Logic Of Sovereignty Research Articles

Immunity and Biosecurity: Reading the Pandemic as a Mutual Relation Between Protection and Obedience

ABSTRACT Biopolitics occupies a central role in contemporary debates over new political and governance strategies around the world. Based on the Hobbesian assumption of a “mutual relation between protection and obedience” the sovereign power of modern states seems to be founded with the purpose of the preservation and protection of life. But what happens if we look at the present pandemic, whereby governments are struggling against an “invisible enemy” to pursue this end, facing at the same time the problem of keeping up with the growth that sustains the wealth of our economies? Through the discussion of four contemporary, and often antagonistic, takes on biopolitics – Foucault’s understanding of biopower; Agamben’s critique of the logic of sovereignty; Esposito’s concept of immunitas; and Mbembe’s necropolitics – the aim of my paper will be to shed light on the theoretical implications of the pandemic for the foundations of political authority and the definition of modern sovereignty.

Legitimating the Antarctic Treaty System: from rich nations club to planetary ecological democracy?

ABSTRACT Like other international institutions, the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) relies on the goodwill and self-binding commitment of its members. Legitimacy, understood as the belief in the ‘rightfulness’ of a governing arrangement by its stakeholders, lies at the heart of the ATS’ success as a multilateral institution. Global warming and geopolitical power shifts are poised to challenge established forms of Antarctic legitimacy and effectiveness, with external calls for Antarctic democratisation and reform increasing. Using the concepts of input, output, and throughput legitimacy, this paper explores how the ATS has been legitimated as the only authoritative decision-making context for Antarctic matters, internally amongst Treaty Partners as well as externally towards the rest of the international community. It argues that the increase of input legitimacy through the inclusion of more consultative parties led to a perceived lack of output legitimacy for some especially environmental critics which illustrates the importance but also the limits of maintaining consensus about throughput legitimacy: the agreed upon processes and rules of decision-making. Finally, the analysis problematises the inhibiting centrality of nation states and the logic of sovereignty during times of global ecological and geopolitical change and asks how an ambitiously democratic future of Antarctic governance in the Anthropocene might look like.

Thinking the Political with Jean-Luc Nancy

In this article, I argue that at the center of Jean-Luc Nancy’s approach to the political lies the thinking of subject as that of relation. Throughout the historical actualizations of, for example, the individual, the state, or the people as a subject, the problematic of relation is one that has retreated and now demands to be subjected to a retreatment. When the arche-teleological presuppositions that constitute subject as that which is given enter the phase of deconstruction, subject comes to present itself as nothing but the activity of relating itself to itself. I respond to Nancy’s call to invent “an affirmation of relation” by way of rethinking the logics of sovereignty and democracy. While sovereignty unites, posits, finitizes, and finishes the self of the people, a post-68 democracy pluralizes, infinitizes, and disfigures the identity of the people. Between sovereignty and democracy, notwithstanding their conflicting tenets, the relation is not that of reciprocal exclusion. One is rather the correlative of the other. Without the one, the other would not make any sense. Through this Janus-faced economy of the political, the people can experience its own “reality”—to experience relation itself. The affirmation of relation is what gives and keeps free the voided site of the political for the infinite self-institution of the people, and for that reason is political par excellence.

Mimicry and substitution in the logic of sovereignty: the case of PYD

This study aims to explain how a segment Kurdish nationalists in Syria imitates and substitutes the Westphalian conception of sovereign statehood in Syria. It argues that the Partiya Yekitiya Democrat (PYD-an offshoot of the PKK in Syria) establishes its rule both by mimicking and substituting modern tools of state-making. The study identifies a three-pronged political-military strategy used at the local, regional and international levels. It shows that facing existential challenges from local non-state competitors and regional predatory states, the PYD’s main approach has been mimicking the modern state where possible and substituting the lack of legitimate rule and sovereignty with a set of political and global support networks. The study lastly shows how the PYD’s logic in mimicking the modern state practices is ultimately dependent on the support particularly from great powers such as the USA and reactions from the regional powers such as Turkey. Overall, the study examines how the fluctuations in the logic of the PYD stems from its mimicry and substitution of the modern state conduct such as survival strategies, foreign practices and identity politics that interweave and cut across the conventional state, sovereignty, geopolitics and territoriality.

Qutb’s hakimiyyah through the lens of Arendtian authority

ABSTRACT The influence of Sayyid Qutb’s writing on political Islam and Islamist groups cannot be overstated. In constructing his radical political theory, special attention is usually given to Qutb’s two binary concepts, hakimiyyah (usually translated as divine sovereignty) and jahiliyyah (the condition of any place or society where Allah is not held to be the sovereign being). This article interrogates the commonly accepted notion that hakimiyyah is equivalent to divine sovereignty. Instead, I argue that Qutb’s hakimiyyah is best understood as an Arendtian form of authority (or a bounded sovereignty), even though Qutb’s project is essentially foundational while Arendt’s is antifoundational. Thus, rather than appealing directly to the authority of sharia, Qutb bounds hakimiyyah to a historical founding moment in the city of Mecca, the Meccan Quran, and the ‘unique generation’ during this period. Examining hakimiyyah through the Arendtian lens of authority substitutes the logic of sovereignty with authority based on a voluntary command/obedience relationship. This approach unsettles the binary logic of sovereignty that is often latently integrated into the academic literature on Qutb’s political writing. Consequently, examining Qutb’s hakimiyyah through the Arendtian lens of authority generates a consistent and coherent reading of his political thinking, which is usually deemed inconsistent and paradoxical.****

The Leviathan Becoming a Cephalophore: Primogeniture and the Transition from Sovereignty to Governmentality

For Foucault, Hobbes is important for the transition from sovereignty to governmentality, but he does not always go into great detail how. In “Society Must Be Defended”, Hobbes’s reactions against the political historicism of his time lead him to an ahistorical foundation to the state. In Security, Territory, Population, his contract is emblematic of the art of government still caught in the logic of sovereignty. Management techniques, one of which being inheritance laws like primogeniture, inducing changes in a population’s milieu so that its interest is properly directed allow the art of government to escape this logic. Hobbes supports primogeniture, but its historical position in the common law makes this support unexpected. This article examines the historical context of primogeniture and the reasoning for Hobbes’s support of it in light of Foucault’s claims about him in order to give more precision to those claims. The result is that primogeniture as a law of nature produces the family as an interested unit of the population. Yet this interest is itself historicized, so Hobbes’s attempt to de-historicize politics did not fully succeed.

Architectures of Totality: Structure, History and Polemos in Kafka and Borges

Parable in the works of Franz Kafka provides a literary site for exploring the relation between likeness and difference and between what can be compared and the limit of comparison. By the same token, the parabolic topos of Babel points toward an internal limit for political power and the logic of sovereignty, a limit that both gives rise to sovereignty and ruins its attempts to consolidate itself as all-encompassing and permanent. With Jorge Luis Borges, meanwhile, his return to the parable of Babel gives rise to a consideration of the absolute or specular identity of thought and being and of how such an identity would in fact announce the end of history as such. For Borges, it is from the temporality of time that history draws its possibility, above and beyond all claims to unified thought and being.

Christianity, Sovereignty and Global Law

This paper, written as a chapter for a forthcoming book on Christianity and Global Law edited by Rafael Domingo and John Witte Jnr, scrutinises the idea of global law from the perspective of Christian political theology by focusing on the concept of sovereignty. For the purposes of the paper, “global law” is defined as the law of a universal and compulsory world community which consists essentially of individuals. The paper is organized around three questions: (1) What is sovereignty? (2) What is wrong about sovereignty? (3) What is right about sovereignty? In answering the first of these questions, I focus on the nature and extent of state sovereignty as understood in contemporary international law. In response to the second question, I turn to the highly influential theories of sovereignty advanced in the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries by Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes as examples of the logic of sovereignty when developed in its most absolute form. I argue that underlying the modern idea of sovereignty is a theological concept of absolute power (potentia absoluta), first attributed to God, and later to popes, kings, and states. This gives rise to a theological critique of state absolutism and an alternative account of sovereignty that I develop in response to the third question. Here I focus on the political theory of Johannes Althusius, an early seventeenth-century jurist who developed a pluralized conception of sovereignty deliberately in contradiction to Bodin’s absolutism. Building on Althusius, I argue that political authority, understood as legitimate jurisdiction, is a status rightly possessed in different degrees and in different respects by the ruling institutions of many different forms of human community, from the smallest and most local, to the largest and most global. Sovereignty is a term that can be used to designate this kind of rightful but limited authority, and understood in this sense, it represents something very important standing in the way of a concept of global law premised on a compulsory universal community consisting essentially and simply of individuals. To conceive global community in this way is to posit a kind of “simple space” in which there is one center of rule exercised over the multitude of individuals, instead of a “complex space” in which there are multiple locations of authority operating simultaneously in different places and in different respects. It is this kind of complex and multifaceted space that is a more appropriate model underlying any law having a global reach or universal scope.

Suffering and sovereignty

This article investigates the recent martyrdom of the French Catholic priest Jacques Hamel in order to assess the possibilities of sacrificial commemoration in a world that is increasingly globalized, increasingly secularized, and also increasingly subject to the capricious violence of religiously-infused terrorism. I argue that under contemporary conditions it has become increasingly difficult to articulate a meaningful form of sacrifice that exists beyond the logic of sovereignty. However, I conclude by identifying rare and fleeting instances of martyrdom which seem to promise the return to the concept’s counter-sovereign heritage.

The Problem of Sovereign Succession in Confucian Ritual Discourse: Constitutional Thought of Reconciliation between Fact and Value

The thesis of "Confucian constitutionalism" has argued that ritual propriety was equivalent to constitutional law in Confucian political thought. By focusing on the shortcoming of the thesis, which is its lack of a theoretical place for sovereignty, this article examines the nature of perpetual sovereignty, which ensured the continuous succession of political authority in the Chosŏn Dynasty. This article thereby presents the constitutional thought of reconciliation between political fact and constitutional value in sovereign succession. It also highlights the feature of the ritual discourse, which lies in the fact that the tensions between the logic of sovereignty and the constitution of primogeniture were raised after a king's death. This suggests that Confucian royal rituals were the ex-post symbolic mediation between fact and value. In the ritual controversy (yesong), in which the tensions between them escalated, Song Siyŏl attempted to harmonize them but only by separating political succession from ritual representation. This constitutional thought of reconciliation represented the autonomy of politics, yet maintained the demarcation between fact and value. In conclusion, the Confucian ritual discourse of kingship was not the priestly power of Confucian scholar-officers but the practical reasoning of the theoretical conundrum of the throne.

Lifestyle and rights

The challenges facing the life-worlds of political societies in the Islamic world require a radical shift of perspective that can improve our understanding of the contemporary situation of human rights politics. Not only the classical formulation of secularism, which aims at liberating the public sphere from domination of ‘the sacred’, but also the political-theological approach, which addresses the problems of modernity within the context of a disguised and refurbished dominance of ‘the transcendence’, suffer from and share a basic insufficiency in handling human rights issues. According to these approaches, the basic issue stems from a realignment in relations between logics of the sovereign and the sacred or a redefinition of the position of state against religion. In this article, my object is shifting the scope of discussion concerning the rights beyond this logic of sovereignty by adopting an approach which provides a political ground for discussing the intermingling of religion in the life-world. From my point of view, the first step that should be taken to deepen our understanding of the argument of freedom is to unveil the nature of the sacred within the framework of a power network that longs for control over the whole lives of individuals constituting the society. In this regard, by going beyond the concepts such as fanaticism, fundamentalism or terrorism provided by ‘state mentality’, the significance of lifestyle politics for ‘rights talk’ will become more evident. From this point of view, the detection and critique of a zone of ‘weak citizenship’ constructed through restrictions stemming from the values and norms arising from the perceptions of particular communities organized through family, tradition and justice are essential. Such a critique will pave the way for a radical politicization of lifestyles by way of criteria of the demands for equal respect and dignity.

The Fiction of Sovereignty and the Real State of Exception: Giorgio Agamben’s Critique of Carl Schmitt

Agamben is perhaps best known for his analysis of the “logic of sovereignty” drawn from Carl Schmitt. This article examines the critique of sovereignty that Agamben develops through his reading of Walter Benjamin’s messianism. For Agamben, Schmitt’s analysis of sovereignty claims that the state of exception is a juridical condition, in that the law survives its suspension in the form of the “force-of-law.” Drawing on Benjamin, Agamben argues that sovereignty is a fiction that covers over the originary inoperativity of the law and the illegitimacy of authority. The purpose of Agamben’s analysis is to open space for a new understanding of the relationship between law and political action that responds to the contemporary crisis of tradition.

Politics, Discourse, Empire: Framed Knowledge in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities

Abstract Critical engagement with Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972) is widespread. However, much of the scholarship focuses on the text's unstable position between modern and postmodern forms. This article suggests that a political reading is an equally productive—indeed, necessary—intervention in the present scholarship. Treating the text as a schematic of empire and knowledge production yields a deeper understanding of the specific articulations of power constantly issued by the logic of sovereignty. By excavating the impulses of domination implicit in empire building, this article suggests that Marco Polo's dialogues with the sovereign emperor Kublai Khan provide possibilities for resistance to the structural domination that constitutes our most recent political realities.

La inoperatividad de la máquina antropológica

I intend to examine in this article the relationship that Giorgio Agamben establishes between biopolitics and the anthropological machine, in order to suggest that the inclusion of life through law and its consequent domination by the logic of sovereignty can be counterbalanced by the connection between a life that cannot be saved and that which the Italian author calls “form of life”. The unsavable life, that has as a supreme figure a human nature that rests perfectly inoperative, and the form of life, which resisting to right makes life and rule undistinguishable, are the key elements to counteract the ontology of operability that, for Agamben, dominates politics in the West.

Law, Narrative and Politics in a Jewish Key: Hannah Arendt and Robert M Cover in Comparative Perspective

Both Hannah Arendt and Robert Cover articulated visions of law reflecting the Jewish diaspora and thus offered an alternative to state-centred hierarchical models. That the Jews historically were able to preserve themselves as a distinct people over thousands of years without possession of a territorial homeland in the face of changing patterns of voluntary dispersion, forced exile, discrimination and persecution has always raised particularly acute questions about the character of belonging, the meaning of collective identity, and the relationship of membership between particularistic communities and their host polities. Such questions were central to the concerns of Arendt and Cover. In his jurisprudence, Cover described his standpoint as 'very close to a classical anarchist one - with anarchy understood to mean the absence of rulers, not the absence of law'. Against positivistic approaches in jurisprudence, he emphasised the thick interconnections among legal, moral, customary and religious norms that are bound together through the shared interpretive commitments of particularistic communities. For her part, Arendt rejected entirely any understanding of law predicated on a command/obedience relationship and thereby the conceptual logic of sovereignty as antithetical to freedom and the fundamental character of human diversity. As an alternative, she proposed a model of federal republicanism divested of any attribute of sovereignty. While a diaspora perspective strongly informed Arendt's and Cover's approaches to law, their personal contexts for thinking about the Jewish question and their self-understandings of their relationships to the Jewish community differed markedly.

