In his final publication Derrida argues for a rather wide notion of the concept of sovereignty. Sovereigns are not only public officers and dignitaries, or those who invest them with sovereign power – we all are sovereigns, without exception, insofar the sovereign function is nothing but the rationale of all metaphysics, anchored in a certain capability, in the ability to do something, in a power or potency that transfers and realizes itself, that shows itself in possession, property, the power or authority of the master, be it the master of the house or in the city or state,despot, be it the master over himself, and thus master over his passions which have to be mastered just like the many-headed mass in the political arena. Derrida thinks the sovereign with Aristotle: theprima causa, the unmoved mover. It has been often remarked that philosophy here openly reveals itself as political theology. Derrida thus refers to the famous lines of theIliad, where Ulysses warns of the sovereignty of the many: “it is not well that there should be many masters; one man must be supreme – one king to whom the son of scheming Saturn has given the scepter of sovereignty over you all.”

In Niklas Luhmann’s later works on social exclusion, his concept of environment is no longer strictly epistemological but becomes increasingly ethnographic. From a systems theoretical point of view, environments are mere effects of social systems and their need to distinguish constantly between essential operations and operations that are of no consequence for the continuous reproduction of the systems’ identities. However, under certain circumstances environments turn out to be spatial. One could even say that on the analytical agenda the spatial dimension of exclusion takes precedence over the temporal dimension of sociality to the same degree that sociality becomes a primarily temporal reality - and systems theory describes its own approach as a turn to radical temporalization of all social structures. In these spaces or territories it is not communication that can be observed but human beings reduced to their bodily state. Having become a kind of container for socially unadressable bodies, this environment of the functionally differentiated world society does not require empirical social research or complex explanations, but the evidence-producing strategies of ethnographic fieldwork or simply travel notes.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract