(Suny Series in Contemporary The State of Sovereignty, Lessons From The Political Fictions of Modernity

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Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity
The State of Sovereignty
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S U N Y
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THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY
SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought
David Pettigrew and Franois Raffoul, editors

Lessons from the Political Fiction of Modernity
PETER GRATTON
State University of New York Press
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany

2012 State University of New York
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Production, Kelli W. LeRoux
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gratton, Peter.
The state of sovereignty : lessons from the political fictions of modernity / Peter Gratton.
p. cm. (SUNY series in contemporary French thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3785-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1.Sovereignty. I.Title.
JC327.G735 2011
320.1'5dc22
2011004151
10987654321
For Brad, father and son
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ix
INTRODUCTION 1
The Vase of Soissons and the Lessons of Sovereignty
The Noble Thesis and the Ends of Pagan Sovereignty
Where Sovereignty Lies Today
3
7
22
CHAPTER ONE
Rousseau and the Right of Life and Death over the Body Politic 27
The State of Sovereignty after the Social Contract 30
Contracting the Sovereign
33
Lessons from Lartifice et le jeu of Sovereignty
39
Men and Citizens, Life and Death
43
The Sovereign Pardon
48
CHAPTER TWO
Arendts Archaeology of Sovereignty 63

The Fragmented Past and The Future of the Political
66
Beginning Again: The Arche of the Political
79
Finding a Home in the Political
88
CHAPTER THREE
The World is at Stake: Sovereignty and the Right to Have Rights 95

Sovereign Totalitarianism
98
The Rise of the NationState
100
Policing the State
104
The Right to Have Rights
110
CHAPTER FOUR
Torturing Sovereignty: Foucaults Regicide in Theory 113

Genealogies in the Multiple
114
Sovereign Madness
120
Histories of the State of Sovereignty
130
viii
CONTENTS
The Rise of the Nation-State
Biopolitical Sovereignty
Foucault, Schmitt, and the King Who Rules but Does
not Govern
Beyond the Sovereign Decision
Sovereign Freedom, or Freedom from Sovereignty
136
139
141
149
157
CHAPTER FIVE
What More Is There to Say?: Agamben and the Hyperbole

of Sovereignty 161
The Sacrifice of History
165
Homo Sacer: The Significance of Words
170
From Homo Sacer to Vir Sacer 176
The Glory of Another Sovereignty
179
Sovereign Relations
181
Last Words: The Language of Sovereignty and NooPolitics
186
The Hyperbole that Remains
194
CHAPTER SIX
Derrida and the Limits of Sovereigntys Reason: Freedom, Equality,

but Not Fraternity 201
Le Trs Haut of Mount Moriah
207
Freedom, Equality, but Not Fraternity
216
CONCLUSION 227
NOTES 233
BIBLIOGRAPHY 269
Index 283
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As the eighteenth century began, a century known both for the light of the
lumires and the darkness of the Terror, the Comte Henri de Boulainvilliers
settled into the privacy of his office to prepare a volume on sovereignty.
This work would be a part of his livre de raison (a combination genealogy
and accounts book), which he thought would be read only by a few (in
particular, his elder son) and remain largely undisturbed alongside other
dusty materials in his library, just a few feet away from where he wrote.
These writings would become important later to Foucault and Arendt in
their histories of nationalism since Boulainvilliers charted out not only his
family finances, but prefaced it with a thousandyear history of the French
nation he thought to be the rightful ruler of Francenot the Bourbon
line in the person of Louis XIV. The Dissertation sur la noblesse de France
would be published clandestinely in Amsterdam some thirty years later,
long after one son for whom he wrote had died in battle for the Sun King,
and its early pages on the state of sovereignty and its political fictions
make for pitiable reading: the money was gone, debts were piling up, the
sovereign ruled absolutely, and war seemed to be breaking out just about
everywhere. I begin this work, he noted in words familiar to anyone
writing acknowledgments, from the point of view of a personal justification
that I believe is owed to my family.
This book is the only accountingperhaps barely a justificationfor
all those whose time and energy, within and beyond my family, made this
work on sovereignty possible. I have presented portions of chapter 5 at
the International Philosophical Seminar (2009) and the Canadian Society
for Continental Philosophy (2010), and presented inchoate sections of
chapter 6 at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
(2005), and I thank the commentators and participants in those sessions.
The 2009 IPS was especially notable, and I thank Hugh J. Silverman for
his invitation, along with much else since my undergraduate days, as well
as Gary Aylesworth, Lorenzo Fabbri, Don Landes, Patrick Roney, and Tom
Brockelman for incisive comments. An early version of several sections
of the chapter 6 appeared in Philosophy Today (SPEP Issue, 2006), other
sections appeared in Telos (No. 146, 2009), while my early considerations
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
on Foucault and biopower were published in Critical Review of International

Social and Political Philosophy (Vol. 5, 2006). Despite a robust conference
schedule, much of the work that follows is presented here for the first time,
and thus Im all the more grateful for those who heard me present on
something else and then were willing to hear me out on a point relating
to the developments of this book. The 2009 Collegium Phenomenologicum
presented a week, led by Simon Critchley, on the work of Rousseau, and
I thank my seminar participants and others, especially Martin Hgglund,
Steve DeCaroli, and Ann Murphy, for great conversations on Rousseau and
sovereignty, which helped greatly as I revised that chapter for publication. I
want to also thank MarieEve Morin, whose own work on Derrida, Nancy,
and others on community was an initial spark to move to the questioning of
sovereignty in this work. She has also been my able coeditor on a volume
on JeanLuc Nancy, also in the Series in French Thought, and Ive learned
much from her. I also owe a great debt of thanks to James Martel and Falguni
Sheth for invaluable comments on a draft of his book; their thoughts and
suggestions leave it much improved. The Series Editors, Franois Raffoul
and David Pettrigrew, have demonstrated remarkable support for this project,
and I can only begin to mark my gratitude here. The Newberry Library in
Chicago helped me track down important archival materials important for
several arguments made in this work. I could go on to name many more
people and thus I have left indications of my debts throughout this book in
references to those whose works and conversations have helped me along
the way.
This work would not have been possible without the example,
pedagogy, and insightful philosophical readings of Michael Naas at DePaul
University. He is, in sum, the professor I want to be when I grow up. Peg
Birmingham, also at DePaul, has been influential over many of the pages
of this text, not least the two chapters on Hannah Arendt and the chapter
on Rousseau. I have simply robbed a number of these pages from Peg, and I
give them back to her a bit messier than when I got them, but grateful for
her rescuing Arendt and the right to have rights for a coming generation
of scholars. I also want to thank Bill Martin, whose work is imbued with
an ethical sense, a true engagement that is simply too rare in an academy
often too rarified for its own good. He is what I want to be while hoping
not to grow up. This work was completed at the University of San Diego
and during my first months at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and I
thank my many great colleagues at both institutions for discussions relating
to this text.
This book is dedicated to Brad, which is the name of my father and
my son, and Ill let them figure out who in that circle of patrimony gets
the ultimate credit or debt here. But that is yet another fabulous sovereign
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xi
fiction, with the implicit moral of male dominance that has been with us
too long, and so Ill cut the circle of that dedication by thanking Jen for
not making me have to justify any of this, even in the months and days
when Boulainvilliers account books appeared enviable. You have made this
work possible, questioning the fictions of my sovereignty at every turn: if
there is a future worthy of the name, you will be a part of it.
INTRODUCTION
Mysticism, when transposed from the warm twilight of myth and fiction
to the cold searchlight of fact and reason, has usually little left to
recommend itself. Its language, unless resounding within its own magic
or mystic circle, will often appear poor and even slightly foolish, and its
most baffling metaphors and highflown images, when deprived of their
iridescent wings, may easily resemble the pathetic and pitiful sight of
Baudelaires Albatross. Political mysticism in particular is exposed to the
danger of losing its spell or becoming quite meaningless when taken out
of its native surroundings, its time and its space.
Ernst Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies
Why does power [potere] need glory? If it is essentially a force [forza]
and capacity for action and governing, why does it take on the rigid,
encumbrancing, and glorious form of the ceremony, of acclamations,
and of procedures?
Giorgio Agamben, Il regno e la gloria
The point is, as these fables themselves show, that the essence of political
force and power, where that power makes the law, where it gives itself
right, where it appropriates legitimate violence and legitimates its own
arbitrary violencethis unchaining and enchaining of power passes via
the fable, i.e., speech that is both fictional and performative...power is
itself an effect of fable, fiction, and fictive speech.
Derrida, La bte et la souverain, Vol. 1
The famous sovereignty of political bodies has always been an illusion,
which, moreover, can be maintained only by the instruments of violence,
that is, with essentially nonpolitical means.
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future
The lesson should have been that sovereignty had seen its day. Tales of the
death of the sovereign subject and the politics of sovereignty were taught in
any number of schools (from Marxism to psychoanalysis to poststructuralism
to neuroscientific materialism and beyond), with the moral that it was best
1
left as fables for schoolchildren, rather than as an area of inquiry for adults
seeking political change. We were to be a mature, morethanenlightened
ageat least thats what we tell ourselves: we were to know in philosophy the
problems of patriarchy and colonialism; we were to question the supposition
of human dominion over animal being; we were to have dulled our knives
on the bloated remains of the autochthonous, selfpresent subject. In political
science, similar lessons were handed out, with multilateral institutions doing
away with sovereign borders and intrastate warfare. Most of all, too, we had
long given up the bizarre rituals of divine right and the miraculous touch of
the kings Evil. But sovereignty has seized the day, even as it was said to belong
to the philosophies of yesterday. As the owl of Minerva has taken its flight
at dusk, the sun has still not set on all the isles of the state of sovereignty.
I will not presume the sovereignty mastery to turn the last page on
the final lesson of sovereignty and its fictions. This is perhaps its final trick:
those who call for a nonsovereign politics and an end of history, as we saw
in the 1990s, often provide but another cover for imperialism and sovereign
cruelty. This was the guiding fable of globalization, a making of a world
without borders, which nevertheless continues to build its fences around the
enclaves of the rich and powerfulfeudalism with a capitalist face. Neoliberal
mythologies of the end of the state pronounce this masterful pedagogy,
arguing that what ails the political is nothing other than the continuation
of politics, as can be seen in the birthplace of Greece these past few years,
where the E.U.s neoliberal bankers are nothing if not upfront about their
fear of the Greek demos. The global war on terror, rather than marking a
rupture in the histories of secret imprisonment and secret wars (if ever a
history of secrecy can be written), merely gave us a glimmer of the leviathan
secreted away in the vast police apparatuses of the modern nationstate. We
are more than enlightened about the long history of our police apparatuses
and how this state of exception, as Walter Benjamin claimed years ago, has
long been the normnot just arising in the months and years after 9/11, as
some comfort themselves by suggesting. To diagnose this state of affairs, Carl
Schmitts execrable writings have been reprinted and his political theology
passed along as gospel, and not just by the reactionary right using the
language of virility and courage while cowering before the nefarious doings
of Islamic community centers and aidbearing flotillas. We often hope for a
final lesson to impart, such that we could just give sovereignty its last word,
its last rites. Nevertheless, we must not use antisovereigntism as another
alibi for beautiful souls sovereignly ignoring the pleas of the stateless, the
dispossessed, and disparate communities threatened daily by aerial bombings
putting truth to the oldest biblical tales about fires raining down from above.
We often need the language and strategies of sovereignty, even as we dont
give up putting sovereignty to the question in the name of another politics.
INTRODUCTION
Sovereignty has proved exceptional in the philosophical and political

imagination, and we who look down with condescension on this once
highflying albatross, to cite Kantorowicz citing Baudelaire, often stand silent
as the worst forms of sovereigntism continue their macabre charades, no
longer in the shadows, but in the bright light of day. The task of this book
will be to get beyond the formalisms of the sovereign exception taught by
Louis XIVs court apologists and their modern heirs. While there is much to
be learned from conceptualizing the exceptional logic of sovereigntyas the
reader will note, I repeat this lesson in numerous places in this bookthis
dominant formalism risks teasing out endlessly, using Kantianstyle analytic
judgments, the a priori politics of sovereignty untouched en haut, it often
seems, by the politics of this concept and the specific genealogies of its use.
Our readings of JeanJacques Rousseau, Hannah Arendt, Michel
Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida, among others, follow
these thinkers lessons on the masterful fictions of sovereignty. The task is
to explicate the contrasting histories of sovereignty they offer, enabling us
to shift from strict political theologies to the more or less popular and
national sovereignties that have, for several hundred years, proven more
popular, if not more democratic, in the political imagination. We have
never had a sovereign hold over any of these thinkers, and I have set the
assignment to see what lessons remain left for us in their works today. In
this way, well read their genealogies of the past with an eye toward what
they leave for an asyet unwritten (and perhaps unwriteable) history of a
nonsovereign future, thus setting the ground for future readings of their
texts beyond how weve mastered them in the past.
Since this book finds itself in this Series on French Thought, lets
begin by following an oftrepeated lesson on the very beginnings of what
is said to be French, a story that, as well see, gets repeated often in French
historiography and thus will be with us whenever anyone thinks a French
thought. This fable offers a lesson on what it means to pass down such lessons
which specifically concern the powerful mastery of political pedagogy. These
stories have a power whether they are true or false, whether we are more
than enlightened, whether we think were engaged in French thought,
and, finally, whether we finds ourselves overtaken, as Kantorowicz puts it,
by that kind of manmade irrealityindeed, that strange construction of a
human mind which finally becomes slave to its own fictions.1
The Vase of Soissons and the Lessons of Sovereignty

First told by Gregory of Tours (538594 CE) in his Historia Francorum, the
story of the vase of Soissons acted as a literal object lesson for centuries
to those who would challenge the sovereignty of the king in France, well
before the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and well before the people of France
took themselves to be a distinct nation. The story is repeated often in
Frances story of itself, retold in different ways by opponents and defenders of
sovereign power from Raymond dAguiliers to Boulainvilliers to Montesquieu
to Thierry to Foucault.2 If I repeat this story as a means of introduction,
it is precisely because sovereignty is never simply le trs haut, the most
high, which a sovereign summary here would suggest with a set of bullet
points to be learned about sovereign violence; it is always supplemented and
embedded in the stories it tells of itself. And thus, our introduction will
embed the sovereign heading of this book in just this kind of fabulous tale.
In 486 CE, Clovis, king of the Franks, defeated the army of Syagrius,
hence undoing the last of the Roman hold on Gaul. During the fighting,
Cloviss troops plundered a number of churches and took a liturgical vase or
receptacle (urceum mirae), said to be of great size and workmanship, from a
church at Reims. The spoils of war were to be shared equally by lot among
Cloviss warriors. Clovis received a request from the bishop at Reims (where
he would eventually be recrowned upon his conversion to Christianity) to
return the vase, which he agreed to do if he won the vase in the lot. However,
Clovis did not win the sacred receptacle in the draw, which took place in the
town of Soissons. Upon losing the lot, Clovis changed his tactic, suspending
the results of the draw to claim the vase. Gregory of Tours (538594 CE)
continues the story, and provides its moral, from here:
[When] he came to Soissons and all the booty was set in their midst,
the king said: I ask of you, brave warriors, not to refuse to grant me
in addition to my share (extra partem concidere non abnuatis), yonder
dish, that is, he was speaking of the vase just mentioned. In answer
to the speech of the king those of more sense replied: Glorious king,
all that we see is yours, and we ourselves are subject to your rule (nos
ipsi tuo sumus dominio subiugati). Now do what seems wellpleasing
to you (tibi bene placitum); for no one is able to resist your power
(potestati tuae resistere). When they said this a foolish, envious and
excitable fellow lifted his battleax and struck the vase, and cried in
a loud voice: You shall get nothing here except what the lot fairly
bestows on you (Nihil hinc accipies, nisi quae tibi sors vera largitur).
At this all were stupefied (obstupefactis omnibus).3
Pausing here, the story is about the intersection of power, theology, and
the assent, according to Gregory of Tours, of most to the exceptional force
that would break the bonds of justice and law for the pleasure (placitum)
of the sovereign, for no one is able to resist his power. It is, in short,
a fable of the mystical and theological right of sovereignty, whose law of
force is nothing other than the sacrifice of citizens to the sacred order that
INTRODUCTION
Image 1: A fourteenth-century depiction, from the Grandes Chroniques de France, of

Clovis witnessing the smashing of the vase of Soissons. (Image used under Creative
Commons License).
the sovereign defends, if only as a cover for his own power. The moral
of this story is not just about what it tells about the history and fate of
sovereignty, but that, tout court, sovereignty is telling. It tells tales of itself,
and in recent years a certain tale has gone something like this: political
sovereignty is a secularized remnant of the authority of the medieval church,
and as modernity has advanced, the emperor and all latterday sovereigns
have been revealed naked in all their violence.
Two voices are found in the scene above: a wouldbe democrat laying
claim to equality (albeit, the equality of splitting up the profits of war) and
the figure of Clovis declaring his own sovereignty, while playing the fiction
of merely requesting more than his fair share, since he always holds the
sovereign right not to take no for an answer. The wouldbe democratic man
is appropriately left unnamed, since he would come to stand for all those
fighting the divine right of French kings, including the aristocrats, among
whom this warrior is to be numbered. He steps forward to call into question
the kings power, presumably unjustly destroying the lot of another, the vase,
to uphold the principle of justice by which each received an equal share
of both the burdens and spoils of war. The political has witnessed the long
attempt to pick up the shattered remnants of the sacred past, what Carl
Schmitt argued was the theological heritage behind contemporary political
thought. Henri de Boulainvilliers, writing during the reign of Louis XIV,
adds a response not included in Gregorys story, giving an additional voice
to the still nameless warrioraristocrat. You might well be king, the man
is said to have replied to Clovis, but you will share the spoils with the
rest of us....All the victors have the absolute right to the spoils of war: they
have to be shared and the king has no preeminent right.4
At least for a time, Clovis acceded to his warriors and took only his
fair share of the war booty. Of course, we may be too quick to call this
man democratic, with the implicit assumption that the democratic always
stands up to sovereign power, not least because of the principle announced,
at least in Boulainvilliers rendering, that to the victors go the spoils. The
unnamed warrioraristocrat, though, faces the problem of liberal theory since
Locke, raising his voice against sovereignty, attempting to surround its force
with the rule of law and the theories of justice that demand that the property
go to all the victors after the violent origins of the political. Indeed this
hero, our countersovereign, may be attempting a particularly worrisome
sharing of sovereignty: keeping the system of societal war in place to
enjoy the spoils of the imperial conquest of property. In the end, he would
pay the ultimate price for his presumption, an autoimmune presumption,
as Derrida would call it, to sacrifice unjustly the sacred in the name of the
justice that he is defending. We may ask, by what right, by what law, does
this countersovereign step forward to make a claim for justice for all the
others, who are said to be the more rational among them and appear
untroubled by the sovereigns disruption of the equal sharing of lots? Can
one stand undemocratically for democracy, for the principles of freedom and
equality, before a sovereign who is bent on destroying these rights, while
the sovereign offers no other defense than the reason of force, underpinned
by the pretense of a mystical, that is to say, theological, foundation for
suspending the law? Gregory of Tours continues the story:
The king bore his injury with the calmness of patience, and
when he had received the crushed vase he gave it to the bishops
INTRODUCTION
messenger, but he cherished a hidden wound in his breast. [A]t

the end of the year, [the king] ordered the whole army to come
with their equipment of armor, to show the brightness of their
arms....And when he was reviewing them all carefully, he came
to the man who struck the vase, and said to him, No one has
brought armor so carelessly kept as you; for neither your spear nor
sword nor ax is in serviceable condition. And seizing his ax he
cast it to the earth, and when the other had bent over somewhat
to pick it up, the king raised his hands and drove his own ax into
the mans head. This, he shouted, is what you did at Soissons
to the vase. Upon the death of this man, he ordered the rest to
depart, raising great dread of himself by this action (magnum sibi
per hanc causam timorem statuens).
The Noble Thesis and the

Ends of Pagan Sovereignty
The traditional lessons of sovereignty have quickly been imparted. We have
the political theology of a godlike power that acts out of its own secret
reason (the hidden wound) while providing another (the poor equipment
of the soldier), and this story is conveyed still in books and comics to French
children, with the ultimate lesson that sovereignty, when it acts, can do so
without reason, and this is nothing other than the raison dtat. Sovereignty
rules with dread and bears its patience in silence, as Kantorowicz examines
at length in The Kings Two Bodies, and as any reader of Lewis Carrolls
masterful fables learns:
When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful
tone, it means just what I choose it to meanneither more nor
less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words
mean different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty,
which is to be masterthats all.
Like the vase of Soissons, Humpty too will have his shattered remains
carted away by royal minions. Well stay with this story of Clovis and the
shattered remnants of the church since it takes us to the lessons of the
state of sovereignty from the time of Rousseau to the present. If I continue
the story from here, its because sovereignty as such always introduces itself
in fables of its own power, and it just so happens that the retelling of the
stories of Clovis has become a telling example of the nationalist fictions
of modernity. The story is later read less as the political theology of the
sovereign exception, as in the turns of phrase of Gregory of Tours, than in
terms of a French nation taking on the power of a warlord.
More than a thousand years after Gregory of Tours recorded Clovis

as the first of the French kings, Henri de Boulainvilliers (16581722) set
to work on a livre de raison5 (a combination genealogy and accounts book),
as it was called, that was to be a lesson to his son about the absolute
sovereignty of his day. Boulainvilliers was interested in providing a settling
of some rather long accounts dating to the invasions of Clovis and the Frank
warriors, all to argue that his plight as a disempowered nobleman in the age
of Louis XIV was inexorable given the genealogies of power he describes. In
this way, he defends his poor accounts in terms of a thousandyear history of
the French, and the breadth of Boulainvilliers apologia would mark the rest
of his writings. These works would have an importance documented not just
by his contemporaries and the later thinkers of the French Enlightenment
(Diderot, Voltaire, and, especially, Montesquieu),6 but, significant for this
livre de raison, also in the writings of Arendt and Foucault.7 In setting out
what would come to be known as the thse nobiliaire, the noble thesis,
Boulainvilliers looks to history as a place where he could lay responsibility
for his lot (partage) as a seigneur in a time of a supposedly absolute monarch.
Ultimately, Boulainvilliers was convinced his lot was one shared by a nation,
in fact, a truly French nation (his fellow aristocrats), which was to rule by
right of the original conquest of Gaul by the Franks: All the victors have the
absolute right to the spoils of war, as he has the challenger of Clovis say, they
have to be shared and the king has no preeminent right. They thus had a
sovereign right to reign over the descendents of the children of the Roman
settlers as well as the monarch, whose power at best was primus inter pares.
Boulainvilliers, perhaps more than any other figure of the period, invented
a thinking of the nation, as Foucault argues, that is still very much with
us today, whether providing the racethinking before racism (Arendt) or
the ideology of race war before nationalism and stateracism (Foucault).
Chastening against the sovereign cruelty in his own time, Boulainvilliers
begins his livre de raison in what we find to be, of course, an eminently good
place given our introduction: the story of the Frank king Clovis and the
invasion of Gaul as a prologue to his critique of a certain sovereignty.8 Why
begin his work on sovereignty with such a narrative? What Boulainvilliers
recognized is crucial. Not only does sovereignty rely on a supplement of its
own mystification (tales of glory and so on) but these supplemental stories
and genealogies are not to be contested merely at the level of their truth, for
example, that Louis XIV was, unsurprisingly, not a descendent of Apollo. To
argue such is to miss the point: why does the glory of the court necessitate
acting as if he were, with courtiers performing their functions with such
immaculate staging that all around him joined in this performance of
sovereign glory. This is the crucial miseenscne of sovereignty, a staging that
conflates, through the performative as if, the constative difference between
INTRODUCTION
true and false. This produces, Michael Naas argues, the phantasm of
sovereignty, which
is always historically conditioned and linguistically coded [but] tries to
pass off what is always a historically conditioned performative fiction
as a constative or objective observation. The power of sovereignty
lies precisely in this elision of a fictional origin and its real effects,
the elision of a performative fiction (as as if, a comme si) and a
constative observation (an as such, or a like that, comme a).
From comme si to comme a: that is the movement of every sovereign
fiction and the constitution of every sovereign power. It is in the
nature of the phantasm that it not appear as what is, that what
is but a projection appear natural or in nature, that the comme si of
the phantasm be conflated with a comme a.9
Couched in a discussion of the political theology of sovereignty is a crucial
reference to nature as well as their political import in the phantasms of
modernity, to which well turn soon enough. Boulainvilliers, as Foucault
argues in his 197576 lecture course, Society Must Be Defended, was
attuned to just these fictions of sovereignty, in particular, historical fables
that function to surround the sovereign with a mystical foundation for the
law of force by him over his peers, many of whom were writing privately
and plaintively about the plight of the nobles as well. One needed to contest
the royalists view of the past with another histoire (history or story), and
Boulainvilliers provides just such a counterhistoire,10 as Foucault calls it,
to put the theologized sovereignty of the king in question.
Though irreducible to its pomp and persuasion, there is never
sovereignty without its apologists, for example, those who during the
Bourbon period would collectively put forward what is called the thse royale
(royal thesis) to oppose the work of Boulainvilliers and his contemporaries.
Sovereignty always requires its mythoi, its histoires; it could not exist, such
as it does, without them, and Boulainvilliers saw that one way of taking on
the force of sovereignty is to denature the stories and fables the sovereign
tells itself and others. Sovereignty needs these stories, and yet it is these
very stories that allows one to call sovereignty into question, to test its
history of itself, and thus to share out sovereigntys very force of reason.
Such mythoi are a performance of sovereignty, though again, sovereignty is
always above and beyond any simple performance of it. This is not to say
that there is no force to sovereignty, that it has no effect, but rather that
sovereignty requires a spectacle, a virtualization of itself, in sum, a phantasm
for what should require nothing beyond itself, since to be sovereign is to
be unquestioned and unquestionable, that is, purely autoaffective. Is this
10
not the enduring lesson, beyond Hegels masterslave dialectic, of Rousseaus

dictum in the Social Contract that he who is master of others is the greater
slave? Naas, for his part, argues, all sovereignties are fictions or phantasms,
and he points to Jacques Derridas discussion of the performative as if
of the Declaration of Independence and the mystical foundations of law
in his Force of Law essay.11 As Derrida notes, there is an appeal in the
Declaration of Independence to the Supreme Judge of the World to
sustain this act of popular sovereignty, an appeal lending authority to
a selfproclamation of a we: We, therefore, the Representatives of the
United States of America...appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world
for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the authority
of the good people of these Colonies (my emphases) dissolve the political
connection to England. This we, assigned through the signature of the
elite at the convention, provides a fabulous retroactivity of the signature,
hence calling into question, or rendering indecidable, the linguistic
distinction between the performative and the constative, Derrida claims,
in this particular speechact. The Declaration is a vibrant act of faith ...a
hypocrisy indispensable to any political, military, or economic coup de force.12
The final legitimizing instance is God, the name of which is nothing other
than a stopgap, a final appeal, pausing what would be an otherwise infinite
regress and continuous circling of authority in the Declaration. The power
of the sovereign, Naas writes, comes not from any real or true power within
the sovereign himself but precisely from a simulacrum effect, from the fiction
or phantasm of sovereignty. The sovereign retains power not simply in spite
of the fact that he has no real, genuine, existing power but as a result of
the fictional or phantasmatic nature of that power.13 Marc Bloch describes
as much about the sovereign power of the late Middle Ages:
In the popular mind, the sacred character of kingship was
expressed...by a whole cycle of legends and superstitions about
kingship in general and the various individual monarchies. [For
example,] from the end of the ninth century, the archbishops of
Rheims claimed to have custody of a miraculous oil, brought down
to Clovis of old, by a dove from the vault of heavena wonderful
privilege which at once enable these prelates to claim the monopoly
of coronation and their kings to declare and to believe that they had
been consecrated by God himself.14
In other words, sovereignty is the gap between one set of fictions (its illusory
autoaffectivity and selfcongratulatory monism that Arendt notes has
always been an illusion) and another (stagings of glory, narratives of power,
ceremonies and procedures that rigidify into tradition and thus mystify the
INTRODUCTION
11
origins of political power founded on the law of force), one set of fictions
supplementing the other in a coup de force of selfauthorizing authority,
greased by whatever oils happen to be released by heavenly doves to our
selfappointed kings. And this, in turn, is the supplement of the sovereign
self and its autonomy, which is always indexed to the politics that makes
it possible. Habermass dictum that political and personal autonomy are
cooriginal is true enough, with each justifying the other in an endless cycle
of sovereign rhetoric. Political sovereignty defends the safety and security of
personal autonomy as the idioms of safety and security have indemnified all
sorts of sovereignty cruelty in the modern state; this is the dark underside of
modernity, even if its been depicted as the Enlightenments brightest legacy.
But we should not condescend to suggest that these phantasms are
merely a superstition of the past, that the sovereign violence in our own
midst isnt spirited by phantasms and glorified by fables providing alibis for
denying the nakedness of its violence. Perhaps the most pervasive fable is
that of democratic freedom itself, which, along with the performances
of Congress and parliamentary committees, deflect from the black ops and
wars, secret or otherwise, carried out under the everexpanding wings of the
albatross of executive power. Sovereignty is in and of itself not persuasion,
as weve noted, and for this reason Arendt argued that it was antithetical
to the sharing of doxa at the heart of politics. On the one hand, it is
always extrapolitical, nonpersuasive, and nonpersuading, since it requires
nothing other than the law of force, which is external to any law and
could never be coded as such, for Arendt, without undermining the very
sovereignty that posits itself per se. On the other hand, as the very force of
law, the political seems to require it as its instituting point, as the mark of
the decisive juncture between the political and nonpolitical; sovereigntys
selfvirtualization would be, in this way, the mark of the political par
excellence. On these points, as we will see, Boulainvilliers is a masterful
pedagogue on political mastery.
The characteristic analogy of royal sovereignty up to the time
of Rousseau and later to Carl Schmitt attests to this: the sovereign is
exceptional, just as God is to being or existence, like the good beyond
Being, as Plato puts it in the Republic. Jean Bodin, writing in the sixteenth
century, argues for the transcendence of the sovereign thus:
Sovereignty is the absolute and supreme power over citizens and
subjects of a commonwealth, which the Latins call maiestas; the
Greeks akra exousia [highest freedom or license], kurion arche, and
kurion [sovereignty] politeuma...unlimited by time [and] not
subject in any way to the commands of someone else...able to
give laws to his subjects, and to suppress or repeal disadvantageous
12

laws....The laws of a sovereign prince, even if founded on good
and strong reasons, depend solely on his own free will.15
Each of these terms will be key in the chapters that follow. Bodins definition
of sovereignty is both succinct and in line with a thinking of sovereignty
throughout the philosophical tradition: this kurion arche is unlimited in
power either by time or space and is indivisiblethe highest exercise of the
majesty of a certain freedom as license or will (exousia). Bossuet describes this
political theology similarly: Royal authority is sacred...God established
kings as his ministers and reigns through them over the nation....The
royal throne is not the throne of a man but the throne of God himself.16
Into this discussion, at the beginning of the eighteenth century,
enters Boulainvilliers. His counterhistory is not one abstracted from
political praxis. The first philosophe who rejected the whole apparatus of
Louiss absolutism was unquestionably Boulainvilliers, who was thoroughly
averse to the style and pretensions of his government,17 writes one historian
in what is admittedly a bit of hyperbole, since one would need quite a
sovereign mastery over the past to have the last word on whether he was
indeed first. All the same, Louis XIV and his immediate heirs presented
themselves as mortall gods, in Hobbess famous words, whose existence
and monopoly over violence within a kingdom was to be unquestioned and
unquestionable, and thus undefended and indefensible. We should recall
that the notion of the kings absolute power, as the seigneur of seigneurs,
was but an accounting of power by the monarchists, who were centralizing
power not only in France, but were also bolstering the dynastys power to the
detriment of the Holy Roman Empire in the years leading up to and after
the Treaty of Westphalia. It is an irony of history, in fact, that it was only
after consolidating its power before and after Westphalia, after the decline
in power of the Holy Roman Empire, that sovereignty in the territory of
France moved from its pagan form, in a sense, in disparate dominions of
lords, to its more Catholic or Christian form in the figure of Louis XIV,
who was said to be the incarnation of God on Earth (albeit one who used
Roman mythological symbolism).
By making heroes of the Franks, those early barbarian invaders,
Boulainvilliers contests the Roman conceptualization of the imperium, and
thus the sovereignty of a line of history running through the very heart
of what today counts as Europe. Even in the time of Louis the XIV, a
millennium after Clovis and the Franks invasion of Gaul, there may never
have been such a thing as absolute sovereignty; such a sovereignty may
never have a time or place, since there are always those who need to be won
over by sovereignty, either through ritual, such as the touching of the Kings
Evil (scrofula),18 or through a political theology of the Sun God requiring a
INTRODUCTION
13
policy of calculated grandeur.19 The absolute sovereignty of Louis XIV

was unique in French history, as Boulainvilliers is at pains, and right, to
point out. With the memory of the parliamentary problems faced during his
regency (the Fronde of the nobles in 16481653), Louis XIV was convinced
that he should rule in a more or less absolute fashion, ignoring the perceived
local rights of the nobles, who held great power through another form of
governmental sovereignty in France for a millennium. Within a generation,
the oncepowerful seigneurs became a court nobility, in service to the king,
and many nobles called to court were unable to rule over their large estates
away from the eyes, the surveillance, of the monarch.
The task of centralizing the governmental form was aided, firstly, by the
writings of the Sun Kings court apologists and courtiers, his administrators
and bureaucrats, who provided the historical justification for Louis XIVs
maneuvers as a descendant of the Roman emperors. This power grab was
also facilitated by the kings wars across Europe, which enabled him to quell
dissent at home, while sending his enemies off thousands of miles away to
war. The working fiction for this centralization was a veritable and lasting
state of exception: the court apologists argued that a thousand years before,
King Clovis had never ceded his royal authority, that is, his war footing, and
that this state of war existed up to the days of Louis XIV, who remained,
in a word, a warlord. Hence, between Clovis and Louis le Grand was said
to be a continual, though no less exceptional, sovereignty of the exception
lording over the people any number of wars to keep and augment its power.
Many theorists of the concept of sovereignty follow Carl Schmitt in
accepting the selfmythification of the Bourbon thse royale, which, for the
sake of the ensuing chapters, is worth retelling. Schmitts transcendental
thesis is that sovereign is he who is both within the law, while also the
exceptional force that guarantees the law. Schmitt argues, in an oftcited
passage,
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are
secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical
developmentin which they were transferred from theology to
the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent
God became the omnipotent lawgiverbut also because of their
systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a
sociological consideration of these concepts.20
This claim allows Schmitt to note a homology between the miracle in
theology (exceptional to all laws of nature) and political sovereignty
(exceptional to all political laws). But this assertion, despite his tip of the
hat to sociological considerations, tells us nothing beyond its analytic of
14
sovereigntys selfdefinition. Schmitt argued that the exception is related

directly to the state of emergency, a situation that threatens the state
and requires the sovereign to act outside the law in order to protect the
continuity of those laws. But since, as Schmitt notes, it is the sovereign
who decides whether this crisis exists, and since this crisis is always one
that is extraconstitutional, no law can ever anticipate, that is to say limit,
the sovereign in advance. Sovereignty is nothing other than this monopoly
over this decision and its decision points, to quote the apt title of George
W. Bushs 2010 autobiography, which, ultimately for Schmitt, concerns
the distinction between friend and enemy. This is Schmitts fundamental
political division, which Giorgio Agamben later argues is a posteriori to the
original cut between civic life (bios) and bare life (zo).
The political enemy is the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient
for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially
something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts
with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previous
determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested
and neutral party.21
This forms the basis of Schmitts attack on political liberalism: in
the name of the rule of law, the openness of parliamentary discussion,
liberalism has obscured the fundamental political distinction that makes
such laws possible in the first place: the friendenemy distinction. Where
liberals see the state as the meeting ground for consensus and cautious
halfmeasures, Schmitt teaches that it is only the stabilized result of a
conflict that brought a people into being in the first place.22 The state is
not simply a facilitator of open discussions among disparate groups or an
administrator of economic goods for society; it is primarily a means for
internal order such that a proper relation of enmity with other peoples is
constituted. The normal order that liberalism takes for granted is nothing
other than the result of an originary and instituting violence of the state
of exception, which returns at each moment that the constitutional order
is threatened. For this reason,
Every legal order is based upon a decision....It really does not
matter whether an abstract scheme advanced to define sovereignty
(namely, that sovereignty is the highest power, not a derived power)
is acceptable. . . . What is argued about is the concrete application, and
that means who decides in a situation of conflict what constitutes
the public interest or interest of the state, public safety and order,
le salut public, and so on. The exception, which is not codified in
INTRODUCTION
15
the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of

extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like.
But it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to
a preformed law.23
Schmitt avers that whatever theory we advance, it will be undercut by the
manner of the concrete application of the law, and the law itself is but a
normal order guaranteed by the sovereign: There exists, he argues, no
norm that is applicable once law recedes in the state of exception. For a
legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign
who decides whether this normal situation exists.24 As such, all law is thus
situational.25 For Schmitt, these moments of exception are to be temporary,
though his role as a legal theorist during the 1930s puts to the test any
lessons of this state of exception (Ausnahmezustand) as provisional, not least
since no rule can prevent or otherwise overrule the sovereign decision as
to how long this emergency lasts.
Schmitts Hobbesianism, however, has been but one mode of the
conceptualization of sovereignty in modernity. To put it simply, how different
would debates in recent years have played out if, instead of Schmitts Political
Theology, we began our discussions of sovereignty, for example, with the
nonmiraculous, liberal TheologicalPolitical Treatise of Spinoza, whose
own influence from Hobbes leads him in a different direction, one that
would mark liberal and other traditions after him? Spinozas first translator
in French was none other than Boulainvilliers, who perhaps recognized
that his own political theology attempted an immanentist collapse of the
sovereign god into the literal lifeblood of the political, just as Spinoza spent
his TheologicalPolitical Treatise critiquing miracles, political or otherwise,
given Gods immanence to nature.26 This appeal to nature would be the
quintessential fiction of the state of sovereignty in modernity.
Early modernitys critique of the mysticisms of the previous era gave
us a profound political naturalism, one eventually given over to bloody
myths and pernicious vitalisms. This book corrects the onesided view of
sovereignty in recent years by looking to this other theological political
apparatus, one that incants against miracles, since it always wants to make
politics a simple determinism of nature: The right of the state or of the
sovereign [imperii seu summarum potestatum ius], Spinoza writes, is nothing
more than the right of Nature itself [ipsum naturae ius] and is determined
by the power not of each individual but of a people [multitudinis] which is
guided as if by one mind [una veluti mente].27
It will be important to remark on those mythoi and histoires that come
to do the fabulous work of making this as if of future liberal states a fait
accompli. Spinoza writes,
16

[A] Democracy...may be defined as a society which wields all
its power as a whole. The sovereign power is not restrained by any
laws, but everyone is bound to obey it in all things. . . . Furthermore,
whoever transfers to another his power of selfdefense, whether
voluntarily or under compulsion, has fully ceded his natural right
and consequently resolved to obey the other absolutely in all matters,
and this he is obliged to do without reservation, as long as the
king, or the nobles, or the people retain the sovereign power they
have received, which was the basis for the transference of right. I
need say no more.28
We will, no doubt, need to say much more, not least since sovereign
imposition would first of all entail that theres nothing more to say. This is,
strictly speaking, the exact logic of Spinozas political theology of the Hebraic
tradition, the description of which becomes the basis for his arguments for
a silent freedom of thought in democracies:
Inasmuch as the Hebrews did not transfer their rights to any other
person but, as in a democracy, all surrendered their rights equally, and
cried out with one voice, Whatsoever God shall speak (no mediator
or mouthpiece being named) that will we do, it follows that all were
equally bound by the covenant, and that all had an equal right to
consult the Deity, to accept and to interpret His laws, so that all
had an exactly equal share in the government.29
Regarding this crying out of the one voice, we will circle around a similar
set of quotations in Rousseau, who repeats rigorously all the aporias of this
strand of Spinozism, its absence of a prosthetic mouthpiece verifying a
silence of the sovereign under whom the people will nevertheless speak with
one voice, even as one must undertake the difficult task of interpret[ing]
its mandates.
For now, let us quickly turn back to Boulainvilliers Spinozist attack
on the sovereigntism of his day, which inveighs against the kings Evil
and the courts rituals of power to describe the cruelty and despotism of
sovereigntythough of course, he is writing to retrieve the sovereignty of
the nobility to which he belonged. Boulainvilliers argued that the Franks
established their power over Gaul by right of conquest during Cloviss reign;
the Franks are the true French nation.30 Prior to the Frank invasion of
Gaul, the Germanic warriors, Boulainvilliers asserts, set up what could be
best called a pagan sovereignty, with each aristocrat free and independent,
supreme in his particular dominiona people of gods, to borrow what
Rousseaus later posited as the necessary condition for true democracy.
INTRODUCTION
17
Returning to the scene of the sovereign imposition, Boulainvilliers remarks,

Clovis was to have sustained the Franks liberty and to work toward the
common interest of the nation.31 He writes:
It is completely against the truth and the spirit of the ancient
Franks to imagine that among them royal authority was sovereign,
monarchical, and despotic, such that individuals were subjected to
it for life, property, liberty, honor, and fortune....All the Franks
were free. . . . They were companions and so they were called leudes,
from the German word Leuth, which they used with one another.
This means compatriots, persons of the same society and condition.32
The Franks, as such, had no master and exercised sovereignty in a
common assembly of the members of the nation, having that supremacy
[sovereignty] without which no external or internal administration [police]
could survive.33 This would be one of the dominant aristocratic arguments
floating around later when Rousseau writes his Social Contract. Boulainvilliers
general assembly of the nation produced a veritable politics of friendship,
of leudes who gave their blood for those persons of the same society
and condition. It was they who would meet to declare war, clarify the
boundaries of the different dominions, and elect a civil magistrate who
would help settle disputes among the seigneurs.34 The king, he argues, was
to have treated the Franks as they treated each other:
They are all reciprocally leudes, fideles [Boulainvilliers Latin transla
tion of leudes], companions, and not subjects. As a matter of fact,
could anyone believe that the Franks, born free and sovereignly
jealous of this quality, would have given their blood and effort to
make a conquest only to give themselves a master?...Could one
believe that the Franks would have sought to acquire slaves only
to become slaves themselves?35
The leudes, the faithful, served together sovereignly in a parlement, an
assembly necessary for continuing their freedom, their selfrule, and their
dominion. For Boulainvilliers, the trouble for the leudes and their parlement
began with the reign of Clovis, who was the first to combine what had been,
until then, two offices: the civil magistracy of king and the warlord, what
today in the United States would be the doubled persona of the president
as executive and CommanderinChief. The moment Clovis smashed the
head of the warrior, who had done the same to the vase of Soissons, the
role of the warlord, irrevocably for Boulainvilliers, usurped the role of the
magistrate. The story of this Frank nation, disrupted from just after it entered
18
and conquered Gaul, would be a long and eventually losing battle with this
civil magistratewarlord, which is why Boulainvilliers sets out to found a
national (noble) sovereignty that predates this royal sovereignty, forming
his thse nobiliaire.
In his 197576 lecture course, Society Must Be Defended,
Michel Foucault points to the significance of this moment, not only for
Boulainvilliers, but also for the thinking of sovereignty in general. In the
story of Clovis, Foucault writes, we have the precise moment at which the
man who should have been nothing other than a civil magistrate [with the
end of the battle to capture Gaul] holds on to the military form of power
[and] uses it to settle a civil dispute over the vase. The absolute monarch
is born at the moment when the military form of power and discipline
begins to organize civilian right.36 Boulainvilliers work, Foucault argues,
is a challenge to the sovereign right of kings and the model of power on
which it was baseda veritable regicide in theory. But we must be careful
in reading Boulainvilliers not to confuse a thorough rethinking of the claims
of sovereignty with a challenge to sovereignty founded upon natalism and
nationality (based in a family story that would come to encompass an entire
nation). Boulainvilliers theoretical regicide aside, as Foucault calls it, it
is clear that Boulainvilliers, like many after him, had not questioned the
grounds for sovereignty, but merely hypothesized another of its genealogies.
Nevertheless, his writings put forward a history that, as Foucault puts it, was
to reawaken both the nobles memory, which [Boulainvilliers believed] had
become carelessly forgetful, and the monarchs memory, which had become
carefullyand perhaps wickedlyburied, so as to reconstitute the legitimate
knowledge of the king, which would provide legitimate foundations for a
legitimate government.37 The king had hitherto been presented only with
eulogies to his own power and history, according to Foucault, would be
the weapon of a nobility that has been betrayed and humiliated.38 The lesson
of sovereignty is its continual use of such lessons as its weapon of knowledge,
and we need not read far into the 1980s work of Jacques Rancire to know
the structural mastery that passes for and through pedagogical apparatuses.39
At the time Boulainvilliers produced his genealogy of sovereignty,
Foucault writes, history had never been anything more than the history of
power as told by power itself, or the history of power that power had made
people tell. It was, in brief, the history of power as recounted by power.40
For Boulainvilliers, the founding moment of French history was the defeat
of Gaul by the Frank warriors, those leudes loyal and faithful to no one
but themselves and from whom he claims the contemporary nobility were
descended. The feudal government was, on Boulainvilliers description, as we
have seen, an egalitarian assembly that possessed sovereign authority over
the territory.41 For this reason, there has been some historical argument as
INTRODUCTION
19
to whether Boulainvilliers was a liberal in the classical sense.42 While those

pushing the thse royale, including JeanBaptiste Dubos,43 argued that Clovis
was no less an absolute monarch than Louis XIV, Boulainvilliers presented
French history as that of encroaching enslavement. The Franks were not a
nation des Francs, a nation of individuals, but rather a nation franoise,
a collective people, a point he emphasizes, though his descriptions often
confuse the matter.44 And within this nation (the Franks and their heirs),
les Franois were all perfectly free, equal, and independent,45 yet could still
be said to act as one. Each warrior claimed his parcel of land in Gaul, as
would Clovis, and the rights to this land would be protected as the basis of
each ones freedom. We are not far, of course, from classical liberalism, which
would have to deny both this nationalist background and the aristocratic
grab for property rights as part of its longing for lost feudal powers during
which its arguments were first formulated.
Boulainvilliers, in any case, reverses what we normally take to be the
historical ordering of royal and national sovereignty, dating the latter to
before the emergence of the former. Once the war for Gaul was over, it was
the claim of the Frank warriors that the king was to step back into his purely
administrative role, while making sure that the rights and freedoms of each
seigneur were properly adjudicated, that justice as fairness reigned, and that
freedom was maximal, that is, for Boulainvilliers, that the rule of law was
preeminent. But the lesson of Boulainvilliers does not end there. Foucaults
account of Boulainvilliers relies on his Ltat de la France, which was written
upon the order of the king. Louis XIV, preparing for the education of the
duc de Bourgogne, his (brief) heir, had his attendants ready a voluminous
history of France, or rather, a history of sovereignty, of its legitimate
passage from one generation to the next, as a compilation of livres de raison
of the Bourbon dynasty, or better, les livres de la raison dtat. The task of
editing and summarizing these documents for the Dauphinthat is, the task
of providing lessons on the state of sovereigntyfell to none other than
Boulainvilliers, who knew a thing or two, as we have seen, about the order
of sovereignty and the passing on of ones patrimony through historical
narrative. As such, in order to protect the line of sovereignty, the Sun king
provided the task of political pedagogy, as Foucault calls it, to the one
person in the kingdom best qualified to undermine the history contained
in the attendants volumes.46 And summarize the volumes Boulainvilliers
did, through what could be charitably called a hermeneutic inversion of
the texts he was given. There is perhaps no better example of sovereigntys
dnouement at the very moment it sets out to defend itself, what Derrida calls
its constitutive autoimmunity. Where the Bourbon apologists wrote lines
about power and its legitimacy, Boulainvilliers read nothing other than a
history of betrayalsruses of kings that took away power from its legitimate
20
base, the French nation understood as the line of French nobles dating to
before the era of Clovis. The lessons delivered by Boulainvilliers, right into
the hands of the duc de Bourgogne (though probably left unread, since the
volumes were part of the fable of royal omniscience), was an extension of
what he had already written to his own sons in the privacy of his study.
Foucault points to another important lesson of Boulainvilliers political
pedagogy, aligned to the theoretical regicide in his historical account,
when, for Foucault, a different subject of history begins to speak:
At this time [in which Boulainvilliers wrote], the nation is by no
means something that is defined by its territorial unity, a definite
political morphology, or its systematic subordination to some
imperium [as the thse royale claimed]. The nation has no frontiers,
no definite system of power, and no State....[I]t is the nation
that begins to speak. The nobility is one nation, as distinct from
the many other nations that circulate within the State and come
into conflict with one another. It is this notion, this concept of
the nation that will give rise to the famous revolutionary problem
of the nation; it will, of course, give rise to the basic concepts of
nineteenth century nationalism.47
It will be the task of much of this book to tease out the state of this
nation that begins to speak. Two further passages will help to clarify the
key terms and issues at the heart of Boulainvilliers thse nobiliare, which
are also crucial to our own theses (noble or otherwise):
It is therefore true that men are naturally equal in the share [le partage]
that they have of reason and humanity. If something distinguishes
them individually, it should be virtue or the good use of this reason,
though it does not follow that this is the only principle [principe]
that ought to rule [regner] among men. The examples of the earli
est times...comprehended by this same reason...show that it
makes sense that [virtue] is more ordinary in good races [les bonnes
races] than in others...Its birth that provides this ordinarily.48
It is certain that by common right [le droit commun] all men are
equal. Violence has introduced the distinctions between Liberty
and Slavery, between the Nobility and the commoners [la roture].
But though this origin is vicious [vicieuse], the usage has for so
long been established in the world that it has acquired the force of
a natural law [la force dune loi naturelle].49
INTRODUCTION
21
Boulainvilliers argument forms, as his contemporaries noted, a vicious circle

concerning reason and virtue, all while dealing with the vicious, treacherous
origin of the political. He argues that by nature we are equal insofar as we
share in reason and a common humanity, and yet, violence has always already
interrupted this equality, sharing freedom to some, slavery to othersall
following from an exceptional argument about the normal order of races.
True, Boulainvilliers argues, this distinction is not natural. But another
principle has been in use for so long that it is as if it were a natural law
of force, as if the distinctions were natural. This is not to say that this
violence, which founded the rights of the seigneurs, of absolute freedom
within ones domain, is a natural law; it is, rather, the spirit of the Franks,
the spirit of the laws, the unquestioned and unquestionable dominion and
mastery exceptional to history, that supplies the very force that makes the
difference between nature and history, between a given race and its others.
Later dubbed the scandalous doctrine of the Conquest,50 Boulain
villiers lesson that he passed on to his sons and the Dauphin, as well as all
the heirs of a certain thinking of race and nationality, is that all rights, all
laws, are instituted in a moment of violence, and one must protect those
rights in a perpetual state of war, since violence can always take them
away. But the lesson itself, given to his sons in his livres de raison, is itself
a masterful lesson on sovereign fiat: Why this origin in claims stemming
from the Frank invasion? Why stop in the sixth century of the Common
Era? Why these particular Franks? Why not earlier or later, or elsewhere?
We ask these questions not because Boulainvilliers is nave, or to suggest
that later defenders of sovereignty are somehow more sophisticated on this
front. Here, Schmitt is again instructive, precisely because he never seemed
to learn the lessons of the calamitous violence in which he played a part;
his lessons only ever provide a cautionary tale. The appropriation of land,
he wrote in his postWorld War II Nomos of the Earth, remains the real
kernel of an entirely concrete, historical and political event [ganz konkreten
geschichtlichen und politischen Ereignissen].51 Schmitt argues that nomos, usu
ally translated as law (but related to nemein, to mean splitting or sharing) is
the primeval act of landappropriation that founds all later legal codes.52
Playing the invariable realist of the concrete order, Schmitt argues that,
just as liberals mistake parliamentarism for politics, which is concretely
rooted in the sovereign decision, similarly, the origin [Ursprung] of all fur
ther concrete order and all further law is the radical title of conquest.53
Like Boulainvilliers before him, Schmitt wants to separate out the improper
from the proper conquest, the illegal from the legal nomos (hint: it helps
if it set up the European order), which for Boulainvilliers was the inter
nal conquest of Clovis over and against the legitimate order put in place
by the Frank nobles. Schmitt, for his part, argues, Not every invasion or
22
temporary occupation is a land appropriation that founds an order. In world

history, there have been many acts of force that have destroyed themselves
quickly.54 Indeed there have, but one can search the entirely of The Nomos
of the Earth for anything other than the ex post facto fiat that legitimates
one over the other, thus separating order from the chaos of violent imposi
tion. Has there ever been such intellectual effortsearching the philologies
of Greek, the writings of early Church fathers, etc.to render a variant of
Because I said so? Why do many interpreters of Schmitt try to salvage
his arguments as saying anything more than this? For example, just how
much time is temporary? How much order is ordered enough? Whos to
decide? In Schmitt, we always circle back to the nonconcrete formalism of
the exceptional decision, since his nomological version of we were here
first, as any child knows, is always announced precisely when we werent.
These doctrines of conquest dictate a sovereign desire for origins
(Ursprung), but all one ever finds is the prosthetic mythos that the timing
of this morethantemporary event presents something new under the sun,
instead of the continual cycle of temporary occupations and invasions.
Historical claims for sovereignty always circle directly back to the supposition
they are meant to defend. As with the thse royale, there is ultimately nothing
other than the force of sovereignty, the exceptional and, for Boulainvilliers,
acceptable violence that founds all political communities. Following this
reasoning, his livre de raison marks out well the dominant raison dtat of
the state of sovereignty and its political fictions, a lasting sovereign scandal.
Where Sovereignty Lies Today

To paraphrase Rousseaus opening to the Social Contract, what can render
force legitimate? This is, of course, the question of all contract theories,
just as it is also the question of Boulainvilliers implicit contract, which
maintains a closed circuit between the gift of the self and what it receives,
as is the case of autonomy in all social contracts (Could anyone believe
that the Franks, born free and sovereignly jealous of this quality, would
have given their blood and effort to make a conquest only to give themselves
a master?...Could one believe that the Franks would have sought to
acquire slaves only to become slaves themselves?). Is sovereignty, its
violence and its police, the force around which one must live together with
others? Boulainvilliers certainly believed soand history was but a contested
ground of fables with which to glorify this very force. Boulainvilliers saw
the inexorability of the law of force in which, to quote La Fontaines more
or less contemporaneous fable of the wolf and the lamb, la raison du plus
fort est toujours la meilleure, that is, might makes (one) right.55 Philosophy
has always tried to place reason on the side of force, on the side of power,
INTRODUCTION
23
from Socrates questioning of Thrasymachus to Rousseaus discussions of the

right of the strongest in the Social Contract to the legitimation theory of
Habermas, since it ought to be the case, as Boulainvilliers remarks, that
reason and virtue decide. Even if a counterforce, in the name of freedom and
equality, could take on sovereignty, does it not still fall within this vicious
circle, within the thinking that might makes right, even if it is a rule of the
majority, a democracy that lives on the rule or kratos of the demos? Another
thinking of power, of violence and force, is ultimately necessary, such that
we can begin to think another meaning of living together, one not bound
to a nation or natalism, or this vicious circle turned in upon itself.
At this point, as at the end of any good fable, I should impart the
lessons of the above, though, of course, these will take the entirety of this
book to sketch out. This book is a sustained argument that what we thought
we knew about sovereignty must be reassessed, from the side of those who
take on sovereignty in the double sense. It is with Rousseau that we begin,
since he charts much of the territory of the modern state of sovereignty,
arguing for a conception of sovereignty arising from a people and not
descending from on high. As JeanLuc Nancy writes, Whereas political
theoreticians proceeding him had thought mainly in terms of the institution
of the state, or the regulation of society, Rousseau...was perhaps the first
thinker of [a decentered] community56that is, politics at a distance from
the state, as Alain Badiou has argued for.57 Rousseau is a paradigmatic
figure for the contemporary period, given his view that the true power of
the politicalsovereignty itselfis heterogeneous to the state form, and
for this reason a return to Rousseau and Rousseauism will take up our first
chapter. He also demonstates the immanent revolt of sovereignty turning
against itself, and on this point well turn to Derridas early readings of
Rousseau in Of Grammatology. We will read closely the Social Contract to
gather together its continuing lessons, beyond its pedagogy for and by the
sovereign self. As Rousseau notes in Book I, the Social Contract is explicitly
a work of political pedagogy on the lessons of sovereignty: Born in a free
state and member of the sovereign, the right to vote is enough to impose
upon me the duty to instruct myself in public affairs.
The question of chapter 1 will concern the claim that Rousseau offers
nothing other than an inversion of classical sovereignty, leaving in place all
the problems that he identifies well in the traditional thinking of sovereignty.
This is one way of describing Arendts critique of Rousseau, since she argues
that his sovereignty of the people and its politics of pity cant help but give
itself over to the sameold, sameold of despotic sovereignty. Nationalisms,
Arendt argues, have as their telos the police states necessary to protect
and save the nation. Arendts wellknown descriptions of homo faber and
animal laborans, along with her accounts of the natality of political action,
24
should be read in conjunction with what we could just call, with a slight
nod to Foucault, her archaeology of the arche or the sovereign principle
found, for her, in the mythic era of early Greece. What Arendt ultimately
identifies is a notion of sovereignty without authority, thus separating two
terms often taken to be interchangeable. We will argue that sovereignty
without authority, that is, sovereignty without its foundation in theology
or other forms (e.g., Roman) of auctoritas, is nothing other than the reason
of force that founds itself on fictions of common birth. A reconsideration
of the arche of the political, Arendt claims, provides the principle for a
politics without sovereignty, a contention that, perhaps too easily, attempts
to sunder sovereigntys masterly grasp. This arche, for Arendt, is the event
of natality, which would be the obverse of the seignieur and seniority, the
generational repetition of the sameold, sameold, of classical sovereignty.
Turning to Foucault, we follow his multiple genealogies of power, arguing
that far from abandoning sovereignty, as some have claimed, Foucaults later
work offers a genealogy of a sovereignty imbricated with biopower and state
racism. Against those who read Foucault as putting too masterful a hold
over history and its given periods, I note that this is a misreading of his
genealogies, which are always in the multiple and always pulling different
strands from the histories. Some, including Derrida, have read his work
as putting a sovereign grasp over history under a pregiven idea, which
Foucault specifically and successfully argued against. His genealogies also
serve as a corrective to contemporary work on the concepts of sovereignty
and freedom, which simply repeat those views of power identified well in
the first volume of the History of Sexuality: power operates only along a line
of force that is vertical, in a stateform (i.e., those happy simply to critique
the figure of George W. Bush during that administration, to the exclusion
of the vast apparatuses around him). Foucault offers important lessons on
the prostheses of fictions and histories utilized by sovereignty, even as it has
shifted its shape and form.
We then turn to Agamben, who claims that he extends and
corrects Foucaults considerations of bio-politics and its relation to states
of exception. Agambens analyses in his multivolume Homo Sacer project
have done much to bring to the fore discussions of political sovereignty and
no consideration of sovereignty today can deny the shadow of his thought.
Utilizing such concepts as bare life (nuda vita), homo sacer, and oikonomia
(the Christian economy of the relation between God and created being),
along with Schmitts doctrine of the sovereign exception, Agamben has set
out the terrain upon which many post9/11 discussions of the political have
taken place. In this chapter, we read closely his account of sovereignty as it
has shifted through the ensuing volumes of Homo Sacer, especially in Il regno
e la gloria (2007). We follow him through his rendering of the homo sacer of
ancient Rome, with an eye to showing that history has more lessons left for
INTRODUCTION
25
us than Agambens paradigmatic method suggests. Moreover, Agambens

dream of a nonsovereign postpolitics provides but a classic messianism
beyond time and language, leaving us with a political theology beyond belief.
What is crucial is the method explicitly taken up by Agamben, one that
highlights crucial questions for how one engages sovereigntyontologically,
politically, linguisticallyin taking on a given tradition. Thus, we come to
a certain ambivalence regarding sovereignty: depictions of its final undoing
that nevertheless reinsert sovereignty at another level.
Our last chapter focuses on the later work of Jacques Derrida,
particularly his writings on sovereigntys autoimmunity, such as Rogues and
his 20012003 lecture courses, La bte et la souverain. We go beyond his
betterknown arguments about sovereignty to note that throughout his later
writings, Derrida teased out a thinking of unconditional freedom that makes
any questioning of sovereignty possible in the first place. Derridas work
has long been a challenge to sovereign notions of the self, and he had
worried those who think freedom must be conditioned on selfmastery and
individual autonomy. Though Derrida does not theorize it as often as other
key concepts, he offers indications of the centrality of a certain notion of
freedomits very trembling or spacingto the tasks of deconstruction, or
better, the autoimmunity always already under way in the life of concepts,
institutions, and systems. The point in this chapter is not to give Derrida
the last word in this book, as some readers might fear, but rather to pull
together a thinking of democracy and the indications of a nonsovereign
politics discussed in the works of Rousseau, Arendt, Foucault, and Agamben,
all to get a better sense of where sovereignty lies today in its political fictions.
As Kantorowicz put it in our first epigram, no doubt the highflown
images of sovereignty, like Baudelaires albatross, have been brought to down
to earth in the form of our soiled nationalisms. As we continue to mimic
the cripple who once flew,58 we can hear Hegels last word on the lessons
of a sovereign philosophy, coming in his lectures presented to the public on
the philosophy of right and the sovereignty of knowledge (and vice versa
along that chain: the rights of philosophy and the knowledge of sovereignty):
Only one word more concerning the desire to teach [das Belehren] the
world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy always
comes too late....When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one
form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be
rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight
only when the shades of night are gathering.59
The point is not to think the present as the worlds neverending midnight,
since antidemocrats who wont speak their name often proclaim intermi
nable lessons that there can be nothing new under the sun. No doubt, as
26
philosophers paint the world in shades of grey, that can often seem the case.
But as one sovereign falls in the form of a flailing, earthbound albatross,
another rises, taking flight toward the sunset of this morethanenlightened
world. In the pages that follow, we begin to chart these opposing lines of
flight, hoping to glimpse at dusk the owl of Minerva as it takes off, strug
gling to free itself of the lessons of philosophys history, doomed to repeat
themselves, all while setting course for what is coming over the horizon of
tomorrow.
ONE
Rousseau and the Right of

Life and Death over the Body Politic
Men are not naturally kings, or lords, or courtiers, or rich men. All are
born naked and poor; all are subject to the miseries of life, to sorrows, ills,
needs, and pains of every kind. Finally, all are condemned to death. This
is what truly belongs to man.
Rousseau, Emile
It is always a danger for a writer on a particular figure to overemphasize his

or her subjects importance, to make him or her exceptional to history, as
if a given person changed not only the course of theoretical developments,
but also, in some sense, the course of history, becoming a sovereign genius
after whom all others suffer an anxiety of influence. There is no need for
such worries here: much of the ground on which modern political philoso
phy stands is that which has been laid, if at times less than carefully, by
JeanJacques Rousseau.1 Whether one is considering legitimacy, the force of
opinion and discourse, or genealogies of power and sovereignty, it is through
Rousseau that the circuit of modern thinking turns.
At the center of Rousseaus thought is the basic question of the politi
cal: How and why are we to live together? What is an ensemble of people,
and is each ensemble capable of being something other than an association
of people who are alike (semblable, a term oftused in Rousseaus vocabulary,
from his first work to his last)? What forms of community are possible based
upon this form of living, and what counts as living or not living when
certain forms of togetherness, such as monarchical sovereignty, govern the
space of the political? Rousseaus Social Contract is a thorough and tightly
argued set of answers to each of these questions, and one misses the sys
tematic machinery operative in this argumentationa rigor all the more
27
28
remarkable given the sprawling nature of his other texts from this periodat
the peril of leaving unthought what Rousseau has left to teach us regarding
the state of sovereignty.
Rousseaus Contract pronounced a sovereignty of the people, first
through a conjectural history of the rise of the tyranny of governmental
sovereignty, and then through a programmatic sketch of the proper social
contract under which each is in service to a sovereignty that would be
nothing other than the enactment of freedom in equal commerce with oth
ers. This sovereignty is said to be a national or popular sovereignty, the
vaunted sovereignty of the people: a form of association which defends and
protects with all common forces the person and goods of each associate and
by means of which, each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only
himself and remains as free as before.2 Many have called Rousseau to account
for the supposed Rousseauism of the French Terror,3 with the moral that
democratic change inexorably ends in the Terror and tyranny of the masses.
Rousseauism has been long been another alibi for reactionaries using terror
to keep the old sovereignty in play. But his thought is not wholly reducible
to Rousseauism and there is a distinction to be made between national
sovereignty and Rousseaus commitment to thinking another meaning to the
question of living together. If Rousseaus contract has a sense beyond the
juridical and protective limits to which its now dated concept confines it,
JeanLuc Nancy argues, it is because it does not produce the principles of
a common body that governs itself without also producing, first of all and
more essentially, an intelligent being and a man, as his text literally puts it.4
We will come to this latter point at the end of this chapter.
Nancy touches upon an ambivalence regarding Rousseau when,
describing what he calls the inoperative or unworkable community (la
communaut dsoeuvre), a community divided by its selfdisplacement, he
returns to Rousseau. Nancy writes:
The first task in understanding what is at stake here [in thinking
the limits of community] is focusing on the horizon behind us [Nancy
invariably depicts Rousseau as the past of thought]. This means
questioning the breakdown in community that supposedly engen
dered the modern era. The consciousness of this ordeal belongs to
Rousseau, who figured a society that experienced or acknowledged
the loss or degradation of a communitarian (and communicative)
intimacya society producing of necessity the solitary figure, but
one whose desire and intention was to produce the citizen of a
free sovereign community. Whereas theoreticians preceding him
had thought mainly in terms of the institution of a State, or the
regulation of a society, Rousseau, although he borrowed a great deal
ROUSSEAU AND THE RIGHT OF LIFE AND DEATH
29
from them, was perhaps the first thinker of community, or more

exactly, the first to experience the question of society as an uneasi
ness directed toward the community, and as the consciousness of a
(perhaps irreparable) rupture in this community.5
Rousseau does not simply critique sovereigntys selfglorification and the
garlands of flowers, as he put it in his second Discourse, thrown by court
intellectuals over the chains of the masses. Rousseau offers an account of
sovereignty, freedom, and equality that would haunt the thinking of the
political ever since.
He does so while conceptualizing the political as at a distance, as
we will highlight, from the state and even from theology, despite the
supplemental chapter at the end of the Social Contract on civic religion,
which should be thought less as a political theology (which it is) than as
a brilliant reflection of the necessary political fictions of sovereignty. For
Rousseau, the theological is always subservient to the political, which for
him meant providing a place where the will of a people could be enacted
to regularize freedom and equality. Having found themselves living in
chains under illegitimate despotisms, the people and its activityin a
word, its sovereigntyis heterogeneous to the state form, and this in turn
grounds the right of revolution that this sovereign people retains over any
particular governmental form. As contemporary philosophers such as Alain
Badiou and Simon Critchley6 call for a thinking of a politics at a distance
from the state, or, as in Nancy, argue for considerations of beingwith not
reducible to the political,7 it is on Rousseauistic ground that they stand. As
such, writers following Schmitt in depicting Rousseaus work as a secular
theology tout court should recognize that Schmitts dictum offers little but
a reductive truism concerning the trajectories of Rousseau and Rousseauism.
As we proceed, we will emphasize Rousseaus claim that sovereignty
is always active and is thus a performance and practice of the very liv
ing and breathing of the body politic.8 Indeed, this activity, based on a
convention of this body with each of its members9 is absolute, sacred,
and inviolable,10 and cannot give itself over to representation. The activ
ity of sovereignty (it is either sovereign or it is not, since it cannot be
shared, as Rousseau argues) is an explosive and revolutionary power held
in abeyance whenever several men united consider themselves a single
body,11 even if they are in chains. The question that Rousseau struggles
to answer through his use of the foreign legislator, the master teacher who
is to provide the lessons of sovereignty to these people in chains, is how
to motivate a populace in submission. This motivational force is what
animates sovereigntys selfglorification, and the pure actuality of the sov
ereign, Rousseau d emonstrates, necessitates a supplemental fiction uniting
30
the very people whose sovereign activity ought to be already underway. It

is this conceptualization of an alreadyunited people that is the necessary
fictiontheological in provenance, perhaps, but not reducible to itthat
takes hold of the logic of the Social Contract. The point will be to see,
as we move through this book, if the changing modes of sovereignty in
modernity have been supplemented by forms of fabulation and glorification
more pertinent than the theological lineage often pointed out in genealo
gies of sovereignty.
The State of Sovereignty

after the Social Contract
We will thus ask what happens to sovereignty once theology has lost its
authority, as Hannah Arendt has claimed. Put another way, When the old
God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended faith? This is
the question asked in Don DeLillos Mao II as a father gazes out over the
scene at Yankee Stadium as his daughter is married en masse in a Moonie
celebration. The Reverend Sun Myung Moon looks down upon the crowd,
ready to lead them to the end of human history. One would guess that
the depiction here is not far off from the view many have of Rousseaus
moi commun, especially given his obsessions with the Greek and Roman
cults as well as his depiction of a civic religion that was the recourse to
another order of authority, which can win over [entraner] without violence
and persuade without convincing.12 The greatest enemy of freedom, Isaiah
Berlin called him, and to read Popper and others, one would think that the
Rousseau of nonconformism, the Rousseau of the Discourse on the Sciences
and the Arts and the Confessions, that is, Rousseau as JeanJacques, had died
forever among the scenes of the National Assembly and guillotines of the
French Revolution. His depictions of the general will and its sovereign activ
ity, long after the masses of the imperial era and the mobs of the totalitarian
twentieth century, to borrow the categories provided by Arendts Origins of
Totalitarianism, are viewed less as the liberating possibilities of the politi
cal than the beginnings of the cult of leaders in an era when all notions
of authority were withering away. If popular sovereignty held for the late
eighteenth century the promise of an impossible shared sovereignty and
a future literally to be dated anew during the Revolution from the past of
tyranny and arbitrary government, then recent political theory has feared
popular sovereignty as the rule of the mob, as a yet more pernicious form
of arbitrary government.
Whatever our critiques of nationalism, we will not follow those who
offer but a reactionary blend of republicanism along with fears of the people
and their populism.13 Such fears are not new to modern era (Plato and
31
Aristotle viewed democracy as nothing but the rule of the mob, the rule of
rogues), but nevertheless, despite the clichs and empires built around popu
lar sovereignty and libertyliberating others since they are unable to do it
themselves, that is, forcing others to be freeit is significant that popular
sovereignty is more apt to remind many of this scene at Yankee Stadium
than of the caring statesman guiding a people to virtuous patriotism under
Rousseaus social contract, or rather, the latter is depicted almost always as
the former. DeLillo describes the scene:
[The father] looks at each sweet face, round face, long, wrong,
darkish, plain. They are a nation, he supposes, founded on the
principle of easy belief. A unity fueled by the credulous. They speak
a half language, a set of readymade terms and empty repetitions.
All things, the sum of the knowable, everything true, it all comes
to pass on. And here is the drama of mechanical routine played
out with living figures. It knocks him back in awe, the loss of
scale and intimacy, the way love and sex are multiplied out, the
numbers and shaped crowd....The terrible thing is they follow
the man because he gives them what they need. He answers their
yearning....See how happy they look.14
For his part, Rousseau, from his first works to his last, emphasized the impos
sibility of government by the people since civil society is always too popu
lous to be capable of being governed by all of its members.15 As he puts in
the Social Contract, taking the term in the strict sense, a true democracy has
never existed and never will. It is contrary to the natural order....It is
unimaginable that the people would remain constantly assembled to handle
public affairs; and it is readily apparent that it could not establish commis
sions for this purpose without changing the form of administration.16 The
problem for Rousseau is not just that a democracy would likely be ruled by
a people led by private wills, but also that no grouping of men could be
constantly present and thus accounted for in terms of democratic gover
nance, providing both general laws applicable to all and also judgments in
particular cases. Rousseau concludes, Were there a people of gods [able
to move from the general to the particular without thought for private
advantage], it would govern itself democratically. So perfect a government
is not suited to men. But, importantly, Rousseau here refers only to the
governmental form itself, not necessarily to that which gives force to any
government in the Social Contract, namely, the general will and sovereignty
of the people, which may be unpresentable in the presence of the govern
mental apparatus. The state as he discusses it may indeed remain in thrall
to this political theology of a democracy of gods, but how democratic is the
32
moment of sovereignty as such, aside from the governmental form? Thats

the key question for Rousseau.
For this reason, the measure of a people, the counting and accounting
of a people, was an abiding theme in Rousseaus work as he sought to find a
way for selfrule, for the selfsovereignty of each person of a people, without
resorting to the governmental form of direct or representative democracy.
Judith Shklar is right to argue that one dominant method in Rousseau is
to cloak his politics in a negative assertion of what he is against: freedom
is not slavery, sovereignty is not being ruled by a king, and equality means
ridding ourselves of both amour propre (vanity) and the systematic degrada
tion of the people by an elite to which amour propre gives rise.17 A people
are those who are not the tyrants ruling over them. Rousseau writes:
It is the people who compose humankind. What is not the people
is so slight a thing as not to be worth counting. Man is the same
in all stations. If that is so, the stations having the most members
merit the most respect. To the man who thinks, all the civil dis
tinctions disappear. He sees the same passions, the same sentiments
in the hodcarrier and the illustrious man. He discerns there only
a difference in language, only a more or less affected tone; and if
some essential difference distinguishes them, it is to the disadvan
tage of those who dissemble more. The people show themselves
such as they are, and they are not lovable. But society people show
themselves having to be disguised. If they were to show themselves
such as they are, they would be disgusting....If all the kings and
all the philosophers were removed, they would scarcely be missed
and things would go on none the worse.18
Rousseau often depicts the people as the opposition to the tyrant or the
king, to the sovereign who would disrupt the proper counting and account
ing of the people, in line with its uses in Spinoza, Hobbes, and an entire
political tradition before him.19 Thus, the people would in this sense lack
any meaning except as an oppositional menace to tyranny and the illegiti
mate and arbitrary use of force. Rousseau portrays the people as a multi
tude of sorts, performing sovereignty in a particular way such that the very
grounds of sovereignty have shifted. The sovereign will be both the ruler and
ruled of society through the intermediary of the government. It is the tyrant
that is more and less than a man, either a god or monster as Aristotle would
say, and if we worry that opponents to the regime would be attacked in the
name of the safety of the people, it is also true that Rousseau is critiquing,
from the vantage point of the people, those who would make themselves
exceptional to the law put in place by the sovereign. In fact, this was Carl
33
Schmitts critique of Rousseau, since his popular sovereignty seemed to leave

aside the sovereign decisionism of the Schmittian thse royale. When the
people became sovereign, Schmitt writes, The decisionistic and personal
istic element in the concept of sovereignty was thus lost.20
When Rousseau writes the following, then, it is less clear that he
means the people in a nationalist sense (as people, as one, en corps
in the French) than as an oppositional figure to the ruling classes of various
states: Respect your species. Be aware that it is composed essentially of a
collection of peoples; that if all the kings and all the philosophers were taken
away, their absence would hardly be noticeable....Man, do not dishonor
man.21 Nevertheless, at the same time, Rousseau accepts Montesquieus
view that each country, with its particular climate and landscape, gives rise
to a necessary set of laws, though Rousseau does not defend the spirit of
the laws as they are: The universal spirit of the laws of every country is to
favor the strong against the weak, Rousseau remarks in Emile.22 However,
Rousseau accepts that the only way for a political body to succeed, to find
the civic spirit necessary to secure a particular society, is to pay heed to
the national institutions which shape the genius, character, and tastes and
manners of a people, which give it an individuality of its own, as he later
put it in Considerations on the Government of Poland.23 Thus, if one worries
that the general will is but a natalistic fetish that wants only that which is
agreeable to a set of semblables (and thus is always already agreed upon), it
is because Rousseau clearly argues at times that the single life of the sover
eign in the Social Contract is born of the natus of nationalism. When the
Old God leaves the world, what happens to all the expended faith? The
short answer, if a certain Rousseauism is any guide, has been nationalism,
one circling a sovereignty that founds and centers a political community.
Contracting the Sovereign

With this in mind, lets move in closer to the miseenscne of the contract.
Recalling the famous lines from the beginning of the Social Contract, Rousseau
argues that the task is to instruct himself on the legitimacy of the political
order. Consequently, he begins with a depiction of originary violence:
Were I to consider only force and the effect that flows from it, I
would say that so long as a people is constrained to obey and does
obey, it does well. As soon as it can shake off the yoke and does
shake it off, it does even better. For by recovering its liberty, by means
of the same right that stole it [recouvrant sa libert par le mme droit
qui la lui a ravie], either the populace is justified in getting it back
or else those who took it away were not justified in their actions.
34

But the social order is a sacred right [un droit sacr] which serves as
a foundation for all other rights. Nevertheless this right [droit] does
not come from nature. It is therefore founded upon convention.24
Whatever the legitimacy of this actthe act itself will always be selflegit
imizing, that is, also illegitimateRousseau depicts the violence that can
and must found a state accountable to the sovereignty of the people. This
legitimacy is not natural,25 but is a convention, the social contract itself:
Conventions therefore remain the basis of all legitimate authority among
men.26 Rousseau admits that it is difficult to see how the founding of anoth
er society can be anything but violent: the change from what he took to be
one convention (the rule of force) to another (the convention of the social
contract) is literally inexplicable and will remain unspoken:
The wise men who want to speak to the common masses in the
formers own language rather than in the common vernacular can
not be understood by the masses [peuple]....Each individual, in
having no appreciation for any other plan of government but the
one that relates to his own private interest, finds it difficult to real
ize the advantages he ought to draw from the continual privations
that good laws impose. For an emerging people [peuple naissant]
to be capable of appreciating the sound maxims of politics and to
follow the fundamental rules of statecraft [les rgles fondamentales de
la raison dtat], the effect would have to become the cause. The social
spirit which ought to be the work of that institution, would have to
preside over the institution itself. And men would be, prior to the
advent of laws, what they ought to become by means of the laws.27
We will turn to the capabilities of a peuple naissant, a people midwifing its
own birth, before long. Much has been made of this paradoxical moment in
Rousseau, one analogous to the problem of the declared We of the U.S.
Declaration of Independence. For example, William Connolly in The Ethos
of Pluralization, notes, For a general will to be brought into being, effect
(social spirit) would have to become cause, and cause (good laws) would
have to become effect. The problem is how to establish either condition
without the previous attainment upon which it depends. This is the paradox
of political founding, which is also, he writes, the paradox of sovereignty.28
As we see above, Rousseau himself is well aware of this problem of the
advent of the laws.
Rousseaus reactionary critics sieze on this moment to argue that only
a political foundation led by a true sovereign, such as Clovis, could escape
35
this paradox: the law of conquest, as such, is selflegitimizing, and doesnt

face the paradox of a people proclaiming itself as such all at once, though
no doubt these arguments themselves simply recycle the vicious circle of
violent supposition. Joseph De Maistre argued:
The first man was king as father of his children; each isolated family
was governed in the same way. However as soon as families came
in contact, they needed a sovereign, and this sovereign made them
a people by giving them laws,29 since a society only exists through
a sovereign...[T]he idea of a people is a relative term that has
no meaning separated from the idea of sovereignty, for the idea
of a people evokes that of an aggregation around a common center,
and without sovereignty a people cannot come together or have
political unity.30
De Maistre, strangely, doesnt have enough faith in the political theology
and naturalization of the political (the first man was king as father of his
children), which would provide another common center for the sove
reignties of the people; he simply provides the coup de force of the vicious
circle of sovereign supposition: A human association, he concludes, can
not exist without some kind of domination.31 Connolly, for his part, bases
his analysis in part on Paul Ricoeur: It is of the nature of political consent,
Ricoeur writes, which gives rise to the unity of the human community
organized and oriented by the state, to be able to be recovered only in an
act which has not taken place, in a contract which has not been contrac
ted, in an implicit and tacit pact which appears as such only in political
awareness, in retrospect, and in reflection.32 Ricoeurs thinking here is too
general to fit the founding of the body politic in Rousseaus Social Contract;
there is no moment of consent in Rousseaus Social Contract, which would
presuppose a communication that would be the mark not of a general will
but of an assemblage of private wills.
[I]t would be well to examine the act whereby a people is a people.
For since this act is necessarily prior to the other, it is the true
foundation of society. In fact, if there were no prior convention [to
the naming of a magistrate], then, unless the vote were unanimous,
what would become of the minoritys obligation to submit to the
majoritys choice, and where do one hundred who want a master
get the right to vote for ten who do not? The law of majority rule
is itself an established convention, and presupposes unanimity on a
least one occasion.33
36
It follows, then, that the mark of the general will is not so much the
number of votes (voix) or voices (voix) as the
common interest that unites them [le nombre des voix que lintrt
commun qui les unit], for in this institution each person neces
sarily submits himself to the conditions he imposes on others, an
admirable accord between interest and justice which bestows on
common deliberations [dlibrations communes] a quality of equity
that disappears when any particular matter is discussed, for lack of a
common interest uniting and identifying the role of the judge with
that of the party [faute dun intrt commun qui unisse et identifie la
rgle du juge avec celle de la partie]...The sovereign knows only
the nation [that is, itself, le peuple naissant] as a body and does not
draw distinctions between any of those members that make it up.34
Carl Schmitt summarizes what he takes to be the point of this passage:
[T]he general will demonstrates that a true state, according to
Rousseau, only exists where the people is homogeneous, that there
is essentially unanimity. According to the Contrat social, there can
be no parties in the state, no religious differences, nothing that can
divide persons, not even a public financial concern....According
to Rousseau, this unanimity must go so far that the laws come into
existence sans discussion. Even judges and parties in a suit must
want the same, whereby it is never even asked which of the two
parties, accuser or accused, wants the same. In short, homogene
ity elevated into an identity understands itself completely from
itself....The general will as Rousseau constructs it is in truth
homogeneity. That is a really consequential democracy. According
to the Contrat social, the state therefore rests not on a contract but
essentially on homogeneity, in spite of its title and in spite of the
dominant contract theory.35
Schmitts strategy is to show that the populist tradition represented by
Rousseau trades on an implicit friendenemy distinction between one homo
geneous association and its others, which for him is the concept of the
political. We need not follow Schmitts reading as a whole, though he is
right to underline the homogeneity that is presumed and reinforced through
the contract of the title. Of course, the question of the single voice, of the
one voice that would speak for all, is spoken for whenever democracy, the
rule (kratos) by the people (demos), is theorized. As Aristotle noted in the
Politics, if each citizen is to be given an equal share, its also the case that
37
one decision must be final, and this decision would be the task of the person
who puts an end to endless democratic discussion.36 Rousseau, for his part,
argues that sovereignty as such always already speaks with one voice, which
means it need not speak at all, sans discussion.
On these points, its helpful to turn to Louis Althussers reading of
Rousseau. The sovereign moment of Rousseau is exceptional to the laws of
the contract, but also the system of his text: in the social contract, as he
puts it in Emile, the people only contracts with itself.37 This last passage
is cited in Althussers The Social Contract (The Discrepencies). Althussers
reading is thorough and important, noting as he does the essential play
[jeu] of the text. It is also important because it assumes what we could call
an individualistic reading of the contract, namely as providing for each per
son to contract to become an element of the moi commun. Althussers main
thesis is that, at decisive moments, Rousseau comes upon a certain paradox
or discrepancy that can only be resolved by a further discrepancy, until
finally Rousseaus text must deal with itself as an ideology in connection to
realworld relations of economic power, that is, its total alienation qua text
from that which it describes (the political as such). The first discrepancy
revolves around the moment of the contract itself, that is, what Althusser
cites as the contract between the first recipient party (dubbed inelegantly
by Althusser RP1), the individual, who alienates all of his powers and
goods to an as yet unformed community or people, recipient part number
two (RP2). Reading the famous lines of the contract of association from
Book I, Althusser assumes that the contract is between an individual and
the whole of which it will become a part. This does seem to be the thrust
of the contracts essential terms: Each of us places in common [chacun de
nous met en commun] our person and our power under the supreme direction
of the general will, and we receive [nous recevons] as one [en corps] each
member as an indivisible part of the whole.38 Althusser writes:
Here is the difficulty: in every contract, the two Recipient Parties
exist prior to and externally to the act of the contract. In Rousseaus
social contract, only the RP1 conforms to these conditions. The RP2,
on the contrary, escapes them. It does not exist before the contract
for a very good reason: it is the product of the contract. Hence the
paradox of the social contract is to bring together two RPs, one
of which exists both prior to and externally to the contract, while
the other does not, since it is the product of the contract itself, or
better: its object, its end.39
Althusser argues that when Rousseau writes in Emile, the people only con
tracts with itself, it is a denegation of the problematic nature of the second
38
recipient party to the contract. That is, for Althusser, Rousseau mask[s]
the paradox of the contract by presupposing that the people preexists it.40
The peculiarity of the social contract is that it is an exchange
agreement concluded between two RPs (like any other contract),
but one in which the second RP does not preexist the contract since
it is the product. The very solution represented by the contract
is thus preinscribed as one of the very conditions of the contract,
the RP2, since this RP2 is not preexistent to the contract.41
However, the full sentence from Emile, not cited by Althusser, suggests
that far from denegating the problem of the individual, Rousseau draws
attention to the very play under discussion and exactly reverses the usual
order we think of the contracting parties (RP1 and RP2): The people
only contracts with itselfthat is to say, the people as sovereign body [now
RP1] contracts with the individuals as subjects [now RP2, since each only
becomes a subject, as Rousseau makes clear in the Social Contract, after the
contract] [le peuple ne contracte quavec luimme, cestdire le peuple en
corps comme souverain, avec les particuliers comme sujets]. This condition
constitutes the whole artifice of the political machine and sets it in motion
[lartifice et le jeu de la machine politique].42 Rousseau is never nave about
the stakes (les jeux) at play.
There is much to say, in fact, about the play of this political machine
as well as how it is set to work and unworks itself, as we will note in the
next section. There is also much to say, as Althusser comments upon well,
about the figures of translation and fictionalization of the cestdire and
the pour ainsi dire, the as it were, as and as ifs of Rousseaus con
tract, which serve to disrupt it while at the same time putting it in play, for
example, This formula shows that...each individual, contracting, so to
speak [pour ainsi dire], with himself...43 These are crucial moments of a
marked fiction in Rousseaus text, with the as it were having the force of
moving the argument forward where the argument must continue as if x,
y, or z is the case. For this reason alone, Althussers text is itself a master
lesson in the reading of texts and the play that unworks their selfmastery.
Following the argument further, Rousseaus contract plays on a move
ment between the individual and the people, and passes in the relevant
sections of Emile and Social Contract from RP1 to RP2, from individual
to people (as above) and back again: These clauses are all reducible to
one, namely the total alienation of each associate [of course, the alienation
is that which would make one an associate], together with all of his rights,
to the entire community....Since each person gives himself whole and
entire, the condition is equal for everyone [tous].44 For the moment, it
39
is critical to point out, to take on one strand of a tradition of reading

Rousseau, that chaque particulier, each one, is already thought in rela
tion to what is general. That is to say, each of us [chacun de nous] places
in common [met en commun]that is, the moi commun45all of our goods,
such that we receive as one (nous recevons en corps) back in the contract
what we have given, but this time as an association. This we precedes
and is a party (RP1) to the contract. This still marks a discrepancy. The
moi commun as RP2 is still an asyetunformed party, since it is another,
perfectly united we that comes onto the scene: the nous, the we, of
nous recevons en corps.
Accordingly, Rousseaus dictum that the people contracts only with
itself has embedded within it, Althusser is right, a displacement of the
paradoxical nature of the contract, even if this paradox is the very change
of the itself. But what contract does not assume such a change in the con
tracting parties? What contract is not performative in this crucial respect? In
addition, we must recall that Rousseau is not assuming an ex nihilo founding
from the state of nature (as in the moment of the formation of property in
the Discourse on Inequality, which itself is not an event, but an unfolding of
a certain story leading to this inexorable moment), but rather its refounding:
all men are born free, but are in chains. The chains exist in societies
already in formation, for a peuple naissant. The nation is already born; to
right its political structure requires preserving the people already born as
a nation, but now adding virtue to private interest through the contract
ing of the people with itself, providing the highest pleasure, the sovereign
pleasure46 associated with what Rousseau will call in Considerations on the
Government of Poland the nations second birth.47 Born again, the people is
able to save itself through its civic mythology: a veritable political theology
supplementing a reborn nationalism.
Lessons from Lartifice et le jeu of Sovereignty

Rousseau attempts to bypass the problem of political foundation through
the legislator, who supplements sovereignty with his political pedagogy
for the people on the lessons of sovereignty. He thus seeks to replace the
vicious and violent circle of previous theories of sovereignty with a virtuous
circle in which a Lycurguslike figure would have recourse to an author
ity different from either violence or persuasion: the legislator, Rousseau
writes, is incapable of using either force or reasoning with the people, and
must of necessity have recourse to an authority of another order, which
can compel without violence and persuade without convincing [le lgislateur ne
pouvant employer ni la force ni le raisonnement, cest une ncessit quil recoure
une autorit dun autre ordre, qui puisse entraner sans violence et persuader
40
sans convaincre].48 Neither the magistrate nor the sovereign,49 readers of

Rousseau are used to such a cast of characters, for instance, the Tutor in
Emile, Wolmar in La Nouvelle Hlose, and Rousseau himself in the Letters on
Corsica and Considerations on the Government of Poland. The recourse to this
other order, which Plato called the pharmakon of his myth of metals, the
socalled noble lie of the Republic, is nothing new to political philosophy,
which is addicted to such cures for political foundations, with the lesson
that where there is political pedagogy, there sovereignty lies.
This, no doubt, is among the reasons that people read the contract
ing of political sovereignty not just as outdated as Nancy suggests, but as
a pharmakon akin to contracting a form of political disease. The problem
is how to find such a genius, as Rousseau calls him, a person who will
be exceptional to both the government and to the people as sovereign.50
The legislator is in every respect an extraordinary man in the state.
If he ought to be so by his genius [gnie], he is less so by his office,
which is neither magistracy nor sovereignty. This office, which
constitutes the republic, does not enter into its constitution. It is a
particular and superior function having nothing in common with
the dominion over men.51
This legislator will have no authority over the law, since this would present
the danger that his private opinions could alter the sanctity of his work;
the foreigner, for this reason, will be merely a man, not a citizen.52 The
genius of the legislator will be to introduce, as with Platos myth of metals,
a civic religion that would prepare a people to accept the noble maxims of
the social contract. This, as we have seen, is the problem of the founda
tion of political authority, which even in the case of popular sovereignty
in Rousseau will be surrounded by a Pascalian mystical foundation whose
voice is the voice of God on earth.53
This pedagogy is but another way of forcing a people to be free, or
rather, is on another order of authority (une autorit dun autre ordre) that
would lead (entraner) a people to be free, to compel by divine authority
those whom human prudence could not move.54 Is this not the raison dtre
of all pedagogical mastery? As Rousseau makes clear, only a few peoples have
the social spirit and docility to accept the maxims of the social contract to
such an extent that no discussion would be necessary.55 In Rousseaus words,
a nation is bound by some union of origin, interest, or convention...one
that has no custom or superstitions that are deeply rooted.56
Rousseau aims to occlude the event (of the founding), since it is the
event that threatens to undo the very people in question. As such, the
decisive momentthat which creates and maintains a peopleis always
41
anterior to its sovereignty in Rousseau, to the unitary and homogeneous

moment of the social contract, that is, prior to the homogeneity continued
through and guaranteed by the social contract. It is the necessary fiction for
the sovereignty of the Social Contract. As Rousseau notes in the Discourse
on the Origin of Inequality, prior to reason, human beings have an interest
in their wellbeing and selfpreservation along with a natural repugnance
to seeing any sentient being, and especially any being like ourselves [nos
semblables], perish or suffer.57 At such an early stage, who is this we and
how does one distinguish the semblable and the nonsemblable?
Rousseaus discourses present the degeneration from this semblance
into the dissemblance and dissembling of amour propre, which sunders
the relation among semblables through mendacity.58 The task of the Social
Contract is to ensure that an unnatural mastery over ones semblable is dis
continued.59 A more proper denaturing must occur, even if this means trying
to locate a legislator who both has the appropriate level of mendacity and
yet does not have amour propre and thus would dissemble for the sake of his
private will. Sovereignty lies, and perhaps lies exactly where this distinction
between these two levels of deception must be assumed, between proper
pedagogy and improper mastery.
This pedagogical denaturing is predicated on a naturalization of poli
tics. One way to read Rousseau is as a thinker who, contrary to Hobbes,
Spinoza, Locke, and others before him, attempted to minimize nature (leav
ing for it no rational dictates, no ethics, no decisions as such), while being
clear that all that matters politically is a posteriori to the violence of politics
and cultural conventions. Nevertheless, let us recall that for Rousseau,
a people is a whole from which the individual receives his life and his
being,60 and one is only free and equal as a simulacrum of these semblables.
Despite all the talk of freedom and equality in Rousseau, the social con
tract is always already founded on a homogeneity already in force: Each
people has within itself some cause that organizes them in a particular way
and renders its legislation proper to it alone.61 Rousseau must thus always
already have distinguished between that which belongs to a people and not
to the people, between the semblable and the nonsemblable, for example,
the children, women, and foreigners whose rights are foreclosed from the
beginning of the Social Contract: a sovereign fiat a priori to the Contract,
and yet, a posteriori as well, given the Social Contracts attention to le public
salut, to preserving the people such as it is, to what hell call the effect
that must become the cause. The social treaty, recall, has as its purpose
the conservation of the contracting parties, which means fostering a natural
revulsion to mingling with foreigners,62 which, as natural, is supposed to
have been felt to begin with and thus needs no fostering. In other words,
where Rousseaus state of nature leaves room for no imagination and leaves
42
man in but a pitiable and pitying state, the nature of the state necessitates
him recalling what is natural at every turn in the argument.
This political order is both sacredthe social order is a sacred right
that serves as a foundation for all other rights63and nevertheless arti
factual, marking the line between nature and the law, between man as he
once was and the citizen he can now be. And this pact is also the most
reasonable. For Rousseau, the political order is such that a people would
be mad if it were to give itself gratuitously.64 The people under discus
sion preexist the contract, since from the opening paragraphs of the Social
Contract it is a people that must shake off its yoke.65 The fundamental
tension in Rousseau is between the force of his thought (to put reason and
force on the side of the powerless, the people who are in opposition to
the kings and tyrants) and the very homogenizing force of this reasoning,
which begins and ends with a people without difference and differentiation,
a multitude in the classical sense. For this reason, Rousseauian freedom is
always in service to the saving and conservation of this people, this set of
semblables, which must protect its own propriety proper to it alone given
its own immanent cause or origin:
If [si] the state or the city is merely a moral person whose life
consists in the union of its members, and if [si] the most important
of its concerns [soins] is that of its own conservation, it ought to
have a universal compulsory force [il lui faut une force universelle et
compulsive] to move and arrange each part in the manner best suited
to the whole. Just as nature gives each man an absolute power [un
pouvoir absolu] over all his members, the social compact gives the
body politic an absolute power over all its members, and it is the
same power which...is directed by the general will and bears
the name sovereignty.66
This shift from the if (si), the hypothetical, to the affirmation of a yes
(si) needed for the argument is crucial. For Rousseau, it is necessary that
the body politic has the compulsory force for its saving and conservation.
As such, when Rousseau argues that the prince (or government in general)
exists only through the sovereign, that is, at its whim, he writes,
[T]he dominant will of the prince is not and should not be anything
other than the general will or the law [provided by the sovereign
people]. His force is merely the public force concentrated in him.
As soon as he wants to derive from himself some absolute and inde
pendent act, the bond that links everything together begins to come
loose. If it should finally happen that the prince had a private will
more active than that of the sovereign, and that he had made use
43
of some of the public force that is available to him in order to obey

this private will, so that there would be, so to speak [again, pour
ainsi dire], two sovereignsone de jure and that other de facto. At
that moment, the social union would vanish and the body politic
would be dissolved. However, for the body of the government to
have an existence, a real life that distinguishes it from the body of
the state, and for all its members to be able to act in concert and
to fulfill the purpose for which it is instituted, there must be a
particular self, a sensibility common to all its members, a force or
will of its own that tends towards its preservation.67
Everything in the Social Contract follows the vertiginous movements of
force, legitimate and otherwise, within and outside the body politic, between
that which is de jure and de facto, and that which is natural and that which
is sacred. The gift of the social contract, its very giving (donnant) is the
force of its own selfproduction, which produces a vigilance over the private
wills of the politys members in order to save the common sensibility neces
sary for its survival: So long as several men together consider themselves
to be a single body, they have but a single will, which is concerned with
their common preservation and the general wellbeing.68 As in the state
of nature, which he makes clear in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,
mans first and foremost concern is selfpreservation; so too in civil society.69
Men and Citizens, Life and Death

We now arrive, then, at the right of life or death announced in the Social
Contract:
The social treaty has as its purpose the conservation of the con
tracting parties. Whoever wills the end also wills the means, and
these means are inseparable from some risks, even from some losses.
Whoever wishes to preserve his life at the expense of others should
also give it up for them when necessary. For the citizen is no longer
judge of the peril to which the law wishes him to be exposed, and
when the prince [that is, the government, executor of the sovereign
peoples laws] has said to him, it is expedient for the state that
you should die, he should die. Because it is under this condition
alone that he has lived in security up to then, and because his life
is not only a kindness of nature, but a conditional gift of the state.70
Can we get a clearer definition of the sovereigns hold over life and death?
Rousseaus Social Contract is but a long treatise on the problems of arbitrary
government, of the rule of a certain sovereignty. Yet, here we find nothing
44
other than what would seem to be the classical right of the king, namely,
the classical right to kill, which inversely means the right to let live since
the subjects life is also taken to be at the mercy and grace of the sovereign.
As Rousseau puts it succinctly, the life of the citizen is a conditional gift
of the state. Neither in Hobbes nor in Schmitt is the ultimate power of
the state put so concisely. Two problems, at least, arise:
1. Rousseau, while attempting to annul the sovereign exception, the arbi
trary violence of kings, imports, it seems, the political problem Agamben
identifies throughout the history of the West, namely, the sovereign decision
regarding the distinction between bare life and political life: Every malefac
tor who attacks the social right becomes through his transgression a rebel
and a traitor to the homeland; in violating its laws, he ceases to be member [a
citizen, a member of the sovereign], and he even wages war with it.. . . The
guilty party is put to death...less as a citizen than as an enemy....For
such an enemy is not a moral person, but a man.71 Thus, the social contract
meant to end the war of private interests has only instituted another state
of war in which there are internal and external enemies whose life is simply
conditional, with the stipulation that under this state alone has he has
lived in security up to then.
Rousseau sets out to invert the traditional relationship of the rights
of sovereignty ascribed to the kingsindivisibility of their supreme power,
the right over life and death, etc.to argue that all such powers belong
to the people. It is not the people, Rousseau wants to argue, who live at
the pleasure of the king, but vice-versa; the enemy Rousseau envisions in
On the Right of Life or Death is a wouldbe tyrant threatening the sov
ereign people by way of the governing power. As such, the tyrant lives at
the leisure of the people; the moi of the traditional tel est mon plaisir is in
the Social Contract the moi commun. For that matter, it is the state itself
that lives and dies at the pleasure of the people. This is the ultimate right
of the sovereign in Rousseaus sense: the right of revolution so identified
with the Social Contract. Nevertheless, this inversion continues the state of
sovereignty found in Hobbes and Bodin, with its fearsome right over life
and death.
2. However, one could rightly note that the sovereign does not hold the
right over life and death in the Social Contract, since punishment is left to
the executive power, the state. Nevertheless, in the movement from the
general to the particular, from the laws provided by the sovereign to the
executive or prince, does Rousseau provide enough measures such that the
prince does not become exceptional to the laws that the sovereign provides?
The sacred power of the laws, he writes, can be suspended when it is a
question of the safety of the homeland, that is, when it is presumed that
the first intention of the people is that the state should not perish,72 which
45
his earlier arguments had explicitly said was not the first intention of the
people, whose will only ever wants itself, not a particular state, a confla
tion that modern states have eagerly exploited. Additionally, Rousseau in
his Letters from the Mountain warns that the executive or government will,
over time, trespass on the zone of legislation: [S]ince sovereignty [of the
people] tends always to loosen, the government always tends to increase its
power. Thus the executive body must always in the long run prevail over
the legislative body; and when the law is finally subordinate to men, nothing
but slaves and masters remain, and the republic [that is, the rule of law] is
destroyed.73 Why the necessity of this must? What is in the nature of laws
or, more to the point, the laws of nature that makes this so?
In any event, this is the central problem of governments declaring
themselves democracies, giving the name of sovereignty to the people.
For Rousseau, the executive, those who govern over the particulars, can
in a state of emergency suspend the laws in the name of protecting them,
that is, suspend the very sovereignty of the people that it is meant to relay.
Here Rousseau lays out clearly what will become the permanent state of
emergency.
If in order to counteract [a given danger], it suffices to increase the
activity of the government, then it gets concentrated in one or two
of its members; this way it is not the authority of the laws that is
disturbed, but only the form of their administration. If however,
the peril is such that the laws as an instrumentality are an obstacle
to guarding against it, then a supreme chief is named who silences
all the laws and provisionally suspends the Sovereign authority; in
such a case the general will is not in doubt, it is obvious that the
peoples foremost intention is that the State not perish. This way,
the suspension of the legislative authority does not abolish it; the
magistrate who silences it cannot make it speak, he dominates it without
being able to represent it; he can do everything, except make laws.74
We will connect this soon to a point we already broached in the
introduction: the veritable silence of the people as sovereign, even when
it is silenced for the sake of giving voice to its safety. But, first, note that
Rousseau here must provisionally stand by a state that at every other point
certainly can perish in the name of the sovereignty of the people. Moreover,
there is little doubt that even in political systems founded upon the rule of
law, justice as fairness, as well as the protection of either a people or a nation,
this sovereign exceptionalism is potentially held within the system: this is
one of the central lessons of the state of sovereignty in political modernity.
It acts, as Rousseau notes, in silence even as it dominates the people. In
46
any politics where judgments need to be made between the unconditional

and universal and the conditioned and the particular, sovereign exception
alism is always a risk. All legislative systems serve at the pleasure of this
exceptionalism since it is held in reserve as an everpresent possibility. The
latterday security and police apparatuses that usurp vast expanses of gov
ernment budgets nevertheless operate in silence, while political theorists
tinker around the edges of parliamentary procedures and proper placement
of district lines; there is an everpresent mismatch between the name of
[popular] sovereignty and the vast police forces and secret agencies mock
ing the pretensions of those never silent about spreading democracy and
forcing others to be free. Here the magistrate will always decide when and
where the laws are an obstacle and when the people must be silence[d].
The exception is the rule, even where it is (temporarily) held in abeyance.
Rousseaus prince, it seems, can engage in a teleological suspension of the
political in the name of an absolutethe very force of lawthat is meant
to save that which it gives up, the laws that provide for the security and
freedoms of a citizenry. (The social contract itself operates within a similar
economy of sacrifice: each man via the people gives up his freedom only to
get it back as a citizen; the sacrifice of women to this order is sovereignly
passed over in silence.)75
And this is exactly what is performed by Rousseaus legislator, who
suspends the political as such in the pedagogical process of training a people
to be capable of contracting with itself freely and equally. As all sovereigns
have done, the executive can wrap up this law of force in narratives of
authority, of sacred power and rights, of safety and security, all while reduc
ing a populace to insecurity and discipline and suspending the universal
claims of equality by the force of a singularity outside any law. All sovereign
force is thus ontotheological in nature (with emphasis on both terms here);
it will save you even as it sacrifices you to a higher order, whether it is to
the greater good of religion or nationalism, or even to the sacred nature of
sacrifice itself: Whoever wishes, as Rousseau put it, to preserve his life
at the expense of others should also give it up for them when necessary.
Are there resources within Rousseau for thinking something other than the
fear and trembling of the political?
This has been the raison dtre of the raison dtat, and the only
authority that can make explicable the il faut of the previously cited
passageIf the state or the city is merely a moral person whose life con
sists in the union of its members, and if the most important of its con
cerns [soins] is that of its own conservation, it ought to have a universal
compulsory force [il lui faut une force universelle et compulsive] to move and
arrange each part in the manner best suited to the wholeis the force of
reason. Despite the supposed irrationalism of Rousseau in his own time, this
47
reason is the groundless ground for Rousseau. Along with nature, it is his
stopgap for the legitimacy needed to underwrite the authority of the text
itself, whose principles are derived from the nature of reality and based on
reason.76 Sovereignty without reason is, for Rousseau, nothing. The body
politic...is only a being of reason.77 It is not sovereignty, but rather
arbitrary governance, de facto sovereignty, that Rousseau was attempting to
take on through the Social Contractthus the necessity that the people
conform their wills to their reason, such that the people can learn to
know what it wants.78 And what it wants is nothing other than the correct
ratio, a counting and accounting of itself, as outlined by Rousseau in the
later sections of Book II of the Social Contract,79 while also keeping in mind
its preservation and prosperity80 and its selfcausing cause.
Further, all of this circularitythe movement of force that is meant
to preserve and conserve, to save the people to be free to be nothing other
than itselfreturns with the interest and sanctity of the sovereign and
autonomous individual, which has un pouvoir absolu, an absolute power
over itself guaranteed by its exceptional relation within a people, the nous
(us) of semblables. The people and its unanimity are but the simultaneity
and simulacrum of a multitude of the individual envisioned by Rousseau.
Thus, we recall that the social contract is derived primarily from the care
that [the subject of the Social Contract] owes himself.81 In this vein, we
can also bear in mind some of the most famous passages of Rousseaus work:
the contract is a solution to the problem of find[ing] a form of association
which defends and protects with all common forces the person and goods
of each associate, and by means of which each one, while uniting with
all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before;82 with
this contract, the alienation [of the natural freedom to attack another] is
made without reservation [sans rserve] and the union is as perfect as pos
sible....[I]n giving himself [se donnant] to all, each person gives himself
to no one....He gains the equivalent of everything he loses, along with a
greater amount of force to preserve what he has.83 Thus, total alienation,
as Derrida writes, is the total reappropriation of selfpresence.84
Much more would need to be said about the force of this giving (the
giving of oneself to get oneself in return, the conditional gift of life by the
state, etc.) in the Social Contract. Important for now is that this giving is
a movement of force within an economy of the gift in which there is a giv
ing without givingin giving himself [se donnant] to all, chacque particulier
gives itself to no oneand thus a return to the self; to give without such
a return, that is, gratuitously, as we noted, is an act of madness.85 All
of the various passages in and out of the Social Contract, the descriptions
of the people and sovereignty, are axiomatically aligned and supplemented
with accounts and the accounting of the sacred and inviolable individual.86
48
This is all the more notable since the text is but an overall turn within
the self of the author, the one who begins the Social Contract by reminding
the reader that it is a work of political pedagogy meant to instruct the
self on public affairs,87 the one who begins and ends, respectively, the Social
Contract with je and moi.
The Sovereign Pardon

Liberal scholarship on Rousseau has moved between his momentary empha
ses in the Social Contract on the individual and the community (cestdire
le peuple en corps comme souverain),88 around the sanctity of one and the
other. The question of Rousseaus liberalism has always come down to
whether a reader emphasizes the latter part or the former. If both a people
and the individual have a sacredness, a selfcausing cause, and a certain
inviolability from the outside, then how are we to reconcile what he called
as it were two sovereign demands? The famed passages of the clauses of
the contract, of course, attempt to reconcile this aporia by arguing that the
sovereignty of the self, its very activity, can only be guaranteed, given safe
passage, through a selfruling, that is to say, sovereign, people. This people
will have all of the qualities associated with traditional monarchical sover
eignty: sacredness, indivisibility, inalienability, nonrepresentability, and even
nonpresentability in language; this sovereignty, at its moment of founding
acts with such force that there is and can be no voice.
This sovereignty is also, as we noted, exceptional to any law, since it
is the very force of the law: We grant that each person alienates, by the
social compact, only that portion of his power, goods, and liberty whose use
is of consequence to the community; but we must also grant that only the
sovereign is the judge of what is of consequence.89 Since this sovereignty
is but a convention, it is a consequence of force as well; it is taken only
by revolution, and the people as well as the tyrant, fit Rousseaus critical
description of the law of force, whatever its ex post facto legitimacy: The
strongest is never strong enough to be master all the time, unless he trans
forms force into right and obedience into duty.90 This right of revolution
legitimates itself after the fact, since any such rights could not be natural,
as Rousseau himself contends. In the case of the individuals, it is the force
of reason that circumscribes the sovereignty of the self, another revolving
of a certain revolution back to the same.
Hence, it would be easy to find the primary and secondary sources
necessary to make the case that Rousseau offers a conception of the politi
cal inimical to the very aims he sets up in the Social Contract, namely, to
find a legitimate ground for the use of force within a community. This leads
him to a dream of a community immanent to itself, a moi commun, a people
49
circling around a sovereign power that could legitimize any activity, even the
activity whereby its silence to the usurpation of its own sovereign will. If
we followed a certain line of thinking, we would not be the first to find in
Rousseau not just an antidemocratic thinking but also a notion of a general
will that is said to guide totalitarianism in the last century, and perhaps this
one as well. We are all too aware of the irredeemable and nonmiraculous
problems of a thinking of the people to which Rousseaus texts are said to
give rise. However, if there is to be a rethinking of the grounds of sover
eignty, we must not treat his texts as if it had a singular will, as if it had a
sovereign authority and singular autonomy, which would, not incidentally,
parallel what some like to believe underlies Rousseaus political theory in
the Social Contract.
If we are to contest and question an indivisible sovereignty in the
name of another thinking of the democratic, a rule of and by the people,
we must do so wherever it appears: in the thinking of nations, peoples,
individuals, and, yes, texts. This means taking on the tradition in the way
that Michael Naas highlights:
What we receive through the signature of the other is thus not only
some determined [that is to say, overdetermined] tradition, theme,
figure, or authority, but a certain way of taking on tradition, a certain
way of either accepting or rejecting it and its authority....And
yet, each time we receive the tradition, each time we take it on,
we are offered a chance to receive something unforeseeable and
unprecedented within it....With each reception comes the pos
sibility of rethinking what is our own by receiving it before either
we or it have been wholly constituted.91
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to sketch out fully the demo
cratic thinking of the philosophical underlying this thinking of a reading of
texts before either we or it have been wholly constituted. It is just such a
thinking of the people that would appear missing from Rousseaus Social
Contract, and it may just be that a philosophical thinking of the democratic
requires thinking through what a democratic thinking of philosophy might
mean, a chance to receive something unforeseeable and unprecedented
within it. On this point, its worth recalling that in so many passages,
Rousseau equated his project of taking on monarchical sovereignty with a
critique of a specific thinking of the philosophical: If all the kings and all
the philosophers were taken away, their absence would hardly be notice
able....Man, do not dishonor man. No doubt, this may raise fears of a
dangerous relativism: a philosophy open to one and all. But what would
philosophy be without the morethanone voice within it, without always
50
having something more to say? Like any democracy, philosophy has its tradi
tions and classical views. And we would have to think about who this demos
of philosophy would be, whether we are capable of thinking of a we not
yet wholly constituted, given the we of philosophy that has always signed
itself in the singular voice.92 But philosophy also has an opennessthis
is essential, for the Socratic questioning and Aristotelian thaumazein said
to found philosophy are meaningless without itthat means leaving itself
available for questioning, even under the weight of a tradition. With this in
mind, we can hear the philosophy of the democratic opening itself up (or
rather, opened within democratic philosophy) in the following:
We are signed into a tradition, and a history not only by agreeing
with those who have come before us, that is, by explicitly taking on
their tradition or their history, but simply recognizing or receiving
their signature. And this is true even when, and sometimes espe
cially when, we recognize or receive their signature only in order
to break away from or repudiate itthat is only in order to take
it on. For there is a long tradition in philosophy of taking on the
tradition, of calling into question certain assumptions, canons, and
institutional practices....Whether we are for or against [a tradition
en corps], it is always in view of a countersignature that we write.93
This countersignature, this rethinking of how and what we write would
mean also rethinking and recasting what we think weve always decided
about the decision, and especially the sovereign decision: Neither a mere
repetition or doubling of what has already been writtenthis would be
the resounding encore of the philosophicalnor a merely subjective activity
external to writing, reading would be the moment of decision, the moment
when a tradition is taken onalways with the chance for something singular
and unprecedented.94
This is all the more the case in such an enigmatic thinker as Rousseau,
the first judge of JeanJacques.95 Is such a philosophical democracy think
able, especially as it pertains to a philosophical thinking of democracy, of
the rule of the people? This is not an extraneous matter or merely rhetori
cal question: Can we hear more than one voice calling from the text of
Rousseaus Social Contract? Is there something still unforeseeable that is
to say, nonsemblable, in the passages of Rousseau and political modernity?
Are there any passages or methods out of the circularity of the culdesac
of sovereignty and the sovereign self, around the edges of the contract and
the Social Contract itself?
Before answering these questions, lets note that this leads us to treat
with suspicion a thinking, even a critique, of sovereignty that begins, as in
51
Agamben, with an a priori overdetermination of an entire tradition, serving

to initiate a sovereign hold over it, presuming always already to know its
secret unity, as if everything had already been decided, and thus occluding
the countersignature, the counterthinking that is also a legacy of the philo
sophical. And these overdetermininations also come from those warning us
that Rousseauian populism leads inexorably to totalitarianism and the end of
the political. There is not a dictator in the West, Berlin once argued in an
empirical claim simply laughable, who in the years after Rousseau did not
use the Social Contract in order to justify his behavior.96 Demonstrating
that he was either illread or simply attempting to stop any thought of
Rousseauian egalitarianism by sputtering masterful hyperbole, he goes on:
Rousseau was one of the most sinister and most formidable enemies of
liberty in the whole history of human thought. Such are the negations of
those who think freedom only in the negative.
With each vote and each voice, there is always a chanceand we must
recall with Rousseau just what a chance the state is97for an event worthy
of the name, even when, as it always seems, however the vote is cast or
how many voices are heard, the result will leave the rule of the same in
place, leaving us only with change that no one believes in. This problem
is as old as sovereignty, as the seniority of the seigneur of sovereignty itself:
the problem of the sameold, sameold. Nevertheless, let me count out two
voices in Rousseaus text that go beyond voting for more of the same:
1. The first would take us through a grammatological reading of Rousseau
begun by Derrida. Such a rereading of Derridas supplementary text, Of
Grammatology, may seem as gratuitous as the supplement itself, given all
that has been written on the topic. Yet the importance of its depiction of
sovereign selfpresence will become clear in the later chapters of this book.
Rousseaus work, for Derrida, marks a powerful rendition of a metaphys
ics of presence that privileged, from Plato to Hegel and beyond, speaking
over writing, given that the former is said to be closer to the pure thought
of the selfpresent speakersubject, that is, the sovereign subject. I take up
this terminology of the metaphysics of presence with a certain hesitation,
given its use and abuse for a time as a term for all that is horrible about the
traditioneven if few ever got around to stipulating just what is philosophi
cally problematic about such a metaphysics. Such would have the effect of
writing off sovereignly a legacy whose lessons are not finished yet. We have
already touched on this point.
Recall that writing, for Rousseau, is dangerous from the moment
that representation...claims to be presence, that is, when one forgets its
supplementary role as an addendum to the thing itself and instead mistakes
it for that very thing. As Rousseau puts it in an unpublished fragment on
Pronunciation: Languages are made to be spoken, writing serves only as
52
a supplement to speech....Speech represents thought by conventional

signs, and writing represents the same with regard to speech. Thus the
art of writing is nothing but a mediated representation of thought.98 For
Derrida (and Rousseau), writing is the supplement par excellence since it
marks the point where the supplement proposes itself as supplement, sign
of sign, taking the place of speech already significant.99 Despite its emphasis
on the textuality of Rousseaus texts and its attempt to show the unten
ability of his privileging of speaking over writing that his texts attempt, Of
Grammatology is a political text through and through, calling into question
as it does a whole tradition not only of natural law, but also any state of
nature theory presupposing, as Rousseau himself warned in the Discourse on
Inequality, an easy path of thought outside of society itself. In short, Derrida
argues, following Rousseau, every presentation of nature is a political sup
position, if not a sovereign fiction.
Derrida sets out in Of Grammatology to depict the deconstruction
at work in parts of the philosophical tradition apropos the privileging of
speaking over writing in Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude LviStrauss, and
Rousseau, among others. For Derrida, Rousseaus use of the word supplement
can be read both as a replacement and as an addition, the former being
what made writing, along with autoaffection, such a dangerous supple
ment, since the dead letter would come to replace and represent the spo
ken word, which is itself a supplement to the selfpresent thought of the
speaker. Derrida argues that language is always already a subset of writing
as supplementarity (supplance) in general. This writing (criture) is the dif
france necessary for any language to be practiced as such, and thus writing
exceeds and comprehends that of language.100 Writing, in the colloquial
sense of putting marks to paper, would be but an exemplary model of this
general writing. For this reason, Derrida proposes to insert in Saussures
famous definition of semiology the word grammatology, the study of writing:
[As] science of the immotivation of the trace, of writing before
speech and in speech, grammatology would thus cover a vast field
within which linguistics, by abstraction, delineates its own area, with
the limits that Saussure prescribes to its internal system and which
must be carefully reexamined in each speech/writing system...By
a substitution which would be anything but verbal, one may replace
semiology in the program of the Course in General Linguistics: I
shall call it [grammatology]....Linguistics is only a part of [that]
general science...; the laws discovered by [grammatology] will
be applicable to linguistics.101
In the first chapters of Of Grammatology, Derrida lays out his case that
writing has been traditionally figured as a sign of a sign, for example, in
53
Saussure, who attempted to show that semiotics was but a system of differ
ences without positive terms (each signifier can only signify as such in a
differential system with other signs). For Derrida, there is an archewriting
prior to any particular empirical languageor rather at work in any particu
lar languageincluding those languages that are said to be merely spoken.
Writing, as a differential system of signs, is the spacing and deferral in speech
and writing; each sign is representative without being representational in
an endless circuit of supplements. Derrida sets out to render the relation
ship between speaking and writing indecidable given that the opposition
between the two operates in a system of archewriting wherein archewriting
is the diffrance between the two. For reasons of space and relevance to this
chapterthe signs of this text are not themselves endlesswe wont treat
these themes much further, nor visit Derridas reading of Rousseau up to
his last seminars in 200203.
Saussure, Lvi-Strauss, and Rousseau (the three main figures in Of
Grammatology) think of writing as the degradation of the political since
it marks the loss of a sovereign selfauthorization and authentic political
communities. As Derrida puts it, Saussure (and we can add Rousseau to
this formulation) is faithful to a tradition that has always associated writ
ing with the fateful violence of the political institution.102 Thus, Derrida
writes near the end of Of Grammatology, graphics and politics refer to
one another according to complex laws.103 Writing is written off as an
evil that punctures the immanence of this community, introducing all the
problems of modern society for Rousseau: hierarchization, centralized power,
and oppression. Writing is that which introduces the exploitation of human
beings by other human beings. One can thus see why sovereigntythe force
beyond the letter of the lawhas such a hold over a tradition of philosophy.
Reading Lvi-Strausss account of the Nambikwara ethnic group of Brazil,
Derrida writes that
[o]nly an innocent community and a community of reduced dimen
sions (a Rousseauist theme that will soon become clearer), only a
microsociety of nonviolence and freedom, all the members of which
can by rights remain in range of an immediate address...only
such a community can suffer...the insinuation of writing.104
The evolution from the unanimous primitive people to modernity would
be an advance to the political by way of writing. This description should be
kept in mind for later chapters, since it is precisely this Rousseauism that can
be found in depictions of supposed nonsovereign political spaces. Derrida
counters, though, that there would be no politics in a community of one
voice: The expression primitive times, and all the evidence which will
be used to describe them, refer to no date, no event, no chronology. It is a
54
time before time. In sum, this community would be presocial.105 This is

a theme to which Derrida will return time and again in Of Grammatology:
the introduction of writing is seen as the introduction of the political, and
the political is for this reason axiomatically oppressive:
The governments of oppression all make the same gesture: to break
presence, the copresence of citizens, the unanimity of assembled
peoples, to create a situation of dispersion, holding subjects so far
apart as to be incapable of feeling themselves together in the space
of one and the same speech.106
As such, one might say, politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because
it has been contaminated by law, that is, the heteronomy of the law of
the other exterior to sovereign autonomy.107 This treatment of the politi
cal would be in line with the need, Derrida claims, for a more general
deconstruction of speaking and writing in the form of criture. In this way,
the political would serve as but an example of an even more general law
regarding writing: the political would be a metonymy for writing, whether
in its everyday meaning or in the meaning Derrida will give to these terms
in his reading of Rousseau:
Political decentralization, dispersion, and decentering of sovereignty
calls, paradoxically, for the existence of a capital, a center of usurpa
tion and of substitution. In opposition to [primitive presocieties],
which were their own centers and conversed in the living voice,
the modern capital is always a monopoly of writing. It commands by
written laws, decrees, and literature.108
From this, it follows, Derrida argues, that if it is the case that Rousseaus
protocommunities and Lvi-Strausss version of the Nambikwara had writ
ing (since they had language), then they would also have a politics, and
thus political diffrance would be at work in these microsocieties. But,
if hierarchy and political diffrance109 existed prior to the advent of writ
ing in the colloquial sense in these microsocieties, then what would be
the relation between archewriting and the political? Is the political but
a particular sphere of the general law of grammatology? The fact that the
notion of law is already present as the operator of this relation (Thus
graphics and politics refer to one another according to complex laws) sug
gests that in some sense the political is prior to archewriting, at least in
the sense of a politics of the concept, which the prefix arche denotes as
well. After taking up Lvi-Strausss argument that the first task of writing
is genealogical classification, Derrida provides his answer:
55
It is this limit which crosses more or less everywhere when writ

ingin the colloquial senseappears. Here its function is to con
serve and give to a genealogical classification, with all that that
might imply, a supplementary objectification of another order. So
that a people who accede to the genealogical pattern accede also to
writing in the colloquial sense, understand its function....Here
one passes from archewriting to writing in the colloquial sense.
This passage, whose difficulty I do not wish to underestimate, is
not a passage from speech to writing; it operates within writing in
general. The genealogical relation and social classification are the
stitched seams of archewriting, conditions of the (socalled) oral
language, and of writing in the colloquial sense.110
As such, the end of writing is political.111 Here we have the reversal of
the relation between the political and writing: writing is but a metonymy
for the political, which would be that which operates between politics and
writing in the narrow senses, as the stitched seam of archewriting, the
very condition of language and writing in the colloquial senses. The point
for Derrida is that ultimately, sovereign self determination is the mark of
an ipseity, he writes later, that gives itself its own law, its own force of
law, its selfrepresentation, the sovereign and reappropriating gather of self
in simultaneity of an assemblage or assembly.112 This selfsimultaneity, on
Derridas account, is impossible given what he describes in many of his early
works as the trace structure of diffrance.
For our purposes here, its only necessary to point out that the neces
sary condition for the sovereign self, for its indivisibilityeither in terms of
a self, an association of a people without communication, or even a purely
present Godis the nullification of time, that is, stasis and death. In Speech
and Phenomena, Derrida depicts this in terms of the contamination of any
now as only thinkable as infected by the trace of the past, and thus every
present could purify itself through a stopping of time, an ultimate mastery
that never exists as such.113
For all these reasons, Derrida argues that diffrance cannot be written
off as an originary form of mastery:
Not only is there no kingdom of diffrance, but diffrance instigates
the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threat
ening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a
kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom. And it is always
in the name of a kingdom that one may reproach diffrance with
wishing to reign, believing that one sees it aggrandize itself with
a capital letter.114
56
That is why Rousseau must deny communicability to sovereignty, since the

very temporalization of the relay of the sign (linguistic, gestural, vocal, etc.)
from one to another marks an alterity that disrupts the silent univocality of
sovereigntya gap marked often in Rousseaus texts by as it were. And yet,
this sovereignty is always supplemented by the writing of its laws, by speak
ing of itself, by its fictionsfor example, its civic religion. As Derrida puts
it in Rogues, As soon as I speak to the other, I submit to the law of giving
reason(s), I share a virtually universalizable medium, I divide my authority.115
To conclude this discussion, could we not substitute politics for grammatol
ogy in the quote from Saussure in which Derrida had himself substituted
grammatology for semiology? Another supplement in a chain of supplements:
[As] science of the immotivation of the trace, of writing before
speech and in speech, [the thinking of the political] would thus
cover a vast field within which [grammatology], by abstraction,
delineates its own area, with the limits that Saussure prescribes
to its internal system and which must be carefully reexamined in
each speech/writing system....By a substitution which would
be anything but verbal, one may replace [the political] in the
program of the Course in General Linguistics: I shall call it [the
political]...[Grammatology] is only a part of [that] general sci
ence...; the laws discovered by [thinking the political] will be
applicable to [grammatology].
Another violent incision, to be sure. The point is not to rethink debates over
Derridas early work. Rather, we need to highlight the role that Derridas
reading of the supplement in Rousseau (as political and grammatological)
provides another way, within the text of Rousseau, of unworking its sover
eignty; the questioning of sovereignty plays a key role in Of Grammatology,
as it does in Rousseau.
Lets take this path a little farther, following a few passages in Of
Grammatology from the section quoted above (thus graphics and politics
refer to one another according to complex laws), The Alphabet and
Absolute Representation. Here Derrida takes up the one aspect of sover
eignty (its unrepresentability) in Rousseaus Social Contract, especially his
praise for the assembled people who would make their sovereign voice
heard. Though Derrida doesnt mention this explicitly, Rousseaus defense
of sovereignty, besides broaching an overturning of the royal state of sov
ereignty, is necessitated by his linguistic theory: sovereignty must be excep
tional to the law, since the law as such is always to be treated with a certain
suspicion, however much the rule of law has been praised in the thinking
of the political since. This is nothing new to Rousseau. Platos Statesman
57
argues that the best state is one ruled by a monarch unhindered by the
laws, since even in the midst of their writing, new circumstances arise that
cause them to be moot.
Such is always the claim of certain sovereigns looking to escape the
rule of law, especially in the name of security and safety, namely the claim
of the making and efficiency of sovereigntya key component of Arendts
discussions as well. As Rousseau puts it, Yesterdays law does not obligate
us today, but tacit consent is presumed from silence [again, in Rousseau, the
powerful voice of silence], and the sovereign is taken to be giving inces
sant confirmation to the laws it does not abrogate while having to do so.
Whatever it has once declared it wants [i.e., the sovereign making the
laws], it always wants, unless it revokes its declaration.116 For Rousseau,
the laws continually acquire new force; sovereignty supplements the laws
as the active element that gives it force, even if the force is given only by
the silence of the present sovereign. No precise rules, of course, can be
given about when the sovereign should show itself, since this would be a
form of sovereignty itself.117 The represented must in turn supplement the
representative to give it its full presence, like the speaker to that which is
written. As Derrida puts it, The movement of supplementary representation
approaches the origin as it distances itself from it....Alphabetic writing,
representing a representer, supplement of a supplement, increases the power
of representation. In losing a little more presence, it restores it a little bit
better.118 All of Rousseaus thought, Derrida argues, is in one sense a cri
tique of representation, as much in the linguistic as in the political sense.119
In this way, the legitimizing instant in the city, as in language
speech or writingand in the arts, is the representer present in person:
source of legitimacy and sacred origin.120 Lets look at this portion of the
Social Contract more closely:
Once the populace [le peuple] is legitimately assembled as a sovereign
body [en corps Souverain], all jurisdiction of the government ceases;
the executive power is suspended, and the person of the humblest
citizen is as sacred and inviolable as that of the first magistrate,
where there those who are represented are found, there is no longer
any representative.121
As a result, political liberty is full only at the moment when the power of
the representer is suspended and given back to the represented, when the
law is suspended in the name of the sovereign power.122 A people, Rousseau
argues, is no longer free and no longer exists the moment it allows
itself to be represented.123 Let me quote again from Derrida, writing in the
margins of Rousseau:
58

It is necessary, then, to reach the point where the source [the people]
is held within itself, where it returns or reascends towards itself in
the inalienable immediacy of selfpossession [jouissance de soi], in
the moment of the impossible representation, in its sovereignty. In
the political, that source is determined as will [whose activity is
sovereignty itself]: Sovereignty cannot be represented for the same
reason that it cannot be alienated. It consists essentially in the gen
eral will, and the general will cannot be represented: it is either the
same or it is other [autre]; there is nothing in between. . . . 124The
sovereign, which is a collective being, cannot be represented except
by itself: the power may be transmitted, but not the will.125
But this moment of interruptionthe interruption of the politicalis

never pure; it is a supplemental moment. It is the moment of diffrance,
Derrida writes, when the sovereign will delegates itself, and when, in con
sequence, law is written.126 The body politic en corps wants nothing other
than this autoaffection and sovereign pleasure (jouissance de soi) of the
body, necessitating the exclusion of diffrance, of the otheran inviolate
and inviolable political machine en corps. Sovereignty, Derrida writes, is
presence and the delight in [jouissance] presence.127 This is ultimately the
corruptive principle of that necessary supplement, the government that sov
ereignty needs, since in the strict sense of the term, a genuine democracy
never has existed, since it is unimaginable that the people remain con
stantly assembled to attend to public affairs. Sovereignty as such should
need nothing, yet, as we have seen, it needs the supplement of the very gov
ernment that will be its ruin, as Rousseau argues in all of his later writings,
including the Social Contract.128 The dream of making sovereignty eternal,
he admits, is impossible,129 though he holds out hope for the jouissance (or
bene placitum, what is wellpleasing, in the story of Clovis) of sovereign
selfpresence, a linking of desire and mastery depicted by Aristotle in terms
of the highest pleasure (hedone) of the sovereign god.
Consequently, Rousseau, for the sake of this pleasure, will only express
displeasure for representation, which he argues is a corruptive principle:
the representative is not the represented but only the representer of the
represented; it is not the same as itself.130 It is the supplement, diffrance
itself: a necessary mediating principle that is the undoing of the principle
of sovereignty itself. It is obliged to write itself, even if it is by the spacing
and the interval necessary within the assembly in transmit[ing] itself from
one to the next, passing itself on, in a moment that is quickly written off
as pass. Like deconstruction itself. Consequently, in writing the law, the
sovereignty of the people opens itself up to another law, the law of writing,
that is to say, the law of politicssupplements in a chain of supplements
59
every time it is necessary to remark still and again, encore, on sovereignty

en corps: Il faut remarquer encore..., as Rousseau says.131 Sovereignty,
in its representation gives itself up to division, to the more than one voix,
and thus to counting, to measure, and all that would condition its supreme
unconditionality; it cannot be otherwise. This may begin to sound as if
Derridas reading is following a certain Rousseau into an argument for the
representation of republicanism, which we simply need to get used to given
the diffrance that disrupts presentation and the sovereign instance of the
people. But, the unworking of sovereignty is also calling into question of
authentic representation and the speaking for another, the ventriloquism
that assumes the silence of the people as the republic does its business.
Sovereignty is a nonpresencetoself, a representation of its own repre
senting, a sacred sacrilege, and thus, to cite a quotation we will use in
another register below, the body politic (cestdire le peuple en corps comme
souverain)132 begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries in itself the
causes of its destruction.133 Folded, returning to itself, representing itself,
sovereign, presence [or better: sovereign presence] is thenand barelyonly
the supplement of a supplement.134
2. Foederis aequas Dicamus leges. Let us declare an equitable treaty. What
is one to make of this epigraph, which remained through various crossings
and uncrossings on the title page, from the Geneva Manuscript to the pub
lished version of the Social Contract? The words are from Virgils Aeneid,135
and the context is the violent founding of Rome, whose republic provides
so many lessons for Rousseau (and, later, Arendt).136 Virgil wrote the Aeneid
during Romes golden era, and the Aeneid would come to provide the mythi
cal foundations for the authority of the Roman imperium. (Virgil himself is
said to have read aloud many portions of the Aeneid to Caesar Augustus.)
The story is one of continuous attempts by the Trojans, after the destruc
tion of Troy, to found a new city, one fated to them. The epigram of the
Social Contract opens itself onto a plenitude of readings, leading one into the
many byways of the Aeneid and Virgils complicated relationship to Augustus
and his imperial politics. The bloodshed of Book XI of the Aeneid is said
to mirror the bloodshed of the Roman imperium, and readers of the Aeneid
could not help but see a contrast between the pious Aeneas (halfgod) and
Augustus, the selfdeclared god. Whatever Virgils purpose, to speak truth
to power or merely facilitate it, the Aeneid would come to be the ex post
facto legitimizing myth and political pedagogy of imperial Rome. Certainly
Rousseau sees this as a model for his own civic religion, providing the very
artifice, the necessary fiction, of popular sovereignty.
The words of Rousseaus epigram are not those of Aeneas, but rather,
the eldest, most senior, the most sovereign of the council of Latium, who
was seeking to end the battle with the Trojans at the walls of future Rome,
60
ready to hand over sovereignty and its insignia.137 Let us declare an equitable
treaty, Latinus announces to his council, but the pronouncement does not
stick, since, of course, much stands in the way of any treatys enactment, not
least the agreement and the readiness of the other party. The partisanship
of some Latins, including Turnus, drives the Latins back into battle, and the
city is destroyed, with Aeneas showing none of the mercy expected of such
a hero. Thus, the foundation of Rome is the site of a great mourning, the
passing of a city and its leaders for a future city to be heralded up to our
own time: a sacrifice of one city to a mythical order that would authorize
narratives of sovereignty up to and after Ronald Reagans depictions of a
shining city on a hill. It is, of course, a tragic story, and when Rousseau
chooses these words from the whole of the Aeneid, he not only follows a
long tradition of Roman authors quoting the Aeneid out of context to fit
another, he also chooses perhaps its most tragic words: let us declare an
equitable treaty. The words at once mark the end of days of mourningfor
the Latins and the Trojans killed on the battlefieldbut also a beginning
of the sacrifice of this people to the greater glory of another.
Let us make an equitable treaty, in other words, is the beginning of
the end of Latinus and his city at the imposition of a sovereignty that will
be anything but equitable. Rome, speaking at least in name the language of
the vanquished, will be nothing other than a republic and later an imperium
of mourning to this past, to this violent origin. Even the two sovereigns,
Aeneas and Latinus, cannot prevent the violence to follow, despite any
treaty upon which they might have decided, and Aeneas himself refuses any
pardon for his nemesis, Turnus, at the end of the Aeneid. Thus, Rousseaus
choice of an epigram provides a moral that we ought to be suspicious of
any contract to avoid the bloodshed so destructive of the political. Which
again brings us again to the right of the sovereign over life and death as
well as the right of war, and finally the place of the pardon in Rousseau.
Rousseaus Social Contract is predicated on two underlying principles:
(1) the principle of political life is in the sovereign authority; (2) the
body politic, like the human body, begins to die from the very moment of
its birth and carries within itself the causes of its own destruction.138 That
Rousseau takes literally the metaphors of life and the body in talking about
the political is not new. Nor is his claim that political bodies always carry
the seeds of their own destruction. What interests us is Rousseaus claim
that sovereignty, that is, the very activity of the body politic itself, carries
an immanent selfdestructive capacity: the summa potestas of sovereignty,
for Rousseau, bears the cause of its own destruction, its own impotence.
Poppers oftcited claim that Rousseaus thinking of the sovereignty of the
people is nothing other than a mark of the death of the political139 is true,
though in another sense. The sovereignty of the people holds within itself
61
its death drive, even as or because it seeks to secure itself against threats
from the outside.
Recall that for Rousseau the life of a citizen is not only a kind
ness of nature, but a conditional gift of the state [un don conditionnell de
lEtat].140 Rousseau, as does every sovereign before and after him, conflates
the criminal and the enemy, if there ever is a workable political distinc
tion, declaring,
[E]very malefactor who attacks the social right [le droit social] becomes
through his transgressions a rebel and a traitor to the homeland
[la patrie]; in violating its laws, he ceases to be a member, and he
even wages war with it. In that case, the preservation of the state
is incompatible with his own. Thus one of the two must perish.141
The right of war provides the right to kill, even if only to provide an
example, a lesson for others. Notably, however, this right is limited to
the prince, to the government, which decides over particular cases. But the
pardon (grce) belongs, as it traditionally did, to the sovereign, producing
a destabilizing dissymmetry between the governments right of the sword
and sovereign peoples right to mercy. The sovereign people in Rousseau
is stripped of the right to kill and let live (a right of particular judgment),
but it retains the right to give unconditionally the gift of life that is other
wise a conditional gift of the state. This can be nothing other than the
right of a people to undo itself. Pardoning, giving thanks and grace to the
unpardonable, would undo that very people, as Rousseau often reminds us,
and is a gift without return (the only such gift in the economy of the Social
Contract): When the people and those needing pardon are in the balance,
he writes, one of the two must perish.142
And it is here that the authorial voice interrupts, for the first time
in the overall circle between the beginning and end, between the je of the
first word and the moi that is given the last word; the text turns from the
genre of political pedagogy to the confessional, though it confesses without
confessing anything: But I feel that my heart murmurs and holds back my
pen. Let us leave these questions to be discussed by a just man who has
not done wrong and who himself never needed pardon.143 In the circuit of
the Social Contract, it is as if Rousseau just couldnt bring himself to take
the last step in these lessons. In this passage, we hear an author who is all
too aware of the violence of sovereignty in his own time. Let us, you can
almost hear him say to his powerful enemies (real and imagined), declare
an equitable treaty.
And so it is here that we will leave the Social Contract, there where
it calls itself to its end, to its final judgment, but also to the grace of the
62
reader, who, recognizing the ontotheological power of this sovereign par

don, sees nevertheless in it, perhaps, another thinking of the democratic:
an attunement to the desolate citizen needing a pardon, not least for the
revolutionary tract that he has written. This is the meaning of Rousseaus last
texts, especially his Letters from the Mountain, where he defends the citizens
right to revolt against the state, to call on Geneva and other republics to live
up to their founding ideals, even if it means that he will have to renounce
his citizenship144 and become an enemy of the state where the raison dtat
is not reasonable. It is what the Social Contract declares and pronounces in so
many passages of the text: a turn against the injustice of its time. In many
places, Rousseau has given us a revolution as a turn back to the same. But
in interrupting his own discourse to call for equitable terms, that is, to
mourn himself and thus the others of the text, he provides for this power
of revolt and revolution of the people to be other than it is in the social
contracteveryone sees where [too many sovereign pardons] lead145this
is where the revolt turns back upon itself, revolting against itself in the very
name of revolt and revolution. This right over the particular is definitively a
precipitate of this sovereignty, one that in the end can only be, as a pardon,
a thinking of life and survival, a thinking of living on as an unconditional
gift facing the political conditions of the raison dtat. It is a gift that no
lawthe gift of the pardon is always particular and thus can never be gen
eralizedcan foresee, marking an exceptional moment of the unworking of
sovereignty. In this way, the circle of sovereignty turns upon itself, and with
the pardon, this supplemental giving without return, this almost nothing of
the political, beyond its fear and trembling, comes the risk and chance of
an ensemble living together to be other than semblable to itself.
TWO
Arendts Archaeology
of Sovereignty
First world war: 8.7 million dead; Second World War: 40 million. In
Hitlers camps: approximately 7 million victims; in Stalins camps: 30
million, according to Solzhenitsyn. The incalculable is there, in numbers
at once terrible and meaningless....We calculate for want of something
better....We face the limits of every phenomenology in the face of this
explosion.
Dominique Janicaud, Powers of the Rational
The facts are: that six million Jews, six million human beings, were help
lessly, and in most cases unsuspectingly, dragged to their deaths. The
method employed was that of accumulated terror...Last came the death
factoriesand they all died together, the young and old, the weak and
the strong, the sick and the healthy; not as people, not as men and wom
en, children, and adults, boys and girls, not as good and bad, beautiful and
uglybut brought down to the lowest common denominator of organic life
itself, plunged into the darkest and deepest abyss of primal equality....It
is this monstrous equality without fraternity or humanity...that we see,
as though mirrored, the image of hell.
Hannah Arendt, The Image of Hell
The turn of one page to the next brings us from the pardon to the unpar
donable. Dominique Janicaud is right: We calculate and reason for want
of something better. Sovereignty must be called to account, even if what is
done in its name and its analogues (empire, hegemony, imperium) is unac
countable, uncountable, and calls into question the powers of the rational.
For these reasons, an attunement to the political fictions of sovereignty does
63
64
not mean giving up the category of hell, which has become worldly, all too
mundane. In the next several chapters, we follow trajectories of sovereign
force and power laid out by Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio
Agamben in histories that attempt to think the origins of totalitarianism,
the origins of spaces of human omnipotence, mastery, and sovereignty, in
short, histories of the end of the political. An accounting of all of the pieces
of the decline and fall of the nationstate and its disastrous aftermath, the
failures of the promise of the 1789 Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen,
will be fraught with methodological aporias, not least because it would seem
the powers that we once ascribed to reasonand we saw this in Rousseau,
a true thinker, despite his illread critics, of the Enlightenmenthave pro
vided the very mechanisms, the technicity, that allowed the indescribable
to occur. The processes leading to the concentration camps, as Arendt
put it, were alltoo transparent and logical.1
The problem facing Arendt and Foucault in their respective works
(and ours as well) is to think the effects of sovereignty without reifying a
single, previously secreted history that will ex post facto calculate the paths
that led to the death camps, which would only have the force of forming a
sovereign and masterful hold over history, and therefore presume an omni
science unable to think the event, or what was once called contingency.
Our turn in the next two chapters is to the work on sovereignty in the
thought of Hannah Arendt. Though little remarked upon in the secondary
literature, a confrontation with and thinking of sovereignty is the red thread
(to borrow her favored metaphor) that winds itself through all of her works.2
Each of her works are meditations on the rise and fall, and the rise again,
of sovereignty: her thinking of the public space, the place of action and
freedom, is unthinkable for her if tethered in the least to a positing and
positioning of sovereignty, whether in terms of a Rousseauian general will, a
god, a nation, a traditional regime such as monarchy, or even the masterful
self. Moreover, her work on the life of the mind and thinking as such is,
for her, a challenge to any depictions of the circular mastery of thinking
itself, all in solitude from the other. She works not just on the concept of
sovereignty and its genealogy, but also sets out to delineate a sovereignty
at work in the politics of concepts.
We will follow Arendts descriptions of the fictions of sovereignty as
they gain force in modernity, while ultimately coming back, in the next chap
ter, to showing how Arendt herself cannot escape a certain sovereigntism in
seeking a nonsovereign politics. Her archaeology of sovereignty, which
calls her to the Greek arche, will be fundamental to rethinking Arendts
contributions to thinking politics. My ancillary claimand one that I will
follow up here and there in the remainder of this bookis that sovereignty
is another name for evil in Arendts political vocabulary. There is evil,
ARENDTS ARCHAEOLOGY OF SOVEREIGNTY
65
Peg Birmingham writes. This fact marks the beginning and enduring pre
occupation of Arendts thought.3 Birmingham is right to point out what is
often missed in assessments of her thinking, namely, that Arendt does not
offer an unmitigated celebration of political action as a miracle, though
this is the language she often uses. On the contrary, Arendt recognizes the
risk of action and the unforeseeability of its consequences, and this risk is
nothing other than the danger of radical evil. The point is at once banal
and important: if action is to be a beginning, then stricto sensu one cannot
know beforehand what this action will bring. Those wishing to deny this
risk end up refusing politics and thus repeat the sovereigntisms that they
might otherwise wish to decry.
Arendts political project therefore cannot be an unconditional,
unhesitating celebration of action as the miracle and joy of human begin
ning rooted in the event of human natality,4 but a consideration of the
unpredictable, anarchic origin that carries its rule or principle within it.5
It is, rather, comprised of two inseparable moments, Birmingham claims: 1)
the abject desolation that carries with it the everpresent threat of radical
evil and 2) the activity of beginning that allows for the transformation and
fragile redemption of finitude itself, a transformation that holds at bay but
never eradicates this threat.6 We will, before long, revisit this discussion of
a fragile redemption, though not before completing the work on Arendts
archaeology of the arche of sovereignty.
Sovereignty, Arendt argues, is ultimately an attempt to bring God
(made in our own image as the master of the household) back down to
earth, to reject plurality and the promise of action in the name of absolute
rule; this is also what she calls evil. On this connection between sovereignty
and evil, allow me to quote here in the margins at length from Birmingham,
as she herself writes around crucial remarks from Arendts correspondence
with Karl Jaspers:
[Arendt argues] that the totalitarian vision of hell is an attempt to
establish an omnipotent presence on the earth itself: what is radically
evil . . . [is] making human beings as human beings superfluous. This
happens as soon as all unpredictabilitywhich in human beings is
the equivalent of spontaneityis eliminated. And all this in turn
arises fromor better, goes along withthe delusion of omnipotence
(not simply the lust for power) of an individual man. If an individual
man qua man were omnipotent, then there is in fact no reason why
men in the plural should exist at alljust as in monotheism it is
only gods omnipotence that makes him ONE....The desire for
omnipotence is a rejection of plurality altogether in favor of being
one, a godlike power on earth that desires absolute rule.7
66
Arendt herself writes:

[T]he reality of concentration camps resembles nothing so much
as medieval pictures of Hell. The one thing that cannot be repro
duced is what made the traditional conceptions of Hell tolerable to
man: the Last Judgment, the idea of an absolute standard of justice
combined with the infinite possibility of grace. For in the human
estimation there is no crime and no sin commensurable with the
everlasting torments of Hell. Hence the discomfiture of common
sense, which asks: What crime must these people have committed
in order to suffer so inhumanly? Hence also the absolute innocence
of the victims: no man ever deserved this. Hence finally the gro
tesque haphazardness with which concentration camp victims were
chosen in the perfected terror state: such punishment can, with
equal justice and injustice, be inflicted on anyone.8
The Fragmented Past and The Future of the Political

Arendt believed that thought after Auschwitz had to do nothing less than
sound out the tradition, to give it an encore at its coda, all the better to
hear the resonance of the basso continuo of the notion of action (and the vita
activa), which had been left unheard by those seeking the pure harmony of
thought available in the vita contempliva. Nevertheless, a conception of praxis
was, she argued, available in scattered notes below the major chords of the
tradition. The beginning and end of the tradition have this in common,
Arendt wrote in Tradition and the Modern Age, that the elementary
problems of politics never come as clearly to light in their immediate and
simple urgency as when they are first formulated and when they receive their
final challenge.9 The beginning and end, she says, strike an unmodulated
chord, a chord is now jarring. For Arendt, the tradition met its demise
with Nietzsches proclamation of the death of God and the appearance of
hell on Earth in the concentration camps of the 1940s, which marked an
irredeemable loss from which no tradition could recover.
I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have
been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its
categories, as we have known them from their beginning in Greece
until today. Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption
that the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able
to renew it....What has been lost is the continuity of the past
as it seemed to be handed down from generation to generation,
developing in the process its own consistency....What you are
left with is still the past, but a fragmented past.10
67
This tradition had been passed, of course, through intergenerational

paideia, which now was but fragmented set of remnants of once masterful
lessons. As she pulled together the pieces of the fragmented past, Arendt
demonstrated ambivalence about the relation between the philosophical
tradition and the horrors of the death camps, though she is clear that phi
losophy was not the cause of the break in the modern age. This sprang from
a chaos of massperplexities on the political scene and of massopinions in
the spiritual sphere which the totalitarian movements, through terror and
ideology crystallized into a new form of government.11 Arendt does not
accuse Platonism in all its forms of providing the ideology for National
Socialism. Her claim is more minimal: totalitarianism is but a radicaliza
tion of some of its most cherished tropes and foundations.12 Neither the
silence of the tradition in the face of the events of the twentieth century
nor the work of those who attempted to invert the tradition (Kierkegaard,
Marx, and Nietzsche) can ever explain what actually happened.13 That
is what makes the death camps unprecedented.14 This tradition could be
no more responsible for the break constituting the modern age than the
industrial revolution; antiSemitism; the rise of capitalism, the social realm,
and economic superfluidity; the vagaries of the end of the first world war;
and so on, that would come to crystallize the elements that brought the
death camps into being. All the same, with the rise of totalitarianism and
the ideologies of the police states, the thinking of the political received
its final challenge. The task, she suggests, for the life of the mind is not
simply to pay heed to the unprecedented nature of political evil and the
hells on earth, but also to turn back to those elements of the philosophical
tradition that can be taken on again for considering the possibility of a new
beginning, another political arche. We no longer hope for an eventual
restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, she wrote in the
preface to Origins, and thus, despite the charges by a number of critics of
a certain Hellenism, she believed that there was no restoring the tradition,
only the chance, like action, for a new beginning in thought, which was
best approached if one understood what was available in the feeble echo
of the prephilosophical Greek experience of action:15
[T]o live in a political realm with neither authority nor the con
comitant awareness that the source of authority transcends power
and those who are in power, means to be confronted anew, without
the religious trust in a sacred beginning and without the protection
of traditional and therefore selfevident standards of behavior, by
the elementary problems of human livingtogether.16
Continually at the break between past and futureleft with no tes
tament and no ultimate lessons for how to proceedArendt argues for
68
another thinking of the political.17 What I propose, she writes in The

Human Condition, is a reconsideration of the human condition from the
vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears.18 And
with her thought, the circle turns, moving from the end of the thinking of
the political, as she understood it, in totalitarianism, back to its mythologi
cal beginning in the Greek miracle.19 What Arendt attempts, then, is to
reverse Platos turningabout, his famous periago ge away from the Homeric
heritage and its privileging of action, back toward a thinking of the politi
cal just as the Greek polis was being formed (during, for us, the fortuitously
named archaic period) in order to open this circle to the crises of the politi
cal today. What we find in Arendt is not so much a reluctant modernism,
but a retrieval of ancient mythoi to think the event of the break between
the past and future that marks the failure of modernism. The relevance of
this for Arendts critique of sovereignty will become clear as we go along.
Ironically, these considerations lead Arendt right to where Rousseau,
her bte noire, begins his Social Contract, which, as weve noted, starts with
King Latinuss hortatory, Let us make an equitable treaty in the Aeneid.
Arendt attempts to think the laws as productive alliances, the coming
together that made politics possible, rather than simply as prohibitions mark
ing out a space of negative liberty. In other words, she seems to go to the
same exact place where Rousseau opens his Social Contract. She writes, in
the Promise of Politics, of the violent origins of the political as well as the
precarious lessons of its mythologies:
Every peace treaty, even if it is not really a treaty but a diktat, is
concerned with a new ordering not only of things...but also of
the new thing that made its appearance in the course of hostility
and is shared by both doers and sufferers. . . . What happened when
the descendents of Troy arrived on Italian soil was no more and
no less than the growth of politics in the very place where it had
reached its limits and come to an end among the Greeks. [We need
not be detained by the mythos of this seeming handoff of Greek to
Roman, an alliance that did not and could not exist at the time
of Romes founding.] With the Romans, politics grew not between
citizens of equal rank within a city, but rather between alien and
unequally matched peoples who rst came together in battle. It is
true that, as we noted, struggle, and with it war, marked the begin
ning of political existence for the Greeks as well, but only insofar
as they became themselves through conict and then came together
to preserve their own nature. For the Romans, this same struggle
became the means by which they recognized both themselves and
their opponents. Thus, when the battle was over, they did not
69
retreat inside their walls, to be with themselves and their glory.

On the contrary, they gained something new, a new political arena,
secured in a peace treaty according to which yesterdays enemies
became tomorrows allies.20
To orient ourselves to Arendts thinking of action without sovereignty,
we will quickly rehearse her distinctions of the vita activa, discussed most
prominently in the Human Condition. Throughout her work, she pulls togeth
er two different claims: one dealing with the loss of the thinking of action
in the history of philosophy, the other dealing with the event of the loss of
a worldly political space with the rise of the social after the eighteenth
century. These accounts are intertwined in Arendts Human Condition, and
its apparent that Arendt believed, at the least, the philosophical tradition
did not offer another thinking that could contend with the disintegration
of politics as the space of plurality. New allies would be needed.
Arendts primary assertion is that men in the plural, that is, men
insofar as they live and move and act in the world, can experience mean
ingfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other
and to themselves.21 The philosophical tradition had privileged the vita
contempliva, the life of the philosopher or those contemplating the good
ness of God, over the vita activa, which was treated as a necessary evil for
providing the leisure (schole or otium) for the bios theo retikos. Attempts to
overturn this tradition in Marx and later thinkers, Arendt argues, failed in
part because they did not understand the proper boundaries of the vita activa:
the life of the animal laborans, which performs the laboring necessary for
the continuation of bare daily existence; homo faber, man the maker who
produces the framework within which we live, from the homes and spaces
of the cities to works of art and books that keep historical memory; and the
type of living that is an end in itself, namely the life of praxis in concert
with others, the bios politikos, a life that can only be lived in a properly
constituted political space.
For Arendt, the blurring of the distinctions of the vita activa, the life
of labor, the life of production, and the life of action, has led philosophers
after the break with the tradition to view the political in terms of its instru
mentalization (reaching its apex in the ascendance of the bureaucracy, which
occludes any discussion or plurality and seeks nothing other than efficiency)
and, with the rise of the social, to view the work of these bureaucrats
as taking care of the necessities of life. The link to Foucault concerning
biopolitics should be more than apparent. For her part, Arendt argues the
roles of homo faber and the animal laborans have been combined in modernity
to produce a politics ready to remake men in the name of protecting bare
existence, formerly found only in the privacy of the household. We have
70
seen this in the rise of police states that protect the nationthe family writ
largein the name of its security, while spreading terror to those viewed as
not belonging to a particular body politic.
These distinctions are held together by the difference she finds between
the life of the household (oikos) and the public space (polis). The household
serves as the place of hierarchy and mastery for the Greeks: between parents
and children, master and slave, and husband and wife.22 What occurs in the
oikos is private and Arendt puts weight on the privative sense of this word:
it is a space robbed of the freedom and publicity of the public world. It does
not and should not make its appearance in the polis. The oikos is the place
of pain and labor, where one endures the effort of attending to lifes needs.
Life in the oikos is a living that corresponds to the biological processes,
which are cyclical and unending. For Arendt, it is the least particularly
human of the three vitae activae: the blessing or joy of labor is the human
way to experience the sheer bliss of being alive which we share with all
living creatures, and it is even the only way men, too, can remain and swing
contentedly in natures prescribed cycle, toiling and resting, laboring and
consuming, with the same happy and purposeless regularity.23 This crucial
distinction is the basis, if ultimately reconceptualized, of the bio-political
in Agamben and Foucault.
Importantly for Arendt, one must first be a master of ones home
and oneself in order to leave the oikos for the polis. Without doing so,
one cannot escape necessity into the realm of freedom and action. The
role of homo faber is to build this framework for the space of action, not
only in the tools that it provides for the home, but also the buildings in
which actors assemble and the boundary lines (nomoi) that separated the
polis from the oikos through the nemein (distribution, sharing) of the laws
(nomoi). The law originally was identified with this boundary line. The law
of the citystate was neither the content of political action...nor was it
a catalogue of prohibitions. It is thus homo faber through poiesis or produc
tion that creates permanence in the world, which is missing from the life
of the animal laborans. This permanence comes not just in the building of
the walls of the city, for example, but also in the writing of laws and the
memorializing and reification of the words and deeds that occur in the
space of action, which would disappear without the techne or knowhow of
the technikes.24 Speech as action in the public space is a living spirit that
is taken up in the dead letter of the sayings of poetry, the written page
or the printed book, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments.25
Consequently, there would be no space for action without homo faber.
Though distinct, the life of action and production, of speaking and writing,
are intertwined. Homo faber, as producer, is not only a lord and master over
71
his work, but master of himself.26 That would make the poet, the writer,
the historian, and the maker of the laws wholly masterful over his or her
writing. It is unclear whether Arendt means that this is part of the ideology
of the homo faber or means that human beings, insofar as they have the
potential to be a writer and so on, have this potential for mastery. Foucault,
too, will note the importance of selfmastery in the second volume of his
History of Sexuality. The later Foucault returns to the classical Greece and
eventually to the spiritual exercises practiced during the first and second
centuries of the Common Era in order to think nonsovereigntist (that is,
for him, prepsychoanalytic) models of the soul. Though Foucault will argue
that the Greek souci de soi, care of the self, is nonregulative and nonjuridi
cal (Platos Laws, for example, to the contrary) and thus beyond a certain
sovereignty that developed in the Roman imperium, he thinks of the self as
that which is made through an askesis that is a mark of autonomy outside
the subjectivizing (assujettissement) of the modern age. Philosophy, too, will
mark a certain care of the self, as depicted in the case of Socrates, and
Foucault will argue that this care of the self will involve an injunction to
tell a certain truth (as parrhesia) beyond the everyday beliefs of the demos.
For Foucault, the autarkeia (selfsufficiency) and epitrophe eis heauton (a turn
ing or conversion of the self) is an experience of a pleasure that one takes
in oneself.27 Below, we can see how this pleasure of a selfcirculating
sovereignty comes to inform Dantes De Monarchia. How this conversion,
this circling and pleasure, in a word, this autoaffection, diverts its course
from a certain thinking of sovereignty is unclear. This would be a way to
figure sovereignty even as it circulates beyond the self, say, as the divine
something like a conceptual halothat is the regulative ideal of this very
circulation, as Pierre Hadot suggests.28 We will return to this point in our
considerations of Agambens work.
This brings us to the problem of thinking the exception in light
of sovereignty, since the exception would also need to be thought other
wise, that is, to think another atopos that is the nonlocalizable spacing
of thought and action that calls into question all the topoi and schemai
of sovereignty in terms of its selfmaking of the autos with a presumed
selfmastery. Arendts thinking of action and of another starting point for
the philosophical, its arche, is one modus or styling of a questioning of such
visions of selfmastery and autonomy, that is, the circling of an ipseity of
the autos and its autopoiesis that has been taken to be automatic, in the
etymological sense, in certain traditions of philosophy. This will mark the
center of Derridas discussion of the autoimmunity of sovereignty and it
informs much of Arendts account of the arche of the political as well, one
disturbing any sense of the subject as selfmastering.
72
We will return to these points, though first we must review Arendts

own critique of autonomy by returning to the vita activa. For Arendt, with
the rise of the social in modernity, the life of necessity broke free of the
household and came to dominate politics. As it did, the public space reced
ed. Given the sameness of the necessities of life in each household, mass
societythe confusion of the public and the private distinction dear to the
Greeksleveled down the possibilities of humanity to mere existence, for
which Arendt uses one of the Greek terms for life, zo e.29 The life of society
is a space of inaction, where each is normalized out of any distinctiveness.
It is decisive that society, on all its levels, excludes the possibil
ity of action, which formerly was excluded from the household.
Instead society expects from each of its members a certain kind
of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which
tend to normalize its members, to make them behave, to exclude
spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.30
The equality in the social is a base equality, not the agonal equality of
the Greek polis.31 Arendt is unclear about the connections among the rise
of the social, mass conformism, and the entry of necessity into what should
have been the space of freedom. (Foucault bridges these claims through
biopower and discipline.) Arendt writes by way of explanation:
The sameness prevailing in a society resting on labor and consump
tion and expressed in its conformity is intimately connected with the
somatic experience of laboring together, where the biological rhythm
of labor united the group of laborers to the point that each may
feel that he is no longer an individual but actually one with others.
This account is obviously lacking. First, it is unclear why this response (a
feeling of oneness with others) would in fact not leave one with a feeling
of solidarity, in Arendts sense, which recognizes a shared oppression within
an given society. Trade unions, for instance, did not arise ex nihilo. Secondly,
Arendts phenomenology of pain and the endurance of the life of labor
focuses on their private and privative character, which draws one further
into oneself, not into a peculiar unity without solidarity with others.32 In
any event, Arendt argues that as society takes over politics, the state begins
to view the populace as a large family, a nation, and also as a society of
laborers. In our understanding, the dividing line [between public and pri
vate] is entirely blurred because we see the body of peoples and political
communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be
taken care of by a gigantic, nationwide administration of housekeeping.33
73
Additionally,
The highest purpose of politics, the end of government, was the
guarantee of security; security in turn made freedom possible, and
the word freedom designated a quintessence of activities which
occurred outside the political realm. [Government] was now con
sidered the appointed protector not so much of freedom as of the
life process, the interests of society and its individuals. Security
remained the decisive criterion...a security which should permit
an undisturbed development of the life process as a whole.34
With the life processes channeled into the public realm, politics
becomes pure administration and the human being is reduced to the
level of a conditioned and behaved animal.35 As Foucault would later
put it similarly, For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle:
a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern
man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in
question.36 The blinding light of publicity of the public remains in the
social, but at the cost of destroying the privacy of the household. This all
but destroys the true space of appearance of the public: ruled by nonone,
human being is reduced to the level of das Man, no one in particular.
The beingwith of the public has devolved into a conformism in which
each member of the nation is nothing other than a semblance of another.37
There are no more speakers of great words and doers of great deeds, only
idle talk and inaction, that is to say, nonresponsibility in the face of
whatever comes.38 At the same time, homo faber has been slowly usurped
in the face of the expanding processes of animal laborans: fabricated goods
are made not to last, but to be consumed in the same unending processes
found in the life of labor.39
Before crossing over to Arendts account of action, it is important to
keep in mind the ideologies that Arendt believes privilege each form of
life. Homo faber, according to Arendt, violates the world in its destruction
and creation.40
Man, insofar as he is homo faber, instrumentalizes, and his instru
mentalization implies a degradation of all things into means, the
loss of intrinsic and independent value, so that eventually not only
the objects of fabrication but also the earth in general and all
forces of nature, which clearly came into being without the help
of man and have an existence independent of the human world
lose their value because [they] do not present the reification which
comes from work.41
74
Treating everything as a mere means produces a meaninglessness in everything

with which homo faber contends.42 One finds here an echo of Heideggers
thinking of the technological enframing (Gestell) from The Question
Concerning Technology. What Arendt adds to Heideggers account is not
just the thinking of the technics of the world, but also its subservience
to the ideologies produced by the animal laborans: safety, security, as well
as the use of violence to meet the needs of life as zo e. What underwrites
Arendts account, one surmises, is the view that the highest achievement
of the vita activa in the modern age is no longer praxis but homo faber, and
it is the ideology of the latter that rules the political. In the end, homo
faber is on call by social beings for the fulfillment of their bodily needs. In
this way, animal laborans has usurped homo faber to such an extent that homo
faber becomes nothing other than an extension of the processes of animal
laborans. As Arendt suggests, environmentally, the results are catastrophic:
the wind as something objectively given has been eliminated from human
experience.43 Politically everything becomes banausic, a word derived
from the Greek banausos, and whatever isnt expedient is superfluous, banned
from the nation.
The issue at stake is, of course, not instrumentality, the use of
means to achieve an end, as such, but rather the generalization of
the fabrication experience in which usefulness and utility are estab
lished as the ultimate standards for life and the world of men. This
generalization is inherent in the activity of homo faber....The
instrumentalization of the whole world and the earth, this limitless
devaluation of everything given, this process of growing meaningless
ness where every end is transformed into a means and which can
be stopped only by making man himself the lord and master of all
things, does not directly arise out of the fabrication process; for
from the viewpoint of fabrication the finished product is as much
an end in itself...as man is an end in Kants political philosophy.
Only insofar as fabrication chiefly fabricates use objects does the
finished product again become a means, and only insofar as the
life process [of animal laborans] takes hold of things and uses them
for its purposes does the productive and limited instrumentality of
fabrication change into the limitless instrumentalization of every
thing that exists.44
Supposing itself sovereign over everything that exists, human beings
become the measure and take rule over nature. Everything becomes a means
to an end, which then becomes another means in a process that is symmetri
cal to the ultimate meaninglessness and superfluidity that bred totalitarian
75
ism. As instrumentalization treats everything as a means, this also has the

effect of making everything and everyone superfluous: every end and thus
every means is equally good as long as it indemnifies animal laborans, the
life of the nation, and so on. One can hear this in so many debates today
in which the ravages of the environment are ignored for the ultimate end
of the business cycle, which is itself no end. Man the maker is but the flip
side of man the destroyer. The sheer givenness of being is not taken as
the starting point for shared action, but is subservient to this measurer of
all things, man as homo faber.
This meaninglessness, this sovereignty of the human, comes at a grave
cost, the functionality of the political, which in turn reduces human being
to a means to an end, which is itself subservient to the life process. Homo
faber no longer makes a world, but by way of animal laborans produces a
wordlessness, a world alienation.45 Where the public space has been done
away with completely, The reality of the surrounding world can be called
into doubt. Where common sense is lost, where animal laborans no longer
speaks to others, that is, where it no longer performs for and in reaction to
others beyond idle talk, ideologies step in.46
The rise of society brought about the simultaneous decline of the
public as well as the private realm. But the eclipse of a common
public world, so crucial to the formation of the lonely mass man
and so dangerous in the formation of the worldless mentality of
modern ideological mass movements, began with the much more
tangible loss of a privatelyowned share in the world.47
At each turn, the political is displaced. Arendt in her analysis is careful to
frame the political by divesting it of violence, bodily experience, the writ
ten law, representation, and most importantly, the rulerruled relationship.48
Arendt is not just worried about the functionalization of the political and
politics, found in liberalism (which treat politics as a means to private
liberty and accumulation of wealth), conservatism (which wishes to the
use politics for reinstalling the former sources of authority), and Marxism
(which on her account viewed politics as a ladder to be thrown away once
the emancipation of labor has occurred). She is also convinced that political
theory is still won over, ruled over, by a notion of rule, and remains gov
erned by the rulerruled paradigm in democratic and anarchic philosophies
that still dream of a selfrule of the people or multitude. These teleocratic
philosophies of the political are just forms, Arendt argues, of Platonism,
inverted or otherwise.49
It is important to see in all of this Arendts rethinking of rule. For
the Greeks, Arendt claims, the laws were products of making and thus
76
the rule of law itself is a result of a rulerruled and meansend distinction:

Before man began to act, definite space had to be secured and a structure
built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the
public realm of the polis and its structure, the law; legislator and architect
belonged in the same category.50 Thus, despite Aristotles own professed
contempt in the sixth book of the Ethics for those who would confuse poiesis
and praxis, Arendt holds that both Plato and Aristotle elevated the techne51
of making laws to the highest role in politics:
The Socratic school...turned to [poiesis and lawmaking], which
to the Greeks were prepolitical, because they wished to turn against
politics and against action [the legacy of Homeric Greece, the true
import of Platos periogo ge in Book VII of the Republic]. To them,
legislating and the execution [that is, viewing the form of the polis and
bringing it into being, as would an artisan] of decision by vote are
the most legitimate political activities because in them men act like
craftsmen: the result of their action is a tangible product, and its
process has a clearly recognizable end. This is no longer or, rather,
not yet action (praxis), properly speaking, but making (poiesis).52
What Plato and Aristotle wished to rid from the polis was its unreliability,
its uncertainty of outcome, and the frailty of human affairs along with
it. This is clearer in Platos political dialogues, in which just rulers have a
techne, an expertise, analogous, say, to that of the weaver, as in the Statesman,
which they utilize to find the form or eidos of the just state and then in
turn arrange the polis accordingly. And just as there is a violence performed
to matter by the craftsman, so too, Arendt believes, there is an inherent
violence in applying the rulerruled model to the political. The meansend
character of Platos thought is a result of replacing making for acting, of
poiesis for praxis, which in turn leads to a thinking of the political as a form
of rule, through which the ruler as archon is provided with all the means at
his disposal to create a particular end, an eidos seen in the soul of the ruler.
The ultimate end, for Plato, is the provision by the polis of the time needed
for the philosopherkings, who, in thrall to theo ria, wish to turn completely
away from human affairs to the good that is kurios (sovereign) over being,
such that they fix their gaze on that which sheds light on all.53 Thus, in
Platos Republic and in Book X of Aristotles Ethics, the most theoslike life
of theo ria, the bios theo retikos, is definitively and, for the philosophical tradi
tion, all but irrevocably privileged over the bios politikos.
In Plato, we have, for Arendt, the origins of the sovereign and free self,
a self that is able to will its ends54 and remain master and ruler over himself,
such that sovereignty and freedom, selfmastery and autonomy, become the
passpartout of the tradition.55 Only the sovereign can choose the end (and
77
thus the means) and is truly free, just as in the creative freedom of the
poiesis of the artisan.
However, Arendt is unclear about Platos role in the turnabout from
the prephilosophical Greek experience. Arendt also claims that Plato, while
replacing action with making, borrows the divisions of the household for
his political theory. This is apparent upon any reading, say, of book five of
the Republic,56 in which Plato depicts a politeia in which there would be the
conceit, the working fiction, of a united family under the sovereign (kurios)
philosopherking. Is it her suggestion that Plato borrows the metaphors of
the household in order to bolster the rule of the philosopherking? Is it
that, in turn, the politeia is made by the ruler as homo faber in order to
build a political householdall the better that the masters can leave this
enlarged home, not for the space of the public, as in pre-philosophical
experience on Arendts account, but for the pure contemplation of the
forms by way of theo ria? The question is important since it would mean, as
Arendt argues in What is Authority?, that the ruler-ruled relationship is
an analogy from the household, not from the life of homo faber.57 In the
Human Condition, its homo faber and the meansend distinction that forms
the basis for thinking of the polis as bifurcated between ruler and ruled: If
sovereignty is in the realm of action and human affairs what mastership is
in the realm of making and the world of things, then their chief distinction
is that the one can only be achieved by the many bound together, whereas
the other [homo fabers production of a craft] is conceivable in isolation.58
Is it that ruling is a borrowing of one form of life (animal laboransthe
idea of mastery, such as being the master of ones household), which is then
combined with elements of homo faber in order to create the very polis that
would accede to ones demands? Reading Aristotle, Arendt is clearer that
his appeal to nature leads him to borrow the ideas of mastery from the
household, despite his own disavowal of an isonomy between the oikos and
the polis in the Politics.59 It would seem that for Arendt, long before the
rise of the social in the eighteenth century, Plato and Aristotle had already
conflated the zen (living) of the technites and the idiotes, the living proper
to homo faber and animal laborans, respectively. If sovereignty in Foucault
occurs at the moment that the executive power of legislation and the police
function come together, as we will see later in this book, then for Arendt
the thinking of arche as sovereignty (an oftused translation, for example,
for Herodotuss use of the term) occurs at the moment when the ruler
envisions him- or herself both as a maker of the political and the head of
its household. What comes through clearly, in any case, is that the force
of violence found in the home and the poiesis of the artisan becomes the
monopoly of the government.60
Linked to homo faber or animal laborans, or both, Arendt argues that
even where a multitude (demos) seeks to remake politics in its own image
78
(and thus to escape the rule that is proper to the household or the maker),
it remains caught in the same thinking of the political as monarchies and
other regimes. For Arendt, democracy, if it is to live up to its promise,
cannot be one regime among others, which as well note in chapter 6, is a
principle also held by Plato, who argues in Book VIII of the Republic that
democracy is at best a mixture of regimes. The problem, for Arendt, is that
for homo faber, with enough tools and a demos worried about its own security,
everything is possible, especially given the modern subservience of all ends
to the necessities and security of the national household.
Arendts contention is that the prephilosophical experience of poli
tics for the Greeks was quite different:
It was understood as a form of political organization in which citi
zens lived together under conditions of norule, without a division
between ruler and ruled. This notion of norule was expressed by
the word isonomy, whose outstanding characteristic among the
forms of government...was that the notion of rule (the archy
from archein in monarchy and oligarchy, or the cracy from kratein
in democracy) was entirely absent from it.61
In this way, the polis was not a democracy, which still held within it the
notion of rule (the kratos of the demos), and Arendt argues that isonomy
and democracy were in fact opposed,62 though she does equate a certain
thinking of democracy with the essentials of politics: The attempt to
replace acting with making is manifest in the whole body of argument
against democracy, which the more consistently and better reasoned it is,
will turn into an argument against the essentials of politics.63 Note Arendts
use of quotation marks for democracy, suggesting that she is using the word
as a substitution for the earlier concept of isonomy, or at the least leaving
open another thinking, perhaps, of the democratic.
Whether preparing a democracy or not, human beings are not by
nature political, Arendt claims, but rather through homo faber create laws
(nomoi) framing the equality (ison) of the political space, which in turn
protects the freedom of each. This is what Aristotle dubs the thirdbest
regime in the Politics, namely the polity of a multitude acquiescing to
the rule of law. Here, freedom and equality, for Arendt, were received by
virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth,64 though one might question
just what the distinction was for the ancient Greek citystates. In any event,
her argument is that tyranny utilizes the polis for its own needs and thus
has no freedom, which is predicated on acting and being one of the peers
in whose company one should be free.65 Where there is a monarchy, there
is no longer a political space, with the result that there was no freedom
79
extant any longer, either for those ruling (archein) or those being ruled
(archesthai).66 This power to command, to dictate action, is not a matter
of freedom, Arendt concludes, but a question of strength or weakness.67
For Arendt, equality (which always implies a relation to another any
way) and freedom are not properties of a subject or even an actor; it is a
place...where people could come together. Kept to its proper role, homo
faber can create this space. Once homo faber overtakes this space, there is
sovereignty, lordship, and mastery, without freedom. And once the affairs
of homo faber and animal laborans are conflated, absolute domination, the
delusion of omnipotence over a national household, is an everpresent
possibility.
Beginning Again: The ArchE of the Political

The original sin, as it were, that prepared the way for the hell of total domi
nation in the camps was an early disassociation of the Greek words archein
and prattein, which for Arendt belong together if one is to think a political
space of norule, nomeasure, and an arche other than archein (ruling) and
archesthai (being ruled). Liddell and Scotts GreekEnglish lexicon notes that
arche in Homeric Greek meant, as Arendt notes, a beginning, origin, or a
first cause. With Herodotus and in later Attic Greek, arche came to mean
dominion, command, and sovereignty, as well as the very place in which
dominion and sovereignty were located.
Arendts archaeology of the term proceeds by moving the arche prior
to its hierarchization, its regimentation in the philosophical writings of Plato
and Aristotle. In Aristotles Metaphysics, for example, arche is typically trans
lated, as in the Loeb edition, as principle, first principle, or beginning.
Of course, Aristotle himself dwells on defining the various meanings of arche
at the beginning of the fifth book of the Metaphysics, in which he makes
clear the isonomy between his Politics and his Metaphysics, since the arche
of being makes everything that follows from it comprehensible, just as the
rule of the monarch and the master of the home provides the principles
around which these spaces are centered and determined, whether the arche
is understood as a beginning point, the best point at which to begin,68
the first principle69 of philosophy (the law of noncontradiction), God,70
or the source within the psuche that is the basis for decision making and
deliberation (prohairesis) in the Ethics.71 Aristotles task in the Metaphysics
is to discover the arche of all aitiai (causes),72 from which all follows, effi
ciently or otherwise. The principles of this schema are aligned not only with
monarchy73 but also the household.74 Though Arendt herself never cites
these lines, it is apparent that her return to the Greek arche is meant to
counter Aristotles use of the term. She thus turns to another thinking of
80
arche beyond its theoretical dominance in the Metaphysics and the Western
tradition to follow. More importantly for her concerns with regard to action,
she rethinks the arche of action beyond an isonomy between its principle
in the soul and political mastery:
The object of deliberation and the object of choice are the same,
except that when a thing is chosen it has already been determined,
since it is the thing already selected as the result of our deliberation
that is chosen. For a man stops enquiring how he shall act as soon
as he has carried back the origin [archen] of action to himself, and
to the dominant part of himself, for it is this part that chooses. This
may be illustrated by the ancient constitutions [archaio n politeio n]
represented in Homer: the kings used to proclaim to the people
[to i demo i] the measures [anengellon] they had chosen to adopt. As
the object of choice is something within our power which after
deliberation we desire, choice will be a deliberate desire of things
in our power; for we first deliberate, then select, and finally fix our
desire according to the result of our deliberation.75
As for the arche of the Metaphysics, it is oikosontotheological, if one
can excuse the abominable hyphenation, that is, it is thought of as a prin
ciple, as a rule that thinks being (on qua on) in terms of a first and most
sovereign principle (prote kai kurio tate arche76), namely, a God (theos), the
highest life (zo e), that rules over the kosmos as its beginner (huparche), its
principle, and sovereign master. By thinking an arche prior to its meta
physical instantiation in an ontology based on the Greek household (oikos),
as well as its ossification in the oppositions archetelos and archearchesthai,
Arendt not only sets forth a reconsideration of the concepts of the politi
cal, but also the foundational politics of Western metaphysical concepts,
in which there is an isonomy between the sovereignty of the one God and
the mastery of the soul and political rule. This background should not be
missed in her critiques of the priority of the vita contempliva, a life that would
be like a god among men, a formulation found not just in Plato, Aristotle,
and Rousseau, but throughout the history of political thought (or thought
as political).77 The man who is thinking, Aristotle claims, is in unceasing
motion, which is motion in a circle, that is, isolated and enclosed upon
himself, selfsufficient (autarkeia)sovereignly exceptional to the being and
beings over which he stands.78
For her part, Arendt returns to the beginnings of the Greek polis,
arguing that there is an originary relation between beginning (archein) and
acting (prattein). The interdependence of these words meant for Arendt
that the early Greeks would greet as sheer superstition the belief in a
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strong man who did not need the presence of others for his power.79 Rather
than strength, the relatedness of archein and prattein captures a relationship
between beginning, what Arendt will dub natality, and action, the work
one bears after an event to carry through on the promise of what has
been brought into the world. We should catch the double meaning of this
bearing, which is not taken on with ease on Arendts account. There is an
inherent exposure in the relatedness of archein and prattein since it leaves
both a leader and his or her followers open to so many risks and chances
that are essential to the political realm. However, once archein comes to
mean chiefly to rule,
the role of the beginner and leader, who was a primus inter
pares . . . changed into that of a ruler; the original interdependence
of action, the dependence of the beginner and leader upon others for
help and the dependence of his followers upon him for an occasion
to act themselves, split into two altogether different functions: the
functions of giving commands, which became the prerogative of the
ruler, and the function of executing them, which became the duty
of his subjects. This ruler is alone, isolated against others by his
force....In the case of a successful ruler, he may claim for himself
what actually is the achievement of many....Through this claim,
the ruler monopolizes, so to speak, the strength of those without
whose help he would never be able to achieve anything. Thus the
delusion of extraordinary strength arises with it the fallacy of the
strong man who is powerful because he is alone.80
I focus here on Arendts archaeology of arche not simply because these
will be abiding themes for later thinkers such as Foucault and Agamben, but
also because it is often argued that Arendts analyses of natality and politi
cal creation, offers an anarchic thinking of the political in which anything
goes. What Arendt means by bringing arche and prattein together, though,
is that any thinking of action on her part already means a new beginning,
not one that merely disrupts old patterns, but is itself an event, like a
birth, or rather a second birth, through deeds and words that cannot be
anticipated. But it is also a forming of responsibility, of a response, in order
to continue the praxis of act[ing] in concert as it brings new meaning to
the world.81 The vulnerability of acting in concert is constitutive of praxis,
which carries with it both the threat and promise of the arche. But there is
also a principle contained within the arche, without which there would be
no relation between arche and praxis: [W]hat saves the act of beginning from
its own arbitrariness is that it carries its own principle within itself, or to be
more precise, that beginning and principle, principium and principle, are not
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only related to each other but are coeval....[T]he principle inspires the
deeds that are to follow and remains apparent as long as the action lasts.82
This principium, principle and beginning, is the enactment of the perfor
mative contradiction that we saw in Rousseaus social contract, but one that
Arendt makes her starting point: it is a principal legitimated only through
the act itself in a web of relations. The latter is its almost indiscernible,
but allimportant difference from sovereignty, which is selflegitimating and
selfauthorizing (and also legitimatizing and authorizing of the self, of a certain
selfmastery). The nonsovereign act is indexed and is in principle aligned to
a web of relations; its beginning and principal principium, if we can speak this
way, is the fragility of human affairs. This is particularly notable in Arendts
thinking of the promise, which places the action out ahead of itself into a
future that remains futural, nongraspable from the present. The promise,
though it provides a set of guideposts into this future, is always already, in
principle, caught in a web of relations that make these promises nonsover
eign, nonmasterful, at least on her account. Though Arendt doesnt say so,
a whole tradition of thinking on sovereignty had argued that the presentation
and presenting of sovereignty cannot and should not make promises, which
would bind the sovereign to a future of which it should always free itself. This
is prominent in Bodins Six Books on the Republic as well as Rousseaus Social
Contract, in which the sovereign people cannot promise itself into the future,
since this would tie up the general will from its future volitions.
Thus, action, whether as promising or otherwise, is at once overde
termined and undetermined by its principium: there is a beginning, an arche
that is an event in the world (and in thought)83 that cannot be predeter
mined, and thus all action continues on in a frail position without guid
ance, as with the fighters of the Resistance who acted without testament
left from the past.84 And yet, this action is also a reaction to this arche.
It is impossible to take the measure of this chain of archepraxis given the
web of circumstances in which the actor (leader and follower) finds itself.
This is the principium of norule, which does not operate within the logic
of ruling and being ruled. The follower is not being dominated, but rather
is an actor who either acts or doesnt act in solidarity with this arche. The
word follower typically has a negative connotation of being ruled. Arendts
investigation of the use of arche, for example, in Homers Iliad, shows that
this is not the connotation we should take from her use of the word fol
lower, since in a sense, partaking, sharing in words and deeds in a new set
of events, the follower acts in solidarity with the event, and thus leads it
as well as its forerunner. The follower is as free as the leader, which does
not mean that there is disorder and anarchy. There is rather something
overarching about archepraxis: it opens up and shifts the whole web of
relations within the polis, which also means that it shifts not just what is
83
in the polis but the very framework of the polis. Arendt thus emphasizes the
notion of contingency in thinking the political: The moment even a fore
seen event takes place, everything changes, and we can never be prepared
for the inexhaustible literalness of this everything.85 Or as she puts it in
On Violence almost twenty years later, Every action...necessarily destroys
the whole pattern in whose frame the predictions [of the present] move and
where it finds its evidence.86
The arche is not to be thought as a cause (aitia), since to think it
this way would enter the arche back into a linearity of time presupposed
by homo fabera masterful hold that counts time within a series of causes
leading back to the sovereign arche (as in Aristotles prime mover and the
Arche that is the word for God in the Gospel of John). Rather, the originary
arche is a beginning that changes everything, shifting both the past and the
future; this is why each arche is decidedly anarchic, a movement between
what can be measured and the demeasuring of its temporal positioning as a
beginning point as a punctus initium. An arche is within a pregiven ground
of historicity and the weight of a tradition that it nevertheless calls into
question. This is, for Arendt, natalitys nongivenness to the captive modes
of thought. In natality, the event is wholly other and, as Arendt doesnt
tire of repeating, is nonpresent: not present in time and not presentable or
capturable to the grasping hands of the manufacturer (manus plus facere),
homo faber, or the grasping thought of the bios theoretikos.
Here we see clearly that Arendt upends Aristotelian metaphysics even
as she borrows from its metaphysical vocabulary, not just arche but also its
Latinization as principium. We see this best in her translation of Dantes
De Monarchia at the beginning of her chapter on action in The Human
Condition, the epigraph that is little commented upon in the secondary
literature, especially compared to the quotation taken from Isak Dinesen:
All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about
them.87 Allow me to quote in full from both Arendts translation88 and a
more standard translation from Prue Shaw:
Arendt: For in every action what is primarily intended by the doer,
whether he acts from natural necessity or out of free will, is the
disclosure of his own image. Hence it comes about that every doer,
in so far as he does, takes delight in doing; since everything that
is desires its own being, and since in action the being of the doer
is somehow intensified, delight necessarily follows....Thus acting
unless [by acting] it makes patent its latent self.89
Shaw: [F]or in every action the primary aim of the agent, whether
it act because its nature compels it or as a matter of free choice, is
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to reproduce its own likeness. Hence every agent, precisely as agent,
takes pleasure in its own action; for since everything which exists
desires its own being, and in acting the agents being is in some sense
enhanced, of necessity pleasure ensues....Therefore, nothing acts
unless it has the qualities which are to be communicated to the
thing acted upon.90
The two epigraphs that open the chapter Action in The Human Condition,
taken together, mark the fragility of the actor that discloses itself in order
to make its story in concert with others. Arendt is thus able to point to the
pleasure of acting that can renew a world while bearing (her translation
for the Latinization of praxis, gerere) the sorrows of its history. They mark a
call to act, to return to the public space despite the shadows of the death
camps, continued imperialism, and the threat of nuclear war under which
she was writing. Taken together, these two epigraphs act as a manifesto
against political quietism. What is particularly mischievous about Arendts
use of this quote is that in these passages Dante offers his own manifesto
for sovereignty, in particular the state form of monarchy tied to a religious
thinking of God. The actor to whom Dante refersand Arendt notably
leaves out the sentences that surround her citationis the monarch, the
one who is capable of [potest] ruling and is capable of [potest] disposing
others [alios disponere] best.91 This ruler, this principal, who is a single sov
ereign authority set over all others in time, that is to say, over all authorities
which operate in those things and over those things which are measured by
time [unicus principatus et super omnes in tempore vel in hiis et super hiis que
tempore mensurantur]92 wants nothing other than to reproduce its own like
ness [propriam similitutidenem explicare] in a multitude that is nothing other
than the effect of sovereign agency. He thus disposes them as he wishes,
according to his own whim (arbitrium),93 and his pleasure is derived from
his power to communicate himself, to enhance (amplietur) himself. Here
the polis would be nothing other than a simulacrum of plurality, which is
but the extension of the potestas of the principium.
The authority for this sovereignty, the defense offered for a sovereignty
circling in its own similitude, is Aristotle. Directly after the passage Arendt
cites, Dante quotes from Aristotles Metaphysics: Therefore nothing acts unless
it has the qualities which are to be communicated to the thing acted upon;
hence Aristotle in the Metaphysics says, The movement from potentiality
to actuality comes about by means of something which is already actual.94
Arendts translation of Dantes De Monarchia performs a turnabout
of Dantes sovereigntism, underlining, in its translational erasure, all the
problems of sovereignty, while also targeting the Aristotelian metaphysics
underlying Dantes politics. In thinking another arche and praxis, another
85
principium and gerere, which Arendt notably translates as bearingtherein

aligning her thinking of nonsovereignty with Dinesens bearing of sor
rowsArendt dismantles the Aristotelian metaphysical edifice, or at the
least, attempts to separate his Metaphysics from the archepraxis of the politi
cal. As she explains later, the abyss opened up in the event of beginning
and action cannot be accounted for by a certain temporality of cause and
effect, of a series of now points between a first cause, derived from the prime
mover or an origin in the psuche, and all later effects within the divine
substance. Such a substantiality of the political and of time is called into
question. For her, against Dante, the event of beginning, of natality, can
not be accounted for by a reliable cause and effect and is inexplicable in
the Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality.95 That is to say, it
is explicable and accountable only if one presumes a measure and measur
ability of (political) being and nonplurality.
We can now understand better the implications of Arendts thinking
of action and her critique of sovereignty. What begins, she writes, cannot
be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of
startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and origins.96 There
is something anarchic about the arche of action: it begins but also takes
place against a backdrop of the web of human relationships, in which
each actor, taking an initiative, risks disclosure of his or her singularity
the who that can never be reduced to a whatdespite the fact that
no actor can ever take credit for all that follows from his or her actions.
This web of relations ensures that the results of each action, as events, are
unforeseeable; each is completely futural, beyond the sight of the present
gaze.97 The actor is expose[d], placed outside of herself (exposere), into
what can seem an anarchic set of relations. Indeed, this is what makes the
arche of action principled in the strict sense: it sets a course as event within
the realm of the polis that is nevertheless underdetermined, given actions
web of relations. As weve noted, the actor is never alone, but always in
relations with others; this is Arendts definition of power: the ability to act
in concert while disclos[ing] oneself without ever either knowing himself
or being able to calculate beforehand whom he reveals.98 It is for the glory
of this acting togetherand for a communal remembrance, a mourning, of
the actors of the pastthat the polis was created:
The original, prephilosophic Greek remedy for this frailty [that is,
the loss of remembrance of the actors once they had left the scene,
Homer notwithstanding] had been the foundation of the polis. The
polis, as it grew out of and remained rooted in the Greek prepolis
experience and estimate of what makes it worthwhile for men to
live together (syzen), namely the sharing of words and deeds had a
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twofold function:...to multiply the occasions to win immortal
fame [and] for the chances that a deed deserving fame would not
be forgotten.99
As a place of organized remembrance, of mourning, the polis is a

space without necessarily a particular topos; it exists wherever there is an
isonomy among human beings and wherever it is the organization of the
people as it arises out of acting and speaking together.100 The human capac
ity for action is predicated first on having a space within which there is an
inherent equality. This space can be put into place through the nomoi of
homo faber or the promises of an actor or actors taking initiatives through
revolutions.101 Where praxis does not live up to the principium, the arche,
revolutions fail. One should not miss, in all of the above, Arendts references
to organized spaces, frameworks for action, and what she also calls the
formal constitution of the public realm.102 Action requires its frameworks
out of which its own principium can renew the very space of this world.
Those who misunderstand Arendts project will always see her championing,
with the idea of natality and the beginning that inserts the human being
into the political realm, a dangerous anarchism. But this critique remains
within a conception that there must be some rule to the political itself, so
many means to keep it measured; this thinking is typical of philosophies of
the halfmeasure, of those that resist the event that would be democratic
or isonomic. And this event is resisted through the mastery of the political,
producing a mechanism like any other, without the plurality that counter
intuitively makes ones words and deeds matter in a web of relations with
others. Arendt calls our attention to the urgency of recognizing the loss
of this web of relations, this plurality of singularities of the public space:
We are perhaps the first generation which has become fully aware
of the murderous consequences inherent in a line of thought that
forces one to admit that all means, provided that they are efficient,
are permissible and justified to pursue something defined as an
end....As long as we believe that we deal with ends and means
in the political realm, we shall not be able to prevent anybodys
using all means to pursue recognized ends.103
Action and freedom have no other end but themselves, which is to say
that action aims at the continuation of the polis itself, the space of freedom
and equality. Freedom, she writes, is actually the reason men live together
in political organizations at all. And action has no end in another sense:
The reason that we are never able to foretell with certainty the outcome
and end of any action is simply that action has no end. The process of a
87
single deed can quite literally endure throughout time.104 It is this process
character of actionan arche a priori to the formal opposition of archetelos
in Aristotlethat has led Western thought:
It is in accordance with the great tradition of Western thought to
think along these lines: to accuse freedom of luring man in necessity,
to condemn action, the spontaneous beginning of something new,
because its results fall into a predetermined net of relationships,
invariably dragging the agent [exposing it], who seems to forfeit
his freedom [as mastery] the very moment he makes use of it. The
only salvation from this kind of freedom [as archepraxis] seems to
lie in nonacting . . . as the only means to safeguard ones sovereignty
and integrity as a person.105
When sovereignty is aligned with freedom, mastery and dominion temper
any exposure of the self. Arendt emphasizes, If it is true that sovereignty
and freedom are the same, then indeed no man could be free, because
sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising selfsufficiency, mastership and
selfmastery, is contradictory to the very condition of plurality.106
However, no man can be sovereign because not one man, but men,
inhabit the earth.107 No one can be sovereign over ones acts, and no ruler,
as archo n, can master the future that is the mark of plurality. This is the
originary fiction of sovereignty, as Agamben puts it, and sovereignty is paid
for by the price of reality.108 It is a presumption of omnipotence, of being
a god that can fully master human affairs, and we have seen how close this
delusion of omnipotence has come to pass. The camps were an attempt
to do away with plurality, and in its nihilismall ends became means to
another endthe future.
Sovereignty, which is always spurious if claimed by an isolated entity,
be it the individual entity of the person or the collective entity
of a nation, assumes, in the case of many men mutually bound by
promises [that is, treaties and islands of predictability within the
archepraxis web of relations of the public space] a certain limited
reality. The sovereignty resides in the resulting, limited independence
from the incalculability of the future....This superiority derives
from the capacity to dispose of the future as though it were the
present, that is, the enormous and truly miraculous enlargement of
the very dimension in which power can be effective.109
Here Arendt makes full her alignment of homo faber with sovereignty, the
making of objects, and the making of human beings that would preclude
88
the future, calculating and measuring out, and thus putting a rule over
the incalculable. This temptation to rid the political of freedom, of
its dangers and promise, is hubris: Aspiration toward omnipotence always
impliesapart from its utopian hubristhe destruction of plurality.110 And
sovereign hubris, she writes, is the political temptation par excellence.111
Hubris, as Arendt indicates, was not just, as is normally thought, a
slight against the gods, but rather was an insult, an outrage to the work
ings of the early democracy of Greece, since there is an assumption that one
is above all others, outside all laws and beyond equality even thought as
primus inter pares. Hubris is the presumptive height of sovereignty, one that
surveys the political while using it for ones own means. As Demosthenes
puts it in Against Medeia, In a democracy, there must never be a citizen
so powerful that his support can ensure that one party submits to outrages
[hubristhai] and the other escapes punishment. This is the case where some
believe themselves masters of the polis.112 The political danger of hubris is
that there will be one who upends the democratic, isonomic order to act
sovereignly over others, to outrage those who are unequals among equals,
as Arendt puts it. Aristotle, too, sees in the Rhetoric113 the dangers of hubris,
since it seems not to attack a particular person, but the inbetween space
that is the place of plurality for Arendt.
Finding a Home in the Political

Does Arendts work nevertheless foreclose the future of the political, as
has often been argued, since there is too much homo faber at work in her
demarcations among the vitae activae, especially in her critique of the social?
Arendt famously argued to Albrecht Wellmer at a 1972 conference that
homelessness and the problem of housing were not political issues, despite
her earlier contention in Origins that homelessness of an unprecedented
scale was the political problem par excellence, a key element that helped to
crystallize the formation of totalitarianism. Arendt could of course argue that
she differentiates between political and economic homelessness, just as the
American government makes a distinction between political and economic
refugees. (The former are allowed access to immigration to make a case for
staying within the United States; the latter, such as Haitian refugees in the
late 1990s, are sent back to their country of origin.) But this misses the key
point that homelessness is a blight because it is the precondition for the
political in Arendts own terms. Let me quote from Arendts preface to the
Origins of Totalitarianism:
Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances,
we watch the development of the same phenomenahomeless
89
ness of an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented

depth....[N]ever have we depended so much on political forces
that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and
selfinterestforces that look like sheer insanity. . . . It is as though
mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human
omnipotence...and those for whom powerlessness has become
the major experience of their lives.114
It is political homelessness, she argues, that set the conditions such
that the very phrase human rights became for all concernedvictims,
persecutors, and onlookers alikethe evidence of hopeless idealism or fum
bling feebleminded hypocrisy.115 A certain violence is committed in the cut
between the political and the nonpolitical, and a hierarchy that Arendt puts
in place between the various vitae activae, which is to say, an introduction
of a ruling of one life over another form of life.
We have seen that that the animal laborans could be redeemed
from its predicament of imprisonment in the everrecurring cycle
of the life process, of being forever subject to the necessity of labor
and consumption only through the mobilization of another human
capacity, the capacity of making, fabricating, and producing of homo
faber, who as a tool maker not only eases the pain and troubles
of laboring but also erects a world of durability. The redemption of
life, which is sustained by labor, is worldliness....What in each
of these instances saves manman qua animal laborans, qua homo
faber, qua thinkeris something altogether different...it is like
a miracle.116
Wendy Brown joins those arguing that Arendts work reasserts the purity,
autonomy, and sovereignty of the political and, as such, cannot help tho
se interested in recasting and rethinking the problems of globalization in
terms of an economically based radical democratic politics.117 Brown rightly
discusses the shortcomings of Arendts analyses with regard to Marx and
political economythat is, both the phenomena of the rise of bourgeois
capitalism and Marxist theory to combat itas a symptom of the rise of
the social since the eighteenth century. Like Foucault, Arendt reduces Marx
(the thinker who both believed reduced too many disparate phenomena
to an economic determinism, a particular key to history) to a moment
in a larger history of modern life, as an ideology of the rise of the life of
labor and the priority in the modern period of life as mere survival. This
move, by Arendt and, as we shall see, by Foucault, may be too clever by
half, since as Brown points out, it disarms radical democrats of the very
90
means to resist the pernicious sovereignty of capitalism, whose movement

has undermined presumptions of other traditional sovereignties: those of the
self, nations, and states.
Arendt, for her part, would assert that she never sought a restoration
of the sovereignty of the political, but rather attempted to rethink action
itself, and thus the event that might give rise to the unforeseeable on the
flip side of the coin of the realm, sovereign capital, and indeed all forms
of sovereignty. Nevertheless, she does argue for an autarkeia of the political
and for its selfsufficiency,118 which elsewhere was a mark of sovereignty for
Arendt.119 This selfsufficiency, along with the circulation of the freedom of
the political that only comes back to the saving of this freedom, has led
many critics to suggest that not only is politics rare, as Arendt herself argued,
but also rarefied. We read in Arendt about all that is prepolitical: the body,
violence, economics, and even, despite her claims in Origins to the contrary,
the social problems of the Heimatlose, the refugees, the sanspapiers. Arendt
never tires of reminding us of the few times in which there has been a
spacing of the political not under the thumb of the rulerruled relation: the
Athenian polis, the brief time after the American Revolution, the communes
of 1848, the early Soviets of 1917, all of which, she argues in On Revolution,
follow a certain committee system of the direct actions of participants.
Arendt is right to point to the fragility of the web of relations of the
political, its very spacing and strange temporality that is discomfiting to
conceptualization. Nevertheless, we could add a host of concerns to those of
Wendy Brown about the strategic dismant[ling] of metaphysics in Arendt:
its reliance on a quasitheological rhetoric of redemption and salvation,
which are overdetermined secularized theological concepts;120 a focus on
nativity even at the same time as she shows all the dangers of any thinking
linked to nativism and nationalism, that is, to a thinking of birth; and
Arendts dream of a pure word, a pure act, that would leave its own trace
without the writing of homo faber.121 The latter leads Arendt into critiques
of all forms of representation, both in writing and in politics, even as she
underlines a self-mastery of those who write. It also leads Arendt into a
valorization of promises that are actions, as opposed to the dead letters
of law writing by homo faber. She thus privileges the pure words or acts
of promising that nevertheless provide islands of certainty into the future.
And it is here, where Arendt measures her words so carefully, taking the
measure of the power of words, written and oral, that she takes a measure
of the politics of action, since one must measure the actions as promises,
since too many promises overbind the political, and too few leave politics
with too many islands of uncertainty.122
In any event, it is the first and last cut that Arendt makes with regard
to the political that demonstrates a reinsertion of sovereignty as the basis
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of her politics while also showing that perhaps such a reinsertion is unpre
ventable. At the level of her archaeology and her depiction of the rise of
the social, the latter is quite clear: politics is fragile. Its web of relations, on
her account, can and often has ossified into a banausic and banning social
realm. But this also occurs at the level of Arendts accounting and measuring
of the immeasurable, of another arche of the political, there where it must
ban the banausikoi and zo e.
Leaving aside for the moment Arendts political theology123one in
service to a secularization of the political but one perhaps overdetermined
by the language of a tradition that she could not controlit is Arendt who
invokes and argues for the distinction between bios and zo e that she believes
is to be found in Aristotle, the bifurcation of a life of meaning and the
meaningless life of the social and the oikos that founds all of her political
categories. And it is the concerns of the oikos and even the concern for a
political home that must also be banned, along with, it should be noted, the
barbarians and despots to the East and those speaking a nonlanguage
to the Southall to secure, to save and salvage, to redeem the miracle
of the political. Such a thinking may make this space autarkic and give it
a renewed dignity, but it also makes politics rare and rarefied as a world
outside the somatic zo e and thus ever transcendent, a world saving itself
in the name of its masterful and godlike form of life, an autos circling
itself and moving, it seems, without being moved. This ideal of autarky is
an illusion and illusory,124 Arendt argues, built by a master homo faberan
archetechto nthat as an architect constructs the political not on the basis of
an ideology of the animal laborans or the homo faber, but on the basis of that
of the bios politikos protecting its proper place in the world.125 This is the
ideology of a politics that can carefully demarcate itself as it writes at one
and the same time that a life without speech and without action is literal
ly dead to the world [and] has ceased to be a human life,126 and that politics
has never been and never will be the way of life of the many.127 The irony
of Agambens analysis of sovereignty in the first volume of Homo Saceras
the sovereign decision over the inclusion/exclusion of bios and zo eis that
whatever its problems of a generalized analysis of Western metaphysics, it
is a particularly devastating diagnostic for the work of Arendt, from whom
he borrows many of his most important concepts. The irony, given her
influence on Agamben, is that Arendt may be alone in falling completely
under the critique of the Agambenian type. Far from calling into question
this supposed distinction, Arendt valorizes it, displacing life as such (zo e)
to its place outside the polis. And in doing so, Arendt wants to depoliticize
the suppression that marks this placement of the borders between the polis
and the oikos, between political body and the laboring body, between the
space of freedom and the social realm of necessityin two words, between
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bios and zo e. Here, we have the instantiation of the light of the polis and a
true space of exceptionality, which she earlier dubbed the dark background
of mere givenness.128 Of course, in the dark background, we have, on
Arendts account, the worst violence, the worst forms of mastery, but all
over a type of life placed outside the law and, she dubs, irredeemable.129
We have seen in the enslavement of the Greek majority (by popula
tion) and other such moments of the political (the time of the American
Revolution) how true this account may be of lives forever dubbed from
within the law as not worth living. But Arendts politics offers its silent
consent to whatever happens beyond its walls, which is to say, it is always
responding (negatively) to the other of the political, zo e on Arendts account,
which is banned from activitypolitics is then nothing but this ongoing pra
xis of violent differentiation, that is to say, an activity of exclusion. Such
a move precludes the future, the promise of politics, and a democracy in
quotation marks that would by her own definition have to free itself of any
particular determination.
Yet, this is not the end of the story in Arendt, who offers a thinking
of the event, of an arche that transcends in principle all anticipation,130
even where she is careful to count out our promises, to count out the
number making up the polis, and to keep measuring the immeasurable. It
is not enough to think the arche of the political in terms of its supposed
Greek origins, but to return, as in Arendt, to its very spacing, its atopology
(which is not the same as a utopianism) and its unforseeability, there where
it marks our fragility and our attempts to come together, to live together
(syzen), not en corps, but again and still, encore, in thinking the impossible
solidarity of appositions of sovereignty and its evil hubris. If one is to leave
the political open to the event, and thus to the other, to the futurity of
the future beyond its present forseeability, and thus beyond a certain cir
culation and encircling of the political, one must alas, admit the abject
desolation [of praxis] that carries with it the everpresent threat of radical
evil and...the activity of beginning that allows for the transformation
and fragile redemption of finitude itself, a transformation that holds at bay
but never eradicates this threat.131
This is all to say that the problem of the Heimatlose and stateless that
Arendt discussed early and often in her work is not nonpolitical, since it is
the nomoi on Arendts account that at the same time mark the polis and the
spaces of the oikoi, or to put it another way, it is the political as founded
on an originary violence, a vicious circle that comes back to reinforce this
violence of the forces of the nemein (the giving and partitioning of law)
of the political. Superfluidity is the political problem par excellence, and
altermondialistes taking on sovereignty and all its figures and figuring, its
functionalization of the world, are its promise.
93
The political, if it is to have any meaning beyond what Arendt calls

a desert, or the desert as the real, must disrupt any single meaning it would
have, giving it over, as Arendt suggests, to the responsibility of ones time,
of the time that is out of joint between past and future. Allow me to quote
from Arendt at length on just this point:
In the last analysis, the human world is always the product of mans
amor mundi, a human artifice whose potential immortality is always
subject to the mortality of those who build it and the natality of those
who come to live in it. What Hamlet said is always true: The time
is out of joint; o cursed spite/ That ever I was born to set it right!
In this sense, in its need for beginners that it may be begun anew,
the world is always a desert....[O]ut of the specific conditions of
our contemporary world, which menace us with nothingness and
nobodyness, may grow the question, why is there anybody at all
and not rather nobody? These questions may sound nihilistic, but
they are not. On the contrary, they are the antinihilistic questions
asked in the objective situation of nihilism where nothingness and
nobodyness threaten to destroy the world.132
If Arendt is to leave us a thinking of the spacing of freedom in the time
that is out of joint, if she is to give us a thinking of the betweenspace of
the world and an interesse that interests us, it will give itself over to its
inherent and unruly plurality, the surprise that we take on and leaves us
open to another future among us. This would be thus also open to another
arche no longer sheltered on high, but in the tangential spacing of the world
whose principle and starting point is nonsovereign and unconditional for
any politics neither too rarefied nor too functional to be left to nobody,
that is, one that stands for another arche and principium of the political.
This first and last principle, as we will argue in the next chapter, is the
right to have rights.
THREE
The World is at Stake

Sovereignty and the Right to Have Rights
Jos MorenoOcampo knows how difficult his position is. Im a state

less prosecutorI have 100 states under my jurisdiction and zero police
men, he said....But he does not see his court as a token body. No. No!
Wrong! he said, swinging his arms one Saturday afternoon as we strolled
by The Hagues medieval prison. He recounted how he had explained the
court to his 13yearold son: My son is studying the Spanish conquerors
in Latin America. Yesterday he says to me, They killed 90 percent of
the Indians, so today youd put them in jail? I said: Yes. Exactly. What
happened to the native populations in the U.S. and Latin America could
not happen today with the [International Criminal Court]. Absolutely.
Absolutely. We are evolving. Humanity is not just sitting. There is a new
concept. The history of human beings is war and violence; now were say
ing this institution is here to prevent crimes against humanity.
Rubin, If Not Peace, Then Justice, New York Times Magazine
In comparison with the insane endresultconcentration camp soci
etythe process by which men are prepared for this end, and the meth
ods by which individuals are adapted to these conditions, are transparent
and logical. The insane mass manufacture [fitting no utilitarian purpose
and no raison dtat] is preceded by the historically and political intelli
gible preparation of living corpses. The impetus and what is more impor
tant, the silent consent to such unprecedented conditions are the products
of those events in which a period of political disintegration suddenly and
unexpectedly made hundreds of thousands of human beings homeless,
stateless, outlawed and unwanted, while millions of human beings were
made economically superfluous and socially burdensome by unemploy
ment. This in turn could only happen because the Rights of Man, which
had never been philosophically established but merely formulated, which
95
96

had never been politically secured but never proclaimed, have, in their
traditional form, lost all validity.
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism
Created by the so-called Rome Statute in 1998, the International Criminal

Court (ICC) began its work in 2003 to prosecute crimes against genocide
and other socalled crimes against humanity. The ICC is premised on the
belief that finally the perpetrators of political crimes, those who, in Arendts
famous words, carr[y] out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with
a diversity of others, can be brought to justice, that is, before a tribunal
outside a sovereign jurisdiction, outside a particular state, and thus outside
a court of victors.1 The ICCs creation must be thought as part of the legacy
of Arendts writings. It is clear, nevertheless, that international justice and
the rise of international institutions meant to stem attacks upon diversity as
such are at best still stories to tell our children.2 Yes, yes, we can tell them,
like the ICC prosecutor above and all of our ministers of culture, we have
become better, progress has been made, and might no longer means right,
and sovereignty plays no role in the distribution of justice in our age: we no
longer share with our children the fables of La Fontaine. We dream that we
could, to put a turn on Arendts famous quip that politics is not a nursery,
make right the politics we describe to our children in their nurseries, but we
know better. MorenoOcampo acknowledges, even as he tells his son progress
has been made, that justice for the mass slaughters committed by the power
ful upon the weak occurs only when the powerful become the weak, when
leaders are deposed and their former enemies turn them over to the ICC and
other tribunals. This stateless prosecutors work should not be diminished;
his attempt is to bring force to what Arendt called in Origins of Totalitarianism
a right to have rights. The stateless prosecutors work may be beyond the
hope of the stateless the world over, the refugees (the enemies of sovereign
state entities, the police agencies, genocidaires, and death squads) that we like
to tell our children, and thus our histories guardians, we will defend. From
the treatment of those who ordered torture in the U.S. in the last decade
to the 2012 decision over Pakistans corrupt president, we know well the
protective fortress our police states build around sovereign immunity. For
now, the idea that the most powerful will be brought to justice, that is, to
account for themselves and their crimes, to count themselves among others
outside a presupposed omnipotence, is just a childrens story, and a not at
all convincing one at that. Arendt was right: politics is not for the nursery,
even if it carries on with various fables and mysticisms.
Nevertheless, for Arendt, the lessons of a new politics must be thought
with the infinite possibility signaled by each newborn. Arendtian natality, as
we have argued, is the obverse of the patrimonial thinking of seniority and
THE WORLD IS AT STAKE
97
sovereignty.3 Let me commence with a long quotation from the first page
of Origins of Totalitarianism, because it gets to a certain melancholia of the
political that was a mark of her texts.
We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world
order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses
of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced
by violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all
that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and
disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same
phenomenahomelessness of an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to
an unprecedented depth. . . . [N]ever have we depended so much on
political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common
sense and selfinterestforces that look like sheer insanity....It
is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe
in human omnipotence...and those for whom powerlessness has
become the major experience of their lives.4
These passages are important, since Arendt makes a broad claim: that
superfluidity, the claims of the Heimatlose, is a political problem, if not the
political problem par excellence. We have seen how Arendt later vitiates
this claim. For now it is enough to follow Arendts argument about this
belief in omnipotence. The answer politically for Arendt to the problems of
modernity will not be to rearrange the relations of sovereignty. Rather, by
renouncing sovereignty altogether, as we argued in the last chapter, Arendt
rethinks the relationship between rulers and ruled, as well as the powerful
and the powerless in its most archaic and basic form. With a clarity of terms
that defines her work, Arendt aligns the central theme of her writing (free
dom) with what it must renounce (sovereignty): If men wish to be free,
it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.5 A concluding sentence to
a section of What is Freedom? these words could find themselves written
as an epigraph to all of Arendts work: No totalitarianism without the force
of sovereignty in the fictional worlds of totalitarian states; no plurality
without sovereignty; no thinking of nature without a questioning of the
mastery and sovereignty of humanity over it; and no thought itself without
a questioning and undermining of the sovereignty and mastery of the self
in the Life of the Mind. To follow up on all of the places in Arendts work
in which sovereignty as such is questioned and critiqued would be an ency
clopedic task, one that I fear would not only try the patience of my reader,
but also lose track of the importance of this questioning of sovereignty
itself. In this chapter, I instead focus on Arendts depiction of sovereignty
in its nationstate form, though it will also become clear that Arendts
critique is aligned with her questioning of the sovereignty of an isolated
98
and selfmastering self, a sovereignty that would preclude the givenness of

thought as depicted in The Life of the Mind.
Sovereign Totalitarianism
Arendts political theoryshe famously resisted being called a philoso
pher6is best known, as weve seen, for its famed diaresis or division of
political terms, each one followed up with a diachronic analysis of the terms
meaning for political philosophy. Arendt cuts away widely used political
terms in order to understand better their functions for the political. The
whole of the Origins of Totalitarianism, one often surmises, is less interested
in bearing witness to the political evils under investigation (better done
elsewhere) than getting the terms correctall then to describe the politi
cal reality.7
Totalitarianism, Arendt often repeated, is not tyranny and not authori
tarianism, and the latter two are not interchangeable as political terms
either. Neither are power, authority, strength, or other central political con
cepts whose confusion, Arendt believed, led into false aporias that neglected
the true paradoxes of the political. Each diaresis then is followed with an
excavation of the terms use and abuse in the tradition: authority traced back
to the Roman founding and auctoritas (authority), which Plato attempted,
but failed to create in the Republic; the publicprivate distinction found in
the quotidian life of preclassical Greece, but undone by a hostile philo
sophical tradition enamored with homo faber, which treated the political as
something to be made; the rise of the social that begins with modernity
and marks the eruption of the needs of the household and its private suffer
ing into the public realm; as well as revolutionary tradition, the brief time
of political action, for Arendt, that erupts the supposed continuity of the
modern period. Finally, when Arendt writes that freedom is not sovereignty,
she turns against a tradition that had aligned the terms in important ways
that had consequences beyond the life of the mind.
Our question in what follows is whether these two terms can be plied
apart as easily as Arendt at times suggests, whether, to put it another way,
plurality never admits of a certain sovereignty in its midst, whether plurality
as such can ever a priori secure itself from the evil of sovereignty without
giving up what makes it open to the incalculable and the comewhatmay
of plurality in the first place. This is not to defend the state and statements
of sovereignty, but rather to admit the threat of sovereignty in the risk of
action. In the section that follows, we will rehearse Arendts critique of
national sovereignty in Origins of Totalitarianism, where, in just a few pas
sages from the section on Imperialism, she crystallizes many of the themes
that she would follow in her later work. Ultimately, we will be led by what
99
Arendts considerations of sovereignty leave for thinking toward an incalcu

lable future beyond sovereignty, a democratic future, perhaps, a democracy to
come, one that will always in put question all our comforts and comfortable
assumptions here and now.
In the last chapter, we were led to Arendts considerations on a politics
without a rulerruled relationship in The Human Condition. Life beyond mere
existence, as Arendt describes it, depends on rethinking the traditional
dichotomy between anarchy and rulebased political systems, including the
socalled regime of democracy. Such a rethinking is not a philosophical or
philological archaism, even if it concerns the arche of the political.
She touches on this work with brutal clarity in Origins of Totalitarianism,
in particular the section entitled The Decline and Fall of the NationState.
The last section before Totalitarianism, Decline and Fall both temporally
and textually hovers just before the abyss of the late 1930s and the complete
failure of the nationstate system, of the rights of man and citizen proclaimed
during the French Revolution, and the dangerously abstract notions of the
dignity of the human rendered obsolete by the interwar refugees of Europe,
who were the postcolonial counterparts of the scum of the Earth whose
very faces had provided such shattering experiences for the imperialists of
an earlier era. Imperialism had been brought back to Europe, creating, along
with capitalism, millions of superfluous people outside of any sovereignty,
or rather, as Arendt rightly claims, under the power of security apparatuses
that more and more held sovereignty within the nationstates of Europe.
If imperialism, as Arendt claimed, was a mix of superfluous mobs ready
to perform the work of colonialists, guided by elite bureaucrats and their
fanciful race theories, then Europe was ready to experience a rough justice
as imperialism returned in its virulent form to Europe.8 Superfluidity was
no longer a subterranean concern on the margins of Empires; it was a
political problem that, the end of World War II notwithstanding, remains
with us today.
What Arendt describes in Decline and Fall is the basis for what
will become her political ontology: a waning of authority and a cataclys
mic statelessness that gave bureaucratsespecially the policeremarkable
power. What had occurred is a lay[ing] bare of the hidden frame of
Western politics. The stateless, whose numbers grew exponentially during
the interwar period, presented, according to Arendt, a living repudiation
of the ideals of a certain Rousseauism and the belief and credit given to
the paradoxical rights of man and citizen.9 It is the rights accorded to the
citizen, but not the human being as such, that would confound the ideal
ism behind the 1789 Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which was
absurdly defunct for the very people the comity of nations was meant to
protect. Given recent discussions about politics at distance from the state,
100
for instance, in Badiou, Critchley, and JeanLuc Nancy to some extent, its
worth recalling, without defending the modern states of sovereignty, that
we have long had such a politics: for the Jews, for the Latino immigrant
in the United States, for blacks in the Jim Crowera South, for the Roma
expelled from France in 2010, etc., etc.those who were simply abandoned
by the state into exceptional zones of illegality.

