or less just), but a partisan victory — the victory of a modern western conception of politics over a pre-existing system of Indigenous self-governance. On the basis of this analysis, it suggests that the problem that arises in the colonial context is not simply that the sovereign assumes an exceptional position in relation to the law. It is also (and possibly more importantly) that government becomes equated with sovereignty in a way that automatically discounts forms of politics not based on the principle of territoriality.