Derrida and Foucault On Sovereignty

Abstract

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.”

The place of the dead, the time of dictatorship: Nostalgia, sovereignty, and the corpse of Ferdinand Marcos

“…That same bust would later be bombed, leaving intact only the lower half of his face and exposing the hollow interior of what might be read as Marcos’s attempt to transubstantiate himself into “a geographical feature of the national landscape” (Barmé, 2015: 25). Enacting “symbolic death blow(s) on the sovereign” ( Balke, 2005 : 81), the destruction of Marcos’s “other” bodies betrays an implicit understanding that dictatorship operates on a material and immaterial register, that for revolution to put an end to the time of dictatorship it must also target the figures that render the dictator timeless and his rule without end.…”

“…Although such definitions importantly stress the deadliness of sovereign power, they should not be taken to mean that the sovereign rules by force alone. Rather, in being endowed by “an act of originary authorization” ( Balke, 2005 : 73), in its embodiment of autonomy without limits, the sovereign holds out the “un-fulfillable promise of access to freedom and power” ( Mansfield, 2010 : 42) and in so doing offers to those whom it subjects the possibility of being recognized, and of recognizing themselves, as subjects. Put differently, if the figure of the sovereign continues to capture our imagination, it is because we are bound to it in an imitative structure.…”

Our Legal Borders: Interrelated Constructions of Individual and Political Bodies

“…As argued here, at the point one could advocate for constructing individual or political borders, legal-ity has already created and constructed those borders and their interrelation so that clusters of factors can be analysed as a crisis, event, or drama that requires legally reconstructing borders. Furthermore, those legal constructions have been inseparable from other modalities of power that permeate, exploit, and take advantage of individual or political borders to produce insecurity (Harvey 1998;Balke 2005;Shaw 2020). Accordingly, legally reconstructing borders will also enable those other modalities of power that permeate, exploit, and take advantage of those borders.…”