For Arendt, the intrawar period witnessed the final conquest of the state
by the nation, which had grown in power as the supposedly absolute mon
archies waned. The Origins of Totalitarianism, in a sense, denotes the shift in
political sovereignty from monarchies, to the racethinking of nations, to
nations of peoples (French, German, and so on), and finally to the complete
subservience of the state to national sovereignty. Part of the task of Origins is
to map the history of nationalism and racism, which later provided the bricks
and mortar for the mystical foundation of totalitarianism. Consciousness of
nationalism, Arendt explains, is not an ageold phenomenon. The states
raison dtre, its raison dtat, was to protect all inhabitants in its territory no
matter what their nationality....[T]he peoples rising national conscious
ness interfered with these functions.10 Only nationals were to be recog
nized as citizens, and nationalism would eventually become the glue holding
together the nationstate as the rise of capitalism brought social atomization.
The only remaining bond between the citizens of a nationstate without a
monarch to symbolize their essential community, seemed to be a national,
that is, common origin.11 Nationalism, then, became the precious cement
for binding together a centralized state and atomized society, and it actually
proved to be the only working, live connection between individuals of the
nationstate.12 Nativity and birth replaced the monarch in symboliz[ing]
their essential community: the race thinking before the racism of the nine
teenth and twentieth centuries, according to Arendt. Totalitarianism was
nothing but, in Arendts eyes, the telos of this nationalism, since in totali
tarianism all laws and legal institutions of the state as such are interpreted
as a means for the welfare of nation.13 Arendts critique of liberal, social
atomizationor its valorization of this atomizationis that this hyperindi
vidualism is but the flip side of a nationalist cementing of the social bond:
This discrepancy between a centralized state and an atomized
(individualized, liberal) society was to be bridged through the solid
cement of a national sentiment, which proved to be the only work
ing living connection between the individuals of the nationstate.
As the sovereignty of the nation was shaped after the model of
101
the sovereignty of the individual, so the sovereignty of the state

as national state was the representative and (in its totalitarian
forms) the monopolizer of both. The state conquered by the nation
became the supreme individual before which all other individuals
had to bow.14
The corollary of national sovereignty is a placement of the means of violence
in a permanent apparatus of police, military, and bureaucracies meant to
protect le peuple en corps, as Rousseau called them, from the refugees and
strangers contaminating its purity, that is, to protect the safety, security, and
welfare of the nation.
There has been a fundamental contestation, at least since Rousseau,
as Judith Shklar notes, in the notion of the people. Whereas thinkers from
Rousseau to Ernesto Laclau,15 Giorgio Agamben,16 and JeanLuc Nancy17 in
the contemporary period have championed a thinking of the people as
a collection of hommes faibles resisting sovereignty, the people also, of
course, has a troubling history as the very body of a collective entity that
defends itself against the scourge of these hommes faibles: the refugees, the
statelessthose on the frontiers of the political. Man had hardly appeared
as a completely emancipated entity...carry[ing] his dignity within him
self without some reference to a larger encompassing order, when he disap
peared again into a member of a people.18 Wherever the people has been
thought en corps, as a body to be protected, nativism and nationalism follow,
even by those hommes faibles who have found that politically, their rights
can only be the develop[ment] of a fierce, violent group consciousness.19
Arendt is herself dismissive of the political uses of the term les hommes
faibles since, for her, it is greatness, not powerlessness, that can create
solidarityas opposed to a generalized pity that brings violence into the
political (her example being the needs of the poor used as the basis for
control during the French Revolution). There is much to say for Arendts
analysis of pity in On Revolution and elsewhere, as she attempts to account
for the Terror and the utilization of the poor by leaders in revolutions
since. Coldhearted as it appears, Arendt analysis is not simply reactionary
in arguing that, for some leaders, there is a need for the presence of mis
fortune [since without it] pity could not exist, and therefore [Robespierre
et al.] have just as much vested interest in the existence of the unhappy
as thirst for power has a vested interest in the existence of the weak.20
Of course, there is a shadow of Hegels masterslave dialectic here, and
Arendt is copping from lines often used by reactionaries dating to the days
of Burke. Moreoever, her descriptions of the use of pity during the French
revolutionary period are animated more by the often incoherent writings of
Robespierre than Rousseau, and thus she is led to considerations of pitys
102
cruelty, notable when Robespierre writes, Thus the clever and helpful
surgeon with his cruel and benevolent knife cuts off the gangrened limb
in order to save the body of the sick man apropos the need to destroy
the supposed partisans of the ancien rgime.21
Arendt does not, however, connect Robespierres nationalism to what
she had earlier written in Origins: Robespierre does not speak out of pity
(though he does use that language), but for a sovereign violencea usur
pation of sovereign power22since he envisions his duty as embodying this
single will, this single body politic; pity is but the selfperpetuating narrative
foundation for this sovereignty. He also speaks for an incipient biopower, as
Foucault will call it, or what Arendt describes as a care for the preservation
of life, both of the individual and the species.23 No matter. For Arendt, the
political was overwhelmed by cares and worries which actually belonged in
the sphere of the household and which...could not be solved by political
means, since they were matters of administration, to be put into the hands of
experts, rather than issues which could be settled by the twofold process of
decision and persuasion. The needs of les hommes faibles were violent, and,
as it were, prepolitical.24 Necessity and poverty were a distract[ion]
from the real political changes necessitated by political revolutions.25
Undeniably, Arendt hits an easy target when she says that a revolution
aimed at a certain sovereignty and tyranny ended in the rise of another
sovereign (Napoleon) and, as such, was a political failure. Arendt never
theless recognizes all that would come to signal biopower: the thinking of
the national state as a body to be protected by administrators issuing various
decreesone of the outstanding characteristics of absolutismwhich she
had recognized earlier in Origins of Totalitarianism. The question that often
confronts readers of Arendt is what she means when she says that these
needs are prepolitical. In Origins, she suggests that when these needs
are not met, then it means the creation of superfluous victims of capitalism,
and thus these needs are prepolitical in the sense that they take away
the ability to take part in politicswhich calls for a political response. In
On Revolution, on the other hand, she argues that poverty is prepolitical
and then, well, she drops the discussion from there, except to suggest that
poverty is an unchanging part of the human condition.26 Nothing changes
faster in political theory than all that is said to be absolute and unchanging.
Arendt is indefinite as to whether the political has a role in rendering
justice for the loss of property, which for her is the private realm neces
sary for entering politics in the first place. Her writings describe at length
capitalisms creation of legions of superfluous people, and she often argues
that economic superfluidity is the precondition of political superfluidity, and
thus the latter would seem to be the political problem par excellence, as
suggested in the citation above from Origins. One may ask, in the quotation
103
that follows, however, what good her notion of solidarity does in the face
of widespread poverty and superfluidity caused by capitalism:
Pity[s] alternative is solidarity. It is out of pity that men are attracted
toward les hommes faibles, but it is out of solidarity that they establish
deliberately and, as it were, dispassionately a community of interest
with the oppressed and exploited. The common interest would then
be the grandeur of man, or the honor of the human race, or the
dignity of man [note the Kantian interest and dignity here]. For
solidarity, because it partakes of reason, and hence of generality, is
able to comprehend, not only the multitude of a class or a nation
or a people, but eventually all mankind. But this solidarity, though
it may be aroused by suffering, is not guided by it, and it compre
hends the strong and the rich no less than the week and the poor.27
This question touches on the relation between the ethical and the
political in Arendt: What does the political owe to those it disallows on the
basis of prepolitical violence? For Rousseau, too, pity is prepolitical, as his
lessons on the state of nature in the Second Discourse make clear, and this
pity is transformed within the civil state: we might say that, despite its basis
in a call on the semblance of the (non)other, Rousseau at least admits a
duty to the other that gives rise to the political. Arendt, however, suggests
in the Human Condition and later writings that the space of the public is too
rarefied to have such base discussions. One can ask what dignity the political
can have in the face of demarcating itself from such important discussions
as to those who are excluded from it, those, to borrow from Rousseau, who
suffer lives as a conditional gift of the state. And conceptually, one can
also ask whether in fact the political, as the space of action, that is, the
place for beginning, cannot begin again as another rethinking of the very
relation between the economic and the political, without necessarily con
flating the two. We employ the term les hommes faibles in line with Paul
Ricoeurs usage in his early work Lhomme faible as that which is forced into
a humble position visvis the Sovereign God. I wont repeat his political
theology here, though it is certainly a term serviceable for those who face
the performances of sovereignty and delusions of omnipotence after the
death of God. Moreover, if we are to rethink the notion of le peuple en corps
we must think its alwaysoppositional and apositional force, an apposition
formed within the very tradition of thinking the people, as a contagion
forming a solidarity and praxis against any thinking of le peuple en corps.
One finds this thinking precisely in the Occupy movements of 20112012.
In any event, it was the sovereign violence defending le peuple en
corpsaided by the loss of nonviolent authority in the modern age and
104
the guardrails of a belief or adherence to the rule of lawthat set the stage
for totalitarianism. For Arendt, the hyphen in nationstate always marked
a contestation of sovereignty between the nation and the state, an ongoing
conflict that Rousseau and the philosophical heirs of the French Revolution
attempted to paper over with discussions of human rights. Arendt writes:
The secret conflict between state and nation came to light at the
very birth of the modern nationstate, when the French Revolution
combined the Declaration of the Rights of Man with the demand
for national sovereignty. The same essential rights were at once
claimed as the inalienable heritage of all human beings and as the
specific heritage of specific nations, the same nation was at once
declared to be subject to laws, which supposedly would flow from
the Rights of Man, and sovereign, that is, bound by no universal
law and acknowledging nothing superior to itself.28
It follows, Arendt writes, that only people of the same natural origin could
enjoy the full protection of legal institutions....[T]he transformation of
the state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation had
been completed: the nation had conquered the state and national interest
had priority over law long before Hitler could pronounce right is what is
good for the German people.29 Human rights were only to be protected by
the state as a measure of ones nativity and nationality. National sovereignty,
she writes, lost its original connotation of freedom of the people and was
being surrounded by a pseudomystical aura of lawless arbitrariness.30
Policing the State

In other words, The tragedy of the nationstate was that the peoples rising
national consciousness interfered with the state as supreme legal institu
tion....This meant that the state was partly transformed from an instru
ment of the law into an instrument of the nation. We saw this at work,
Arendt suggests, during the rise of imperialism, when the colonial bureaucrat
could rule by decree over those who did not belong to the nation, as the
state already did in socalled states of emergency. The efficiency of rule by
decree became apparent and soon was brought back to Europe as a whole,
with rule over refugees (and the decision to make whole classes of peoples
refugees, that is, without a state and without a nation) falling to nameless
Kafkaesque bureaucrats.31
Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of
farflung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy
105
of oppression. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all

intermediary states between issuance and application, and because it
prevents political reasoning through the withholding of informa
tion....[S]ince the people it dominates never really know why
something is happening, and a rational interpretation of laws does
not exist, there remains only one thing that counts, the brutal
naked event itself. What happens to one then becomes subject to
an interpretation whose possibilities are endless, unlimited by reason
and unhampered by knowledge.32
Arendt describes in Origins that, despite all the pieties of the proclama
tions of the rights of man and various international agreements, along with
the socalled veneration of the rule of law in Europe, which was to delineate
the continent from the less civilized political regimes of the East and the
South, sovereigntys lawless arbitrariness spread quickly to the gendarmeries
and local bureaucrats.33 Here we meet the supreme efficiency of sovereignty,
its shortcircuiting of the political itself as a complete functionality of the
political as its terminus.34 Where political philosophy had focused on voting
rights, questions of legitimacy, parliamentary protocols, and various forms of
lawmaking, Arendt argues that the forces of the politicalor rather, what
Arendt considers the prepolitical forms of violencehad concatenated in the
hands of police forces, military officers, and local bureaucrats. Arendts claim
that the nation had overtaken the state is true enough, especially in light of
her belief (one that will become the focus of Foucaults own genealogies of
power in the 1970s) that nationalisms are indexed to an increased vigilance
over the safety and securityle public salutof the living body of the nation.
The consequence of the growth of nationalism to its sovereignty over the
state is that the police and bureaucrats, those who, having the power to let
live or make die over each individual, came to rule via a permanent state of
emergency that surveilled the nation in the name of its own welfare and
security, especially as the nation was thought as a common body. One need
only read the work of nineteenthcentury eugenicists to see the hold of these
metaphors on the national body in the era of the national state. Life, then,
is no longer just a conditional gift of the state, as Rousseau put it so suc
cinctly, but also a gift that comes from nowhere and no one.
The prolongation of [the lives of the stateless] is due to charity and
not to right, for no law exists which could force the nations to feed
them; their freedom of movement, if they have it at all, give them
no right to residence which even the jailed criminal enjoys as a
matter of course; and their freedom of opinion is a fools freedom,
for nothing they think matters anyhow.35
106
Under the rule of no one, as Arendt called the bureaucracies, the expe
rience of the refugee became a generalized phenomenonand not simply
because of the exponential rise of the stateless during the interwar period.
Political homelessness became a major phenomenon, as Arendt notes, such
that the very phrase human rights became for all concernedvictims,
persecutors, and onlookers alikethe evidence of hopeless idealism or fum
bling feebleminded hypocrisy.36 Agamben rightly summarizes the problem:
If the refugee represents such a disquieting element in the order of
the nationstate, this is primarily because, by breaking the identity
between the human and the citizen and between nativity and nation
ality, it brings the originary fiction of sovereignty to crisis. . . . What
is new in our time is that growing sections of human kind are no
longer representable inside the nationstate [this is decidedly not
new, but certainly is the selfmythologization of the nationstate],
and this novelty threatens the very foundations of the latter.
Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal figure, unhinges
the old trinity of nationstatesovereignty, it deserves instead to be
regarded as the central figure of our political history.37
The refugee is not, as Arendt and Agamben argue, a secondary issue, but
rather the central political problem of our age. The creation of the state
less, the politically homeless, is the tool of sovereignty in the modern age;
people without their own national government are in fact deprived of what
has been called human rights.38 Arendt writes:
[Mass denationalizations] revealed moreover, what had been
throughout the history of national sovereignty, that sovereignties
of neighboring countries could come not only into deadly conflict
in the extreme case of war but in peace. It now became clear that
full national sovereignty was possible only as long as the comity
of European nations existed; for it was this spirit of unorganized
solidarity and agreement that prevented any governments exercise
of its full sovereign power....It has always been true that sov
ereignty is nowhere more absolute than in matters [of emigration
and naturalization and expulsion].39
The concept of sovereignty as a monopoly over violence became
more elastic during modernity, retaining that supreme difference between
omnipotence and powerlessness in the brutal nude event itself, while mov
ing the sovereign decision beyond the palaces of the monarch. Whereas
sovereigns of the past had cloaked the effects of its powersexecutions,
107
emigrations, and naturalizationsin ceremonies and emblems of mystical

authority, the bureaucrats of modernity secreted these arbitrary decisions
(the decision whether and what law to apply and in what manner, or
whether to operate simply outside the law altogether) in procedures and
paperwork. The kings Evil was replaced by file cabinets and databases, all
the better to cloak all but the front line of the gendarmerie from the vio
lence being committed, to render invisible the stateless, the rightless, and
also to render undetectable responsibility for this violence: a sovereignty
with memory but no remorse. Is this not the lesson of Eichmann? Matters
of life and death decided exceptionally, that is, case by case, no longer by
the rule of the expert, as described during the interwar period by Arendt,
but by the rule of those on the frontiers of neocolonial conquest. This,
at least, is the performance of sovereignty in the United States, where
no one knows or can know the extent of the reach of the states police
arm in what even the Washington Post has called an alternative geogra
phy of the United States,40 that is, places where American citizens are no
long just denationalized through opaque procedures as during the intra-war
period Arendt describes, but are also targeted for extrajudicial killings by
remotecontrolled drones.
All of which is to say that the police, as Arendt notes, is no longer
an instrument to carry out and enforce the law, but had become a ruling
authority independent of government ministries.41 Its emancipation from
the law complimented exactly that same and deadly emancipation from
the law of the refugee and the stateless: an outlaw by definitionhe was
completely at the mercy of the police, which itself did not worry too much
about committing a few illegal acts in order to diminish the countrys burdens
of indsirables. In other words, the state, insisting on its sovereign right of
expulsion, was forced by the illegal nature of statelessness into admittedly
illegal acts.42 This is the fundamental lawlessness of the state of exception.
The barbedwire labyrinths of the police state were not left behind with
the fall of the Third Reich.43 This labyrinth exists wherever sovereign law
lessness meets up with the lawless people it creates and proclaims. Sovereign
violence does not operate simply within the frontiers of the prison and the
refugee camps, since at the least these are an example and exemplum for the
disciplining of the citizenry that holds in mind just how arbitrary its status
is: everyone is potentially guilty of the very crime of merely existing.44
But this should not be taken to mean that the camp is everywhere (and
thus, in a sense, nowhere), including the gated communities of the United
States or Charles de Gaulle Airport,45 as Agamben argues, which means
reducing the specificity and horrorthe hell that is mundane, worldly, but
always singularof what Arendt called these holes of oblivion. We must
still separate out and clarify the differences between all...forms of terror
108
regimes, forms that assign quite different functions to terror in each regime.46
Each form of terror is thus unprecedented, and modernity is filled
with such events of the arbitrary administration of the states of excep
tion.47 With the decline and fall of the nationstate, we are also at the
edges of a sovereign exceptionalism, as Schmitt dreamed of it. If the sover
eign is he who decides upon the exception, and also over the exception to
the state (the enemy, the criminal, the person to be relieved of citizenship,
and so on) what are we to think of modern apparatuses (what Foucault will
describe under the heading of governmentality) that extend this excep
tional violence to the local constable, immigration officerseven those who
decide over tax codes, health policies, and so on in the name of le public
salut? What are we to make of the fact that wars are no longer fought in
the name of sovereign power and its strange conflation of violence and right,
but as police actions to protect the international order and laws that
each such action upends? No doubt, sovereignty is a mockery except
for giant states.48 The conflation of sovereignty and the police (taken also
in the latters original meaning as the states civilizing function), of the
power of armies and the powers of the policemore and more fused in
each country counting itself sovereignmeans an event in thinking must
take place for thinking appositions to such sovereignty and the sovereign
police, as Agamben calls these new forms of administration: The police are
perhaps the place where the proximity and the almost constitutive exchange
between violence and right that characterizes the figure of the sovereign is
shown more nakedly and clearly than anywhere else.49
What is unclear is the need for this perhaps in Agambens formula
tionan important hesitation in thinking the sovereignty of modernity. This
hesitation is necessitated by Agambens need to keep the figure (singular) of
the sovereign in his explication of the sovereign exception. This is why he can
say that the police function (not police officers) is exactly symmetrical to that
of sovereignty, that there is an embarrassing contiguity between the police
and sovereigntyembarrassing only for a figuring (schema) of the sovereign in
the singular.50 But the lesson of Arendt (and Foucault) is that the concept
of sovereignty [had] been finally introduced into the figure of the police long
before the first Gulf Wars police action.51 As Agamben rightly notes, It is
well known that not a single document has ever been found that recognizes
the [Holocaust] as a decision by a sovereign organ, and thus we should be led
to another figuring and accounting of the sovereign and its organsbeyond
Agambens Hobbesian indication of a body in full charge of its parts. The
underlying pointand for this, we must be grateful for Arendts work, even
as we are horrified that it makes appositions to sovereignty difficult beyond
beheading the kingis that the sovereign(s) are those that act exceptional to
the law in the name of defending this law. Not all violence is sovereign vio
109
lence; obviously much violence occurs within the realm of law and socalled
criminality. We leave aside for the moment the very making of the law and
the superfluidity created through the institutionalization of a certain violence
of the rule of law, that is, the enforcement mechanisms, the law of force, that
renders the force of law. But operating outside the law, outside the boundaries
of the political while securing from the inside these boundaries (nomoi) is
what makes a figuring and accounting of the state of sovereignty, especially
national sovereignty, difficult. Sovereignty, as such, does not have a single
locus, and would be by definition exceptional to any law that would posit
and place it in a certain figure. Or, to use Agambens typical formulation,
sovereignty is included/excluded in the very figure of sovereignty.
It is thus no longer a matter of inverting sovereignty in the name of
a presupposed people, or, to put it more bluntly, cutting off the kings head,
but taking on forms of power that have the force of putting the stateless,
the refugee, the immigrant in a permanent outlaw status; it also means
taking on those ideologues of Schmitt who would confront other states as
outlaws and rogues, even as they operate outside the everunstable bound
aries of international law.
The resistance to sovereignty in the contemporary periodthe resis
tance to terrortakes place at the interstices between knowing that, with
the loss of authority in modernity, everything is permitted given the sover
eign demand that everything be made possible. As Arendt makes clear, the
world is at stake in politics, thus the need for another thinking of political
action52 in which silent consent is but an alibi of innocence in the face of
those who are truly innocent[t] beyond the categories of virtue and vice.53
[T]hey were and appeared to be nothing but human beings whose very
innocencefrom every point of view, and especially that of the
persecuting governmentwas their greatest misfortune. Innocent,
in the sense of complete lack of responsibility, was the mark
of their rightlessness as it was the seal of their loss of political
status.54
This does not mean returning to a politics of security. Arendt is quite
clear that there is a lineage from a philosophical pursuit of security and
sovereign assurance of the cogito, as in Descartes, to the cowardice and silent
consent, the political quietism, of modern power relations.55 For Arendt,
modern politics must begin with the nonpolitical elemental shame that
is all that is left of international solidarityshame ultimately at the infi
nite responsibility of each for all crimes committed by men.56 Politically,
this means not content[ing] oneself with the hypocritical confession God
be thanked, I am not like that at the evil committed by others. Rather,
110
those ready for another politics, another thinking of the political, Arendt
argues, begin in fear and trembling, hav[ing] finally realized of what man
is capableand this is indeed the precondition of any modern political
thinking:
Such persons will not serve very well as functionaries of vengeance
[that is, as a counterforce still within the circle of sovereign vio
lence]. This, however, is certain. Upon them and only upon them,
who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the
human race, can there be any reliance when it comes to fighting
fearlessly, uncompromisingly, everywhere against the incalculable
evil that men are capable of bringing about.57
This is the case with such persons as Jos MorenoOcampo, who ideal
ly is apositional to any particular (state) sovereignty, defending not a figure
of humanity as such, but rather what Arendt calls the right to have rights,
the unconditional right that is apositional to sovereign rule and mastery of
the political; it is beyond the measure and figuring of sovereignty. Coming
back to where we began this section, we can say that another thinking of
the politicaland the ICC is a tentative, though often hypocritical, step in
this regardmust begin by recognizing that the steps that lead to human
superfluidity follow the same logic as in Arendts day: (1) a loss of home
and a distinct place in the world, (2) the loss of state protection based
still on the proper (what is the peoples own) and property, and (3) a thrust
outside legality altogether. The hodgepodge of NGOs protecting and feeding
refugees in the Congo only confirms this complete illegality of the stateless,
and the still nothingbuthumanbeings status of les hommes faibles, people
in solidarity in their decentering appositions to sovereignty, those in fear
and trembling to the political theology of sovereignty. Those persecuted
not because of what they had done or thought, but because of what they
unchangeably [are]born into the wrong kind of race or the wrong kind
of class, are an undeniable heritage of national and popular sovereignty.58
The Right to Have Rights

Shorn of all rights, Arendt begins in Decline and Fall a recharacterization
of the political from the stance of the apositionality and nonsovereignty
of those who have lost all political status in terms of rights. Allow me
to quote at length:
The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law
111
and freedom of opinionformulas which were designed to solve

problems within given communitiesbut that they no longer belong
to any community whatsoever [this is their lack of position, their
apositionality]....The fundamental deprivation of human rights
is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in
the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective.
Something much more fundamental than freedom and justice, which
are the rights of citizens, is at stake when belonging to the commu
nity into which one is born is no longer a matter of course and not
belonging is no longer a matter of choice....They are deprived
not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the
right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion.
Privileges in some cases, injustices in most, blessings and doom are
meted out to them according to accident and without any relation
whatsoever to what they do, did, or may do. We became aware of
the existence of the right to have rights (and that means to live in a
framework where one is judged by ones actions and opinions) and a
right to belong to some kind of organized community.59
Here, in brief, is Arendts attempt at a nonsovereign thinking of the politi
cal. With the death of God and the loss of traditional foundationsthat is,
the frameworks that had demand[ed] obedience without coercion and
force60sovereign violence and the state of exception has stepped in, a
symptom of the nationalism that has cemented the social bond in the name
of the fictions of common birth. There is no going back to this authority
after the death of God in all its forms, though sovereigns have attempted to
remake the political in terms of a mundane omnipotence that has produced
hells on Earth for the powerless, those deemed nothing but human. The
right to have rights, or the right of every human being to belong to human
ity, to have a place in the world, is an unconditional demand placed upon
those who, according to Arendt, can never live in good faith at the evil
humans have done and of which they are still capable. This is a demand
unconditional in the face of sovereigntynational, popular, or otherwise.
And it is a demand placed upon us in the very face of its often seeming
impossibility: It is by no means certain whether this is possible.61 It is also
a demand put back upon Arendts own writings, wherever it ascribes, as we
noted in the last chapter, a distinction among the living, all for the sake of
the rarity and rarification of the political. The right to have rights exists,
Arendt writes; it is no abstraction. Her political ontology calls us beyond the
autonomy of the self, the willingself, as we have seen, and the self of the
Ican and Iwillx, that is to say, it is not the right of a sovereign self.62 And
this right to have rightsso enigmaticis at once the most meaningful and
112
least meaningful proposition for the political: its precondition and yet also
the least it can offer. The right to have rights is still left to be thought
in terms of the political (and, frankly, in the literature on and by Arendt),
but nevertheless, it is not merely a constative utterance of what exists, but
also a proclamation, a performative of what is necessary for (re)thinking
the politicalan opening of a space that offers both a framework and a
space for action and opinion where ones words and deeds matter. This is all
to say that the task is to think another arche, another beginning and rule
or measure of the political in light of the continuing horrors of sovereign
violence. This arche will not mean a worked and working communityfor
Arendt, this would be a community under the thumb of a hubristic homo
faberbut rather be measured against a nonsovereign beginning, against
the abyss of an unforeseeable natality, a political proclamation that pro
claims only the archethe principle, the beginning, a demeasuringof the
political itself. Between the seeming anarchy of action as the freedom of
the political and the archaism of frameworks and laws of the political, we
have become aware of the right to have rights.
FOUR
Torturing Sovereignty
Foucaults Regicide in Theory
Political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the
sovereign, Michel Foucault maintained in a 1977 interview, We need
to cut off the kings head: in political theory, that has yet to be done.1
With such statements, Foucault argued that an emphasis on sovereigns and
sovereignty had kept philosophers and political theorists from delineating
other forms of power operating in modernity. He utilizes his genealogies of
power, along with his later problematizations of the practices of sexuality
during periods prior to modernity, to argue that sovereigntyas opposed
to disciplinary power, biopolitical power, and governmentalityis but a
juridicophilosophical element best left to historians of philosophy, rather
than historians of the present.2 Foucault could suggest that our emphasis
on sovereignty in this book is a repetition of philosophys long and nave
focus on juridical power, one that avoids other instantiations of power that
dominate our societal landscapes and our subjective formations. We are
reminded to look up now and again for the owl of Minerva. This critique
also could be directed at a number of contemporary philosophers who have
returned to the trope of sovereignty, including Agamben and Derrida, and
have seen it as central to recasting contemporary debates over the self and
the return of nationstate sovereignty. On the other hand, a critique could
be directed at Foucault, namely, that his arguments against the relevance of
sovereignty for histories of the present miss the (now) obviously crucial role
of the sovereign exception and the exceptional sovereignty on plain view
in the contemporary period (and after the fact in all of modernity). One
could say, thus, that Foucault, as Agamben argues in Homo Sacer, misses
the true import of sovereignty and is thus offering what Foucault himself
once called sovereignty: a retroversion of power.3
113
114
Genealogies in the Multiple

My contention in this chapter is relatively straightforward: while Foucault in
the early half of the 1970s appears to think of sovereignty as the past of the
political, he resuscitates sovereignty during and after his 197576 lectures,
offering a thinking of sovereign power that, intertwined with biopower, dis
cipline, governmentality, and pastoral power, is not just relevant for an aca
demic consideration of Foucaults work, but for thinking the perniciousness
of sovereignty as such. Foucault, in his lectures and work on the 1970s and
early 80s, offers genealogies of power that, to use an Arendtian word that he
too often utilizes, crystallize in this supposedly retro forms of power of early
modernity, though I am not going to simplify his microphysics of power.4 Our
task is to demonstrate Foucaults remarkable genealogies of sovereignty, while
staying attuned to the lessons on political pedagogy that were often his focus.
Moving from an archaeology of sovereignty in Arendt to Foucaults genealo
gies of power from the 1970s provides a difficult undertaking for any of his
readers. First, there are the genealogies on offer from Foucault in thousands
of pages of lectures, interviews, and published books. To make matters worse,
one must take account of Foucaults shifting method, given that he makes a
turn in his texts after The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) toward what he
calls in Discipline and Punish (1972) genealogies that would be character
ized by histories of the present.5 We need not be detained by arguments
in the secondary literature over whether or not these genealogies are of a
different order than those found in his early archaeological period.6 What
is significant is that these genealogies take up the contingent formations of
power in the period of early modernity that had interested Arendt in her
accounts of racethinking before racism. In the 1970s, the historical epochs
under study by Foucault begin for the most part with the late Middle Ages
and the Renaissance and move to the period just before World War II, with
the notable exception of his 197879 lecture course on the rise of economic
governmentality. Foucaults main target, as always in his career, was the
disinterested humanistic discourses of the postEnlightenment.7 Foucault
argues that far from a history of progress, Enlightenment philosophies offer
a cover for forms of powerknowledge that may speak in the platitudes of
rights and freedoms, as opposed to the lessEnlightened past, but operate
through strategies of societal exclusion and normalization. In sum, defenders
of the Enlightenment want to cherrypick the strains of rationalism in our
history, making it an ahistorical force, while utterly ignoring the contexts
in which these Enlightened thinkers were writing.
The sources for Foucaults genealogies are often Francocentric, deliv
ering nearuniversal accounts of the movements of power based on examples
from French history. One finds time and again in Foucault a formulation that
TORTURING SOVEREIGNTY
115
such and such dispositif8 is part of typical features of modern societies.9 This
lends credence to the view that Foucaults method, as with Agamben after
him, forces a certain sovereign reach over history, not just in terms of its
periodizations but also by way of consistently moving out from one or two
examples to universally applicable paradigms. This view gains more credit
since Foucault often argued that a given paradigm of power shifted quickly
from one type to another. In this way, each of his texts begins and teases
out the meaning of a particular example meant to show a turningpoint
or an invention10 in the treatment of the mad, the prisoner, the sover
eign, or the deviant, though he never treats at length the use of narrative
examples in his texts. The example is not just a particular under a universal
movement of power in a particular period, or layer of history. As an example,
as the chosen example among others, each of these turningpoints is the
exemplary example, the exceptional example, the example that is excep
tional to the categorization of a given period since it would be so normal
as to be exceptional to the given norm he is investigating. It is thus both
the particular under a given power dynamic and exceptional to that power
dynamic at the same time. We underline this given the logic of the excep
tion at the heart of the concept of sovereignty. We will also see this in
Foucaults treatment of King George III, who will not just be a disciplined
figure, as mad, but also, as the example of the disciplined, an exceptional
(and sovereign) figure that combines both the bare embodiment of the mad
under disciplinary power and sovereign power, even in its absence. This
remains the misgiving of many in regard to Foucaults work: the use of
particular examples to write allencompassing histories that have the force
of colonizing all forms of discourse under a given dispositif.
Foucaults genealogies, however, are often far less polemical than one
finds, for example, in Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History
of Sexuality. Gary Gutting is right to point to the experimental form of
Foucaults work as well as its specificity: Foucaults work is at root ad hoc,
fragmentary, and incomplete. Each of his works is determined by concerns
and approaches specific to it and should not be understood as developing or
deploying a theory or a method that is a general instrument of intellectual
progress.11 Jeffrey Nealon, too, finds in a Foucault an experimental research
itinerary, as opposed to the ideologist of disciplinary power and the death of
the author one often reads about. Foucault himself notes, I wouldnt want
what I may have said or written to be seen as laying any claims to totality.
I dont try to universalize what I say. But, that said, one doesnt stray far
into Foucaults texts without finding claims about concatenations of power/
knowledge that are not so specific. Indeed, each of his genealogies offers
a methodological approachthe blue print of a general method12about
how such analyses should be broached beyond the specific field of inquiry.
116
These are not minor arguments in his oeuvre; they are central to under
standing each of Foucaults genealogies of the 1970s, and in fact each of his
studies is determined by showing the microphysics of power that produces
various institutions and institutionalization as a process itself, a macro claim:
I would like to advance the hypothesis that something like disciplinary power
exists in our society, Foucault argues in Psychiatric Power, and we would
need to think much further about the hesitations of this hypothetical
move that announces something like disciplinary power. This power, he
continues, is a particular, terminal, capillary form of power...a particular
modality by which political power, power in general, finally reaches the level
of bodies and gets hold of them.13 But this should not be taken as reason
to dismiss Foucaults genealogies of power, which, especially in his lecture
courses, operate experimentally and heuristically through his nomination of
dispositifs of power important to contemporary concerns. His claims are far
from homogeneous and homogenizing. As such, we should follow Foucault
in his wrestling with the specificity and applicability of his claims (here
regarding the rise of the prison):
The invention of this new political anatomy [the disciplining of
bodies] must not be seen as a sudden discovery. It is rather a mul
tiplicity of often minor processes, of different origins and scattered
locations, which overlap, repeat, or imitate one another, support
one another, distinguish themselves from one another according to
their domain of application, converge and gradually produce the
blueprint of a general method.14
In last section of this chapter, we will take up Foucaults work just
where it operates on macrophysical developments, namely in the rise of
nations and races in Society Must Be Defended. In these lectures, Foucault
lays out the macromicro movements of power first in a society at war
with itself and then in a society docile under disciplinary and biopolitical
regimesall preceded by what he rightly calls the administrative monar
chy that becomes, after the nineteenth century, a more insidious racist
sovereignty.15 Thus, I am comfortable with the supposed uncomfortable
ness of these broad claims, which have the muchfeared consequence of
showing productions of power everywhere, making any confrontation with
power apparently pointless. Foucaults work is thus said to lead to a political
quietism given the inevitability that one is always imprisoned within these
power formations.16 This complaint is as old as Foucaults first publications
on madness. Indeed, critics of Foucault often measure their resistance to his
work quasiaesthetically. They contend less with his work and methodology
than with what they take to be (wrongly) its distasteful consequence, namely
117
that all resistance is futile. It is rather odd, though often the case, that
this is what passes for serious rebuttals to Foucaults work: his descriptions
of power might mean that Im less free than I would like to presuppose,
thus I can counter the feared implications of his work with imbrications of
ageold views of the sovereign self. As such, I can avoid the quintessential
Foucaultian insight that power operates more than through coercion, and I
can take a view that would return to a classical notion of power, one which
has the upshot that it can be more easily resisted. This is theory as catharsis,
a declaration of ones fears while quieting oneself by having an identifiable
enemy: a state, a class, a demanding family membera teenage analysis of
power that sees power as merely having to with the problems of law and
prohibition, as finding ones freedom by taking on mom and dad. Power
would be localizable; it would have a position and a center and my freedom
would be nothing other than marking myself as outside that center. This
is, of course, the thinking behind all versions of negative freedom, where
power is denied its productive force, and places the sovereign subject, like
reason itself, outside of history.
In this way, it is not a matter of finding ones position on the other
side of power. Nothing perhaps shows better what Arendt, Foucault, and
Derrida, all in different ways, characterize as the fiction of sovereignty and
its selfauthorization: by fiat I declare myself free of the powers denoted by
Foucault, all in the name, often enough by Foucaults critics, of liberal free
doms whose historical iteration is left unquestioned. A sovereign freedom is
thus posited as standing outside of history, untouched by anything that could
condition its circularity back to the selfauthorizing subjectan exceptional
sovereignty. The force of Foucaults work is not to illustrate a diachronic or
synchronic determinismthe multiple genealogies Foucault engages should
be enough to dispel such a conclusionbut rather to illustrate the contin
gency of power formations, as well as the everpresent vigilance necessary
for denoting and proclaiming something other than these particular, though
no less pernicious, movements of power. We cannot have a clear conscience
that once we have opposed a policy or regime our work is done. This means
thinking the power/knowledge basis of social security, for example, even as
we may strategically defend it as a last resort for the elderly and the poor;
it means thinking about all that we defend under more humanistic public
policies. It signifies, at long last, as Foucault points out in many interviews
and lectures, maintaining an interminable critical vigilance.
We may not follow Foucault in all his assertions about power and
knowledge, his particular spatialization of history with its layering and turn
ing points, but we cannot join those all too comfortable in the political
selfpositioning and positing of the subject. And this includes those who
would simply side with what the tradition has deprivileged. For example,
118
Foucault notes that he is not, given his early work on the history of madness,
engaged in merely denouncing what is continually...oppressive under
reason, for after all, believe me, insanity (draison) is just as oppressive.17
As Foucault makes clear time and again, his interest is in exactly those
places of darkness left unexplored by the light of the Auklrung. Yet, he is
careful to note that he doesnt want simply to repeat the exclusions that
would merely have one, for example, cast away light in favor of that which
lurks in the shadows, since his task was to shine a light specifically on what
gave rise to shadow governments. His genealogies, he says, must outwit the
problematic of the Enlightenment. It has to outwit what was at the time
described (and still described in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) as
the progress of enlightenment, the struggle of knowledge against ignorance,
of reason against chimeras, of experience, of reason against error, and so
on. All this has been described, or symbolized, by light gradually dispelling
darkness.18 We must not see things in this way, but as an immense and
multiple battle.19 In describing the power/knowledge of particular institu
tions, a siding with one or the other would return to a selfcongratulatory
discourse of progress. If we emphasize all of this about Foucaults work, it is
because, in thinking through challenges to sovereignty, we must also con
ceive methods for historical understanding that are not just power speaking
to power.
Foucault, as we noted, offers not a single genealogy of power (e.g.,
of discipline) or genealogies of different powers ultimately reducible to one
(e.g., as found in base forms of Marxism, where discipline and state power
would be the result of given economic structures). Rather, he offers het
erogenealogies of power, and it would take a stunted view to think power
as subsumable under a given category, such as a particular set of oppressive
state actors. We will attempt to render suspect discussions of power whose
movement is but one way, for example, topdown. Foucault, for his part, calls
for a strategic logiche opposes it to the dialectical logic that would bring
multiple powers into a given homogeneitythat would establish possible
connections between disparate terms which remain disparate.20 This think
ing of a heterogeneity, of multiple formations of power interacting with one
another, is never a principle of exclusion; it never prevents coexistence, con
junction, or connection among modalities of power.21 This strategic logic
becomes even more plastic when one recalls that each genealogy of power
itself takes up the strands of a particular power (discipline, governmental,
sovereign, etc.) and its dispositifs, that is, the techniques of this particular
powers appearance. Each dispositif itself, Foucault remarks, is
a resolutely heterogeneous ensemble comprised of discourses, institu
tions, architectural models, regulatory decisions, laws, administra
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tive measures, scientific terminology, philosophical propositions,