Occupied Cape Judges and Colonial Knowledge of Crime, Criminals, and Punishment

This article returns to a colonial discourse on crime, criminals, and punishment that the court of justice enunciated and followed during an 8-year British occupation of the Cape of Good Hope in the latter part of 1795. Tapping unusually frank juridical discussions on criminality and punishment in the context of sovereignty politics, it examines three key matters. Commencing with a description of the Cape colony’s inquisitorial criminal procedures, the analysis—following Foucault (2000)—conceives of these as powers (political techniques) through which the British claimed an exclusive capacity to enunciate legal “truths” about specific criminal events. Second, it analyzes a unique correspondence between the British military commander and the court of justice members together with two illustrative criminal cases of the day. These provide a sense of the judge’s knowledge of crime and criminal punishment in a social context that imagined itself through social differentiation and hierarchy. Third, it reads these colonial power-knowledge formations as generating three congruent political logics that in hybrid combinations have nurtured segmented, racially orientated, and group-based criminal justice arenas. This discussion alludes to the pivotal role colonial discourses of criminal law have played in generating a politics that shaped the criminal justice arenas of subsequent social forms. New, and differently combined, political logics of sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitics have left a decided legacy to which post-colonial arenas continue to respond.

Eminent Domain and the Rhetorical Construction of Sovereign Necessity

This article examines the logic of necessity in eminent domain cases in the United States. While much has been written about “public use” justifications as adjudicated by courts, less attention has been paid to necessity. In part this is because public use is an explicit part of Fifth Amendment limitations on “takings” while necessity is part of the buried logic of sovereignty that grounds its exercise. Readings of pivotal cases from McCulloch to Kelo lead us to question recent attempts to revive necessity as a legal standard for reining in eminent domain power.

Teologia biopolityczna Giorgio Agambena

The aim of this paper is to present Giorgio Agamben's biopolitical theory in the context of the relationship between the logic of sovereignty and 'bare life'. The first part of the paper presents the foundations of his political thought and, in connection with Carl Schmitt's idea of sovereignty, considers the problem of defining the category of the state of emergency. According to Agamben the principle of sovereignty is constructed on the integrating exclusion of bare life, which is represented by the homo sacer, as one who may be killed but cannot be sacrificed. This will be the central figure of Agamben's thought and also the topic of the next part of this paper. According to the author of Profanation, the figure of the homo sacer as excluded from both secular and sacred law, reaches its highest form in the Nazi concentration camp, which is the space of legal authority where no law exists. In the last part of the paper we will argue in favor of Agamben, that the camp represents a state of emergency and also constitutes a paradigm of western biopolitics.

Knowledge Production and the Superexploitation of Contingent Academic Labor

In the corporate university, a capitalist enterprise, the fact of contingent academic labor should not be seen as an aberration, a scandalous (but perhaps temporary) anomaly that could be solved within and by the very system that produces it. Rather, the ever-increasing number of contingent academic workers, and the consequent reduction in the number and power of full-timers, is the norm. Not only is it the norm, but it is the coherent, logical consequence of the corporatization process. That is, there could be no corporatization without the logic of sovereignty and domination whereby contingent labor in the first place, and all other labor in the second, must be, as is, superexploited. The originary idea of the university as a place for learning (perhaps even disinterested learning) is gone. To have faith in that idea at this point in time would be having faith in a romantic past, it would be a useless, if not politically dangerous, nostalgia. Yet, if the past is barred, the future is not. What must be made clear, however, is that the transformation of the university is not possible if society itself is not transformed. If the university has become a capitalist enterprise, if the relationship between the university as such (its administrators) and its workforce (including the often reluctant full-timers) is the relationship between capital and labor, then the antagonism within the university is the antagonism present in capitalist society as a whole.

Sovereignty as its Own Question: Derrida's Rogues

This paper attempts to provide, through a reading of Derrida's Rogues, an account of the political phenomenon where regimes of sovereignty are resisted in the name of the very values — freedom, democracy and human rights, for example — they purport to stand for. To Derrida, sovereignty must simultaneously conform to a logic of both self-identity and of unconditionality. However, the unconditionality that makes sovereignty possible will always threaten and exceed it, something that other accounts like Agamben's try implicitly to deny. In the end, for Derrida, our present political challenge is to recognize, and even affirm, the way the unconditionality of sovereignty is turned against itself. Sovereignty, then, is most effectively dealt with not by imagining a world in which it will no longer occur, nor by simple opposition, but by committing to the very logic of sovereignty itself.