morality, philanthropy, in short: of what is said as much as what
is unsaid....The dispositif itself is the grid [rseau] that we can
establish among these elements.22
Lets leave aside the aporia of writing a history of the unsaid. What we
have in Foucault are multiple folds of power that in turn operate according
to heterogeneous ensembles or technologies (dispositifs), a series of growing
complexification (heterogeneous dispositifs operative in heterogeneous move
ments of power), but not one that becomes a mere mystification of power.
In this way, Foucault ultimately provides an answer to Walter Benjamins
oftcited appeal in his Theses on the Philosophy of History: The tradition
of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is
not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history
that is in keeping with this insight.23 Just as Foucault uses Las Meninas of
Velasquez as a presentation of three forms of linguisticepistemic structures
(resemblance [sixteenth century], representation [seventeentheighteenth
centuries], and as the effect of the empiricotranscendental doublet of man
[nineteenthtwentieth centuries]) in the preface to The Order of Things,
we view Foucaults writings of this period as providing a plurivocal recita
tion of the polyvalent and polymorphic perversities of power. This should
make sense in any serious thinking of power: if we limit power to particular
instantiations of itself, if we attempt to figure it, and thus to figure it out,
then we miss, to risk tautology, what makes power powerful. If it is assumed
to be but one figure, as with the monarch, it would be more easily resisted.
That power is polymorphic is what makes power, irreducible to the state, in
a sense irresistible. The point is to think the very dynamism of power, its
dynamis, its movements in and through various loci. Power is not just to be
found in the Leviathan of the state but in the multiheaded Hydra of the
crystallizing and always exceptional movements of sovereigntyand I will
insist on the pertinence of this termand its permutations as disciplinary
power, as governmentality, as biopower, and finally, as pastoral power.
In the sections that follow, we will turn to Foucaults multiple genealo
gies of power not just to recapitulate how he formulated different topologies
of societal force, but to conclude with what Foucault offers for advanc
ing what he called a counterhistory of sovereign power. We begin with
Foucaults treatment of the madness of King George III in lectures given
at the Collge de France in 197374, collected in Psychiatric Power. Here,
we will allow Foucault himself to summarize what he takes, at that time,
to be the important distinctions between the powers of sovereignty and
disciplinary power. As we continue along, we will show how Foucaults
thinking of sovereignty becomes more complicated in his later lectures,
120
which offer multiple lessons on the state of sovereignty and the political
fictions of modernity.
Sovereign Madness
After years of battling mental disease, King George III, the figure of the
raison dtat of Great Britain, fell into a mania. He was found at one point
foaming at the mouth and at another addressing his subjects as peacocks.
In 1788, the king was put under the care of Francis Willis, whose medical
treatment was something of a reversecoronation, a taking away of his sov
ereignty. A previous bout of mania in 1765 had been treated by bleeding
and Willis is said to have been brought in by aides because of his reputa
tion for humaneness. Foucault begins his narrative with Philippe Pinels
study, written as a successful case some ten years before the monarch gave
up his crown for the final time, living out his final days as something of
a sovereign scandal, if not a scandal to sovereignty. Allow me to quote at
length, as Foucault does, from Pinels recitation of the case:
A monarch falls into a mania, and in order to make his cure more
speedy and secure, no restrictions are placed on the prudence of
the person who is to direct it; from then on, all trappings of roy
alty having disappeared, the madman, separated from his family
and his usual surroundings, is consigned to an isolated place, and
he is confined alone in a room whose tiled floor and walls are
covered with matting so that he cannot harm himself [and not
incidentally, communicate with the world outside]. The person
directing the treatment tells him that he is no longer sovereign,
but that he must henceforth be obedient and submissive. Two of
his old pages...keep watch over him in calm silence, but take
every opportunity to make him aware of how much stronger than
him they are. One day, in a fiery delirium, the madman harshly
greets his old doctor who is making his visit, and daubs him with
filth and excrement. One of the pages immediately enters the room
without saying a word, grasps by his belt the delirious madman, who
is himself in a disgustingly filthy state, forcibly throws him down on
a pile of mattresses, strips him, washes him with a sponge, changes
his clothes, and, looking at him haughtily, immediately leaves to
take up his post again. Such lessons, repeated at intervals over some
months and backed up by other means of treatment, have produced
a sound cure without relapse.24
Foucault emphasizes all the particulars of this remarkable scene, a ceremony
of the transition of sovereignty proclaimed not through the passing of the
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scepter or the touching of swords or through the taking of a crown. The

king had indeed, for all concerned, lost his head along with the reason of
his crown, and thus when the visitor declares to the monarch that he is
no longer sovereign, that he must henceforth be obedient and submis
sive, it is an enunciation of what had already occurred to the king and
a proclamation that, for Foucault, marks the passing away of sovereignty
to disciplinary power. It is this turn of events, this event of the turning
of sovereignty, that Foucault emphasizes: it is disciplinary power that will
have the effect of calling into question the selfsovereignty of each person,
telling each one that he or she must be obedient and submissive, that he
or she is no longer sovereign over him or herself. Here we have a scene,
Foucault notes, of a deposition, a sort of reverse coronation in which the
king is reduced to complete impotence.25
Isolated from the outside world, we do not have the passing of sover
eignty from one entity to another, but its complete inversion: an abjection
of sovereignty where the oncesovereign is reduced to his body and left
with no other defense but his own abject defilementthe excrement he will
hurl back so ineffectually at those treating him. This is not a case of one
sovereign power falling under another sovereign power, but the transition
from a sovereign powerdecapitated by the madness that has seized hold of
the kings head, and dethroned by the ceremony that shows the king that he
is no longer sovereignto a different power, namely, disciplinary power.26
To paraphrase Augustin Thierrys claim about the kings ineffectuality during
the second French republic, this is a king who rules, but does not govern;
indeed, he does not even govern himself.
We are used to such transitions of sovereignty, and Foucaults depic
tion plays on all the scenes of the passing of the crown from one person
to another, or even the passing of sovereignty from the king to the people
through regicides, revolutions, and so on. This turnover of sovereignty,
between one sovereign and another, is the most dangerous hiatus of sov
ereignty, its very interruption at its peak as power, and thus the need for
so many ceremonies around these moments of passing, of the passing away
of one sovereignty to anotherrituals of glory infused, as Foucault argues
well, with narratives of foundations and rightsnatural, religious, and oth
erwise. But here, in this particular dethronement, this scene of the unseen,
as Foucault depicts it, we have the transition, the passing and passing away
of sovereignty to another power that operates, not through the visibility of
its apparatuses, but through its invisibility, in particular, the invisibility of
Willis. We thus see the visibility of an invisible power whose site is not the
sovereign but the impotent subject, the bare body on which disciplinary
power prevails in all its nakednessand this becomes literal as the scene
moves along. But, as is well known, this passing of sovereignty does not
last long. King George would regain power along with his reason not long
122
after his detention by Willis. And not long after Psychiatric Power, Foucault,
too, would return to the problem of sovereignty, no longer so dismissive of
its hold over the political imaginary.
Nevertheless, this scene allows Foucault to distinguish two forms
of power, though Foucault does note hes being perhaps too schematic: it
seems to him that it is more complicated, and whats more will become
increasingly complicated.27 In any case, despite this caveat, he argues at
this time that there are two absolutely distinct types of power correspond
ing to two systems:
The macrophysics of sovereignty, the power that could be put to
work in a postfeudal, preindustrial government, and then the
microphysics of disciplinary power....There is a transformation,
therefore, of the relationship of sovereignty into disciplinary power.
And you see at the heart of all of this, at bottom, a kind of general
proposition which is: You may well be the king, but if you are mad
you will cease to be so, or again: You may well be mad, but this
wont make you king....The king...could only be cured to
the extent that he was not treated as king, and to the extent that
he was subjected to a force that was not the force of royal power.28
For Foucault, in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century,
we witness the overtaking of sovereign power by disciplinary power. Let
us quickly follow Foucault in schematizing these heterogeneous forms of
power. We will see, as he notes, that things are not so simple.
Foucault argues that sovereignty operates by deduction [prlvement],
a subtraction mechanism...power in this instance was essentially a right
to seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated
in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it, the latter
being the sovereigns right over life and death, the right to let live and
make die.29 In other words, sovereignty operates as a positive freedom, leav
ing a space, as in Hobbess Leviathan, of negative freedom beyond the
reach of the sovereign. Secondly, sovereignty founds itself in procedures
and ceremonies marking its authorization and authority, whether founded
upon divine right, an act of submission by the populace, rights of blood,
or contracts.30 Sovereignty, Foucault argues, is thus backward looking in
legitimating itself.31 Nonetheless, it must always reactualize itself through
its rituals and ceremonies, its narratives and insignias. Sovereignty is taken
once and for all, but is also fragile, always liable to disuse or breakdown.32
To forestall this breakdown, that is, for sovereignty to really hold, there is
the need, he says, for a supplement or threat of violence....The other side
of sovereignty is violence, it is war.33 We have discussed this supplement
123
in both the introduction and chapter 1. Thirdly, relations of sovereignty are

not isotopic. They are tangled up with each other and we cannot establish
a system of exhaustive and planned hierarchy between them.34
Different forms of sovereignty have no common measure: the rela
tions between the lord and serf, the suzerain and the fiefholder, the priest
and the laity cannot be integrated within a genuinely single system.35
There is, however, a general equality of all beings under sovereignty: land,
roads, instruments of production, as well as populaces. The relationship of
sovereignty applies not to a somatic singularity but to multiplicitieslike
families, users [of land, of roads, etc.]which in a way are situated above
physical individuality, or, on the contrary, it applies to fragments or aspects
of individuality, of somatic singularity.36 Finally, at the summit of sover
eignty, at the height of its power, there is a sort of underlying individualiza
tion of the sovereign, but not his subjects, a monarchical spiral in which
the sovereign sits in judgment over all below:
[I]f you look towards the summit [as sovereignty] you will see
there the individualization absent at the base....There is a sort
of underlying individualization of the relationship of sovereignty
towards the top, that is to say, toward the sovereign. The power of
the sovereign necessarily entails a sort of monarchical spiral. That
is to say, precisely insofar as the power of sovereignty is not isotopic
but entails never ending disputes and movements, to the extent
that plunder, pillage, and war still rumble behind these sovereign
relationships, and the individual [sovereign] as such is never caught
in the relationship, then, at a given moment and coming from above,
there must be something that ensures arbitration: there must be a
single, individual point which is the summit of this set of heterotopic
relationships that absolutely cannot be plotted on the same table. The
sovereigns individuality is entailed by the nonindividualization of
the elements on which the relationship of sovereignty is applied.37
In order to describe the event under discussionhere from sover
eignty to disciplinary powerthere is an avowed simplification at work,
which has the force of crystallizing the power/knowledge formations38 on
both sides of this invention, event or turningpoint, as Foucault will
variously call them. The sovereignty on description here is a selfaccounting
of sovereignty in its Bourbon form. It is also a thinking of sovereignty
that is conflated with the law, treating all under it as equal through the
rule of law, as Foucault describes it. It is also notable that the basis for
Foucaults descriptions of sovereignty is Ernst Kantorowiczs indispensable
and eminently readable history of medieval political theology, The Kings
124
Two Bodies. For Kantorowicz, there are two bodies to the king: the king
must be an individual with a body, a point at the summit to which disputes
are brought. However, the body of sovereignty must not die with the kings
somatic singularity. The monarchy must remain when the monarch no long
exists....The kings body which holds together all of these relationships
of sovereignty [priestlaity, suzerainfiefholder, etc.] must not disappear with
the death of this individual X or Y.39
For Kantorowicz, this is best seen in the phrase the king is dead,
long live the king,40 and his long discussions of the fiction of the crown
focuses on the hiatus of the comma in the statement, noting how often the
body of the king was dead, and yet legally was treated as alive; this is how
sovereignty dealt with its own passage between generations. As Foucault
puts it, the medieval legal order required this kind of permanence...the
solidity of [the] realm, of [the] crown.41 And I think we see something of
this still wherever theorists focus on the sovereign summit (the figure of
the king or the president) and its irresponsibility to those below, with little
said about the other sovereign body operating in the dark shadows below.
In any event, Foucault will generalize from these particular descrip
tions to describe as pass any thinking that is infected with this older form
of sovereignty while notably ignoring the polymorphism of sovereignty after
(and during) the Middle Ages: feudalistic, constitutional, national, as well
as popular sovereignties that in fact were the background for George IIIs
tepid hold on his own power. Foucault will be suspicious of any form of
thinking, including psychoanalysis, that assumes the performance of a sov
ereign, whether it be the sovereignfather of psychoanalysis, or even the
law (of the father).42 We must, he writes, orient ourselves toward a con
ception of power that replaces the privilege of law with the viewpoint of
the objective, the privilege of prohibition [as in, he believes, the repressive
hypothesis of psychoanalysis] with the viewpoint of tactical efficacy, the
privilege of sovereignty with the analysis of a multiple and mobile field of
force relations. The strategical model, rather than the model based on law.43
Foucault here conflates sovereignty and the functioning of the law, even the
law of the father in psychoanalysis, rather than recognizing that the very
concept of sovereignty puts it above or outside the law, as is depicted in his
own description of its height beyond all other heights of power relations in
society suggests. In Discipline and Punish, Psychiatric Power, and The History
of Sexuality: Volume 1, Foucault argues that there is a move from the type
of power demonstrated during the classical age (via the sovereign and the
rule of law) and the polymorphic operations of power in the contemporary
period. It would seem, then, that the proponents of the repressive hypothesis
in psychoanalysis, to pick one discourse among others, are engaged less in a
nave thinking of power than in describing its past. Psychoanalysis, Foucault
125
argues, by theorizing sexuality in terms of the law, the symbolic order,

and sovereignty, attempted, in the first decades of the twentieth century,
to surround desire with all the trappings of the old order of power.44 The
psychoanalytic history of sexuality is, Foucault writes, in the last analysis a
historical retroversion. We must conceptualize the deployment of sexuality
on the basis of the techniques of power that are contemporary with it.45 Or,
as he puts it in 1976,
[I]n the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have the produc
tion of an important phenomenon, the emergence, or rather the
invention, of a new mechanism of power possessed of highly specific
strategical techniques . . . absolutely incompatible with the relations
of sovereignty....This new type of power...can no longer be
formulated in terms of sovereignty.46
Foucault takes as his task asking after how to describe those forms of power
heterogeneous to the sovereign law:
From where is this conception of power borrowed that sees power
impinging massively from the outside, as it were, with a continuous
violence that some (always the same) exercise over others (who are
also always the same)?...The idea that power has the essential
function of prohibiting, preventing, and isolating, rather than allow
ing the circulation, change, and multiple combination of elements,
seems to me a conception of power that also refers to an outdated
historical model....[I]t seems to me that by making the major
characteristics we attribute to political power into an instance of
repression, a superstructural level, and an instance whose essential
function is to reproduce and preserve the relations of production, we
do no more than constitute, on the basis of a historically outdated
and different models, a sort of daguerreotype that we can find in
power in a slave society, a caste society, a feudal society, and in a
society like the administrative monarchy.47
Of course, his target is not simply psychoanalytic discourses, but also
theories of right still fighting the political battles of three to four centu
ries ago. Moreover, its his contention that, in some sense, this provides a
theoretical cover to secret away the dominant modes of power underway
today. Such retroversionist theories, he writes, allow a system of right
to be superimposed upon the mechanisms of discipline in such a way as
to conceal its [disciplines] procedures, the element of domination inherent in
its techniques, and to guarantee to everyone, by virtue of the sovereignty
126
of state, the exercise of his [or her] proper sovereign rights.48 As such, if
sovereignty has survived in the discourses of the twentieth and twentyfirst
centuries, embedded in the legal codes of the West, it may simply be as a
ruse diverting attention from and concealing from view the disciplining
of the body. Retroversions of sovereignty, for Foucault, reinforce rather
than resist other power formations; they preclude the analysis necessary
for such resistance.49
The upshot of Foucaults depiction of sovereignty in Psychiatric Power
is that in these nonisotopic relationships of sovereignty, individuality exists
only at the summit, not in the link of the subjects to sovereignty. To this
schema, Foucault opposes disciplinary power, which operates not from on high,
but from below.50 This power has a total hold over the individuals body
and it has no need for ceremonies, the old pomp and circumstance, given
its procedures of continuous control...perpetually putting the individual
under ones gaze.51 As with Jeremy Benthams dream of the panopticon, a
prison where all are seen but can never see the gaze of power (an institutional
inverse of the ring of Gyges), the individual gains back his or her mastery only
by internalizing this gaze, always watching over him or herself as if he or she
were still on view. This will be the ultimate cure of King George, on Pinels
account. Importantly, disciplinary power will not be backward looking toward
a particular foundation, theology, or a bloodless set of contractual rights, as
with sovereignty, but is forwardlooking toward its telos of docile bodies:
What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act on
the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its
behavior. The human body was entering a machinery of power that
explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it....Thus discipline
produces subjected and practiced bodies, docile bodies.52
This docile body will be constantly awareand this is why Foucault
will focus on the nudity of George IIIof ones absolute visibility, which is
the mechanism of disciplinary power, a conscious and permanent visibil
ity.53 Disciplinary power, hence, looks forward to the future...when it
will keep itself going by itself and only a virtual supervision will be required,
when discipline, consequently will have become habit.54 Remaking the
body, disciplinary power is autopoietic in the strict sense. Rather than the
discontinuous attention of the sovereign and the law, whose flip side is
violence, the disciplinary relationship renders punishment.55 And these
relations of disciplinary powers make everything visible, providing a record
of any and all data deemed relevant to the subjectivizing (assujettissement)
of the subject.56 Unlike sovereign power, disciplinary power is isotopic: its
movements through different institutions mirror and imitate one another,
lining up to form a disciplinary society.57
127
This is not to say that there are not residues or remainders that
cannot function outside these topoi of disciplinary power. It is not totalizing:
All disciplinary power [and the knowledge that is concomitant with it]
has its margins, such as the deserter to the army escaping its disciplinary
regime and regimens. But new disciplines, Foucault argues, are invented to
pick up these residues, capturing the mentally ill, the delinquents, sexual
deviants, and so on: We can say that the underworld is the discipline of
those inaccessible, for example, to police discipline.58 What character
izes discipline is its continuing colonization of other discourses and other
disciplines to enclose these residues, to place them within a system entail
ing a normative center through which the subject, always already patheti
cally abnormal, maintains and measures ourselves.59
More importantly, for Foucaults analysis, is that disciplinary power,
as with bureaucracy in Arendt, comes from nowhere and no one, and cer
tainly not from the height of the sovereign. And yet, it individualizes each
one, such that the individual is, as such, not prior to these mechanisms of
discipline, but is, on the contrary, the result of these mechanisms:
[W]e can say that disciplinary power, and this is no doubt its
fundamental property, fabricates subjected bodies; it pins the
subjectfunction exactly to the body. It fabricates and distributes
subjected bodies; it is individualizing only in that the individual is
nothing other than the subjected body....Disciplinary power is
individualizing because it fastens the subjectfunction to the somatic
singularity by means of a system of supervisionwriting, or by a system
of pangraphic panopticism, which behind the somatic singularity
projects, as its extension or as its beginning, a core of virtualities,
a psyche, and which further establishes the norm as the principle
of division and normalization, as the universal prescription for all
individuals constituted in this way.60
The individual, then, is the terminus of this relationship of power, in
which the subject is fabricated along a horizontal axis of relative normal
ity, made to gaze upon itself because of each ones implacable abnormality.
This normalizing power has subjects but no sovereigns; even the director
of any such system is caught up within a broader system in which he is
supervised in turn...subject to discipline.61 Foucault can thus set out
his wellknown propositions in the first volume of the History of Sexuality
with regard to power in general: (1) it is not the property of an agent, but
is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian
and mobile relations62; (2) though decentered from any subject, power
is intentional, operating through a series of aims and objectives63; and
(3) relations of power are immanent to all social relations (economic,
128
scientific, pedagogic, sexual, and so forth). Power, consequently, is irreduc

ible to any entity or agentincluding, significantly, though he doesnt men
tion it, the sovereignsince power comes from below...all the way to
the major dominations. The state, as such, is an effect of power relations
already at work in the discursive formations of a given society.64
One cannot confront this power, Foucault argues, with an enunciation
of rights or privileges derived from juridical power. We cannot reinstate the
juridical individual, since if we scratch below the surface of this individual,
we quickly find the normalized and docile body that is the result, the
telos and not the arche, of disciplinary and normalizing power.65 This split,
Foucault finally argues, is man in the modern era:
What I call Man [presumably, a reference to the transcendental
doublet of the earlier Les mots et les choses], in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries is nothing other than the kind of afterimage
of this oscillation between the juridical individual, which really was
the instrument by which, in its discourse, the bourgeoisie claimed
power, and the disciplinary individual, which is the result of the
technology employed by the same bourgeoisie to constitute the
individual in the field of productive and political forces. From this
oscillation between the juridical individualideological instrument
of the demand for powerand the disciplinary individualreal
instrument of the physical exercise of powerfrom this oscillation
between the power claimed and the power exercised, were born the
illusion and the reality of what we call Man.66
Here we would emphasize the illusion at the heart of man, that is to
say, the modern, sovereign self, or more precisely, the oscillation between
the supposition of power, its comme si, and its exercise, its comme a,
between its illusion and its reality, to return to categories set up in this
books introduction. It is also at this point that we can worry about a dual
ism of puissance in Foucault, one operating at two levels of the individual,
one productive (discipline), the other deductive (sovereignty). If we were
to stop here, Agamben would be right to point out a problem in Foucaults
analysis, which he argues must be corrected, or at least completed67 for
any adequate thinking of sovereignty and the biopolitical:
If Foucault contests the traditional approach to the problem of power,
which is exclusively based on juridical models (What legitimates
power?) or on institutional models (What is the State?), and if
he calls for a liberation from the theoretical privilege of sover
eignty in order to construct an analytic of power that would not
take law as its model and code, then where, in the body of power,
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is the zone of indistinction (or, at least, the point of intersection)

at which technologies of individualization and totalizing procedures
converge? And, more generally, is there a unitary center in which
the political double bind finds its reason to be?...What is the
point at which the voluntary servitude of individuals comes into
contact with objective power?...Confronted with phenomena
such as the power of the society of the spectacle that is everywhere
transforming the political realm today, is it legitimate or even possible
to hold subjective technologies and political technologies apart?68
In order to explain disciplinary power, there is little doubt that Foucault
often doesnt follow up on the points and summits of sovereigntyas both
making and nevertheless irreducible to the lawthat he himself discusses
(its political theology, its point at the summit of emerging power dynamics
in society, etc.), given that as he often simplifies sovereignty to a single state
form (monarchy) and as indistinguishable from the law.
But Foucault does not stop his analysis here. Returning to the mad
ness of King George III, it was not as if sovereignty ended on the day King
George III was handed over to the care of his doctors. In fact, he faced
detention as part of a juridical process (somewhat mitigated because of his
stature and based upon a legal fiction that allowed King George III, or
rather his son, to stamp a letter to pass his powers to Lord Commissioners)
that was used to help fold more power into the ascendant sovereignty of the
British prime ministers office. The history of this period is complex and Ill
refrain from going into too many details here. Nonetheless, the madness of
King George was used as an example (disseminated by rumor in the late
eighteenth century) for the rise of another type of sovereignty (parliamentary,
national) that no longer utilized the old forms of ceremony in the use of its
power. But this does not sound the death knell of sovereigntism, since it is
rather a mark of the historical change of ceremony and sovereign pretense.
The ascendance of new scientifictechnological apparatuses provided different
forms for legitimation and authorization for the use of sovereign violence,
even one that would rebound upon the (no longer sovereign) monarch. This
is what Benjamin will describe, in a letter to Gerhard Scholem in 1938, as
the rise of the vast machinery of officialdom whose functions are directed
by authorities that remain nebulous to the executive organs, let alone to the
people they deal with.69 Its ceremonies, as weve suggested in our discussions
of Arendt, are more visible in their invisibility, dazzling less with displays
of wealth and pageantry than with an air of omniscience, cloaked with lab
coats or the more prosaic uniforms of the petit bureaucrat, carrying secretive
checklists and so onbut no less ceremonial, and deadly, for all that.
There is, as weve noted in past chapters, an inherent madness to
sovereignty, a selfsupposition of its own height above laws and norms, above
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and beyond reason, and Foucault is right to point to a shift in which this
madnessjust months before the start of the French Revolutioncould be
used for a softer regicide. This decoronation, at least in this episode, kept
the king from power for only a few months, though disciplinary power
the power of the police and the psychiatristsremained a constant threat.
Indeed, this was a period in which all kings were on guard for their power,
not least for those aiming their gaze at their very heads.
Foucaults narrative of the madness of King George points to similar
changes that Arendt tracks in the Origins of Totalitarianism. Sovereignty
and disciplinary power work hand in glove, the latter forming the very vio
lence that reinforces the claimsto use Foucaults wordof sovereignty.
In order to understand this better, we can point to the beginning of Discipline
and Punish, where Foucault carefully provides the narrative of Damien the
regicide, drawn and quarteredall the while asked to confess his crimes.
Foucault argues that the tortured body is the flip side, the logical inverse of
sovereignty, even as hell argue later that sovereignty does not tactically
operate on the body as such. Let me quote from Foucault on this point,
At the opposite pole [of sovereignty] one might imagine placing the
body of the condemned man; he too, has his legal status; he gives
rise to his own ceremonial and he calls forth a whole theoretical
discourse, not in order to ground the surplus power possessed by
the person of the sovereign, but in order to code the lack of power
with which those subjected to punishment are marked. In the dark
est region of the political field the condemned man represents the
symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.70
The supplice is no longer puts on view such public spectacles,71 but
this does not mean that sovereign power has not found, utilizing forms of
disciplinary power, new and insidious ways of providing lessons for its oth
ers in the darkest places of the political; la question (torture) of sovereignty
is not as dated as once believed. The death penalty is no more humane
in its procedures of last meals and last rites, with doctors on hand to make
sure the patient is as healthy as possible until, strapped to a chair, asked to
say his or her last words, the patient/prisoner is injected or gassed or elec
trocutedall in front of witnesses a glass partition away, spectators taking
in the abject lessons of the continuing sovereign power of the state.
Histories of the State of Sovereignty

We can now begin the turn toward Foucaults considerations on sover
eign biopower. Foucault, for his part, worried in later interviews that the
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last chapter of The History of Sexuality: Volume I (La Volent de savoir) on

biopower was largely ignored by his readers. An opposite worry might now
be the problem, especially after the work of Agamben, namely that readers of
Foucault may overdetermine their readings through his notion of biopower
or biopolitics. One reason for this shift has largely to do with the fact that
the last chapter of La Volent de savoir was unprepared for within the rest of
the text. The Right of Death and Power over Life, the last section of La
Volent de savoir, as is frequently mentioned, seems less a conclusion than
an introduction to another text entirely. In addition, The Right of Death
and Power over Life begins with a critique of the juridicalphilosophical
concept of sovereignty and the political well known from his other work,
and thus Foucaults own descriptions of biopower, while notable, were not
entirely fleshed out. Juridical power and disciplinary power, as Foucault will
later admitand acknowledge especially, if indirectly, in his forays into
biopower, governmentality, and pastoral powerare not easy to ply apart,
and we must take seriously Foucaults claim that sovereignty takes itself as
the summit atop this set of heterotopic relationships that absolutely can
not be plotted on the same table, a table of dynamic relations that would
include the formations of power mentioned above. Sovereignty, as we have
argued, is outside any law, any norm, that would constitute it within a given
space, and thus would disfigure any figuring of it or figuring it out as a
purely juridical device, even as it works through a figuring of the political.
The publication of Foucaults lecture courses, especially Society Must
Be Defended, and the wider availability of interviews and essays from the
late 1970s make clear that the notion of biopolitics was a central concern
of Foucault during this time. My worry, however, is that while biopower has
resurged as a philosophical trope, thanks largely in reaction to Agamben, it
is the genealogy of biopower and state racism that will be left aside. If it
is a onesided reading to take Foucault as offering just a simple rejection of
juridical sovereignty in favor of discipline as the mechanism of power, so
too it is equally onesided to read Foucaults thinking of state racism and
biopower without a full consideration of the genealogies through which he
develops these ideas.72 In this section, I will turn to Foucaults genealogy of
the nationstate offered in Society Must Be Defended, connecting this, as
Foucault does, with the rise of biopower and state racism that he details in
that years final lectures, as well as the last chapter of La Volont de savoir.
Society Must Be Defended is perhaps Foucaults richest text on the
fate of the political, not least because he provides a genealogy of his own
method sourced to the discourses on power found in Boulainvilliers and his
peers views of societal war. Foucaults lectures wrestle with how counternar
ratives to formations of power can articulate themselves without themselves
being colonizedFoucaults own phrasing of the problemby received
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tropes and metaphors. This discussion of counternarratives will bring us to

the ascendance of national sovereignty and biopower. It is the ascendance
of national sovereignty, I argue, that leads Foucault to rethink his previous
regicide in theory, or rather to think of the polymorphism of sovereignty
after the regicides of the eighteenth century. Undoubtedly, his lectures in
Security, Territory, Population (197778) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978
79) continue to relegate a certain sovereignty, in terms of its state form, to
a relatively minor role in the contemporary period. But ultimately, I pull
the threads of his genealogies, showing how, in Foucaults view, not just a
retroversion of sovereignty, but sovereignty in a more pernicious form,
disseminates itself in bio-political societies.
In our chapters on Hannah Arendt, we followed a trajectory that took
us back to what she saw as the invention of sovereignty in the philosophical
use of the Greek arche as a word for rule. Our archaeology, focused on the
conditions that set the possibility, according to Arendt, for the rulerruled
relation, would be, for Foucault, juridicophilosophical. Foucault regarded
his genealogies as historicopolitical, that is, seeking the geneses of power as
they were elaborated not through the history of philosophy, but in opposition
to philosophy and, in fact, more often than not, prior to their philosophi
cal articulation. This means that we need to follow Foucault in thinking
of nonstate sovereignties and formations of power, which we have begun
to describe in chapters 1 and 4 in terms of the rise of national sovereignty
and the police states put in force to protect them.
On this count, Society Must Be Defended is indispensable. The work
begins on familiar ground. Foucault critiques political theory for missing
the import of nonjuridical movements of power given that they have been
essentially centered around royal power...since the Middle Ages.73
Foucault proposes, as opposed to this topdown view of power, to take an
ascending approach, one that will ultimately see both states and individu
als as the effects of powers circulation.74 We should, he says, bid a final
farewell (adieu) to the theory of sovereignty as it has been constituted.75
Further, the analyses of Boulainvilliers and his interlocutors introduce a per
spectival discourse and counterhistories to sovereign power, arguing along
an ascending axis that confronts the juridicalphilosophical, specifically,
Roman rights of sovereignty claimed by Louis XIV and other monarchs.76
Boulainvilliers is a central character in Foucaults staging of these issues, as
we noted in our introduction. For Foucault, the discourses of this declining
aristocracy offer the first exclusively historicopolitical discourse, one that
would influence the juridicophilosophical narratives of power only through
the latters attempt to exclude these analyses from legitimate discussion.77
This is not to say that the juridicophilosophical discourses of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries operated without their own concep
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tions of history. For the sovereigntists, France and its king were essentially
heirs to Rome and its Caesars. According to a popular histoire, one that lent
legitimacy and was in the background of the Catholic Louis XIVs use of
Roman mythology (namely, Apollo, the sun king), the Franks, as founders of
France, were itinerant descendants of the Trojans who had left Troy under
King Francus, the son of Priam. For Boulainvilliers, however, the Franks
were not cousins to the Romans, but their conquerors, and rather than
denoting a remarkably large family reunion, the Franks entering Gaul were
their blood enemies. And as conquerors they were to have certain rights,
which were neither natural nor juridical.
What is called Boulainvilliers dangerous doctrine of the conquest
therefore contested the mythoi of Louis XIV in two important ways: First,
he challenged the substance of these histoires, arguing that behind the thse
royale was a history of unacknowledged and forgotten battles that must be
remembered if the aristocracy was to reclaim its historical rights, which
were ultimately derived from violence. Secondly, Boulainvilliers changed
the subject of history from the sovereigns and their continuous reign over
nations at war with one another. History was not made up of class struggles
or of the doings of great men, but of wars between nations, and in his own
historical period, the GallicRoman element of society was successfully
taking power from the aristocracy and, not incidentally, replacing them with
professional bureaucrats at the court. This administration, for Boulainvilliers,
did not serve the nation, but was basically a permanent ritual operation
that served daily lessons in public right. As Foucault writes,
The courts essential function is to constitute, to organize, a space
for the daily and permanent display of royal power in all its
splendor. The court is basically a permanent ritual operation that
begins again every day and requalifies a man who gets up, goes for
a walk, eats, has his loves and his passions, and who is at the same
timethanks to all that, because of all that, and because none of
all that is eliminateda sovereign.78
Part of displaying royal power in all its splendor included the pro
duction of narratives of its power. Relevant not just to our discussions in
this chapter, but also more generally to sovereign selfsupposition, Foucault
argues,
[F]or a long time, [history] remained related to rituals of power. It
seems to me that we can understand the discourse of the historian to
be a sort of ceremony, oral or written, that must in reality produce
a justification of power and a reinforcement of that power...[by]
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speak[ing] the right of power and to intensify the luster of power.
It had two roles. The point of recounting history, the history of
kings, the mighty sovereigns and their victories (and if need be
their temporary defeats) was to use the continuity of the law to
establish a juridical link between those men and power, because
power and its working were a demonstration of the continuity of
the law itself. Historys other role was to use the almost unbearable
intensity of the glory of power, its examples, to fascinate men. Like
rituals, coronations, ceremonies, and legendary stories, history is an
operator of power, an intensifier of power.79
Both the practice and the content of writing these histories was sover
eigntist. In brief, the moral of these fables was that what sovereigns do is
never pointless, futile, or petty, and never unworthy of being narrated.80
Foucaults discussion here is a critique of the stillmainstream versions of
historiography, and this can even be extended to any form of narration (e.g.,
journalism) that sees its duty to encircle and describe the inner workings of
the inner circles of power (e.g., the Oval Office of the White House), whose
very performance provides a continuous public lesson on what is important.
Sovereignty as such cannot exist without this mediafunction, this prosthesis
and simulacrum of itself, that is, this mediation.
That Boulainvilliers would be chosen by the royal court to condense
the history of France for the duc de Bourgogne in his Ltat de la France
would provide him an opportunity for a counterlesson in public right,
or rather a lesson in the violent origins of all such public rights. In his
hands, Foucault writes, history does not simply analyze or interpret forces:
it modifies thema claim, of course, that sovereigns have long known.81
Like Foucault the genealogist, Boulainvilliers more literal genealogy of his
family history intervenes in history by writing history. For Boulainvilliers
and Foucault, as such, there is no neutral point from which to converse
about history; writing history is not exceptional to history itself. Importantly,
for Boulainvilliers, one either inculcates the lessons of sovereignty or
learns another more dangerous doctrine, as his contemporaries called it.
By attempting to awake the memories of the aristocrats, Boulainvilliers
modif[ies] the very disposition and the current equilibrium of the rela
tions of force.82 Thus, Foucault argues that Boulainvilliers invented another
thinking of power:
[H]e defined the principle of what might be called the relational
character of power: power is not something that can be possessed,
and it is not a form of might; power is never anything more than
a relationship that can, and must, be studied only by looking at
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the interplay between the terms of that relationship. One can

not therefore write either the history of kings or the history of
peoples; one can write the history of what constitutes those oppos
ing terms....By writing that history, by defining the relational
character of power, and by analyzing it in history, Boulainvilliers
was challenging...the juridical model of sovereignty which
had, until then, been the only way of thinking of the relationship
between the people and the monarch, or between the people and
those who govern. Boulainvilliers describes the phenomenon of
power...in historical terms of domination and the play of rela
tions of force....In Boulainvilliers, we therefore findfor the
first time, I thinka historicopolitical continuum.83
The lineage between Boulainvilliers genealogy, as depicted in Society
Must Be Defended, and Foucaults genealogies of power/knowledge is unmis
takable. In the lectures that follow, Foucault turns directly to a discussion of
the meaning of genealogy, especially the problem of the rise of the univer
sity and officially directed knowledges, those that disqualif[y] what might
be termed useless and irreducible little knowledges [and] normalizes those
knowledges.84 Foucault argues that the state becomes the locus for the
selection, normalization, and centralization of normalized knowledges,
and provides the displacement of philosophy from its summit at the height
of the sciences. The regimes and regimens of science would henceforth
become the masterful knowledge behind disciplinary power.85 The state, in
other words, is in these lectures the juncture of juridical and disciplinary
power. Despite this normalization by the state of other knowledges, what
Foucault argues is occurring during the eighteenth century is the move
ment of Boulainvilliers thinking of the nationwhat Arendt in the same
context called racethinking before racism in Origins of Totalitarianismto
the center of politics, providing a binary view of society that would crys
tallize in various philosophical tropes, he argues, including Hegelian and
Marxist dialectics, but more significantly and perniciously, in racethinking
and nationalism.
Boulainvilliers historical pedagogy, as we have seen, depicts the
Franksthe Germanic peoples whose defeat of the outlying areas of the
Roman empire is the starting point for most French historiesas a ferocious
race that had given up its freedom for the increasing peace and security of
the graveyards of history. These great warriors were, Boulainvilliers claims,
the forbearers of a dying aristocracy selling itself out for a pittance to the
royal court, a court led by a king who should have been nothing other than
a magistrate marking a place of exchange between Frankdescended sei
gniors. To those who have not heard of Boulainvilliers, Foucaults claims for
136
the importance of the French aristocrat would appear audacious. However,

Foucault is right to point to the boiling cauldron of claims and counterclaims
made for different nationseventually classes for Foucaultwithin France
as the eighteenth century reached its end in the Terror of the Revolution
and the rise of Napoleon.

The intellectual field, in the late eighteenth century, Foucault argues, was
divided between the historicism of Boulainvilliersdefined as seeing an
unavoidable connection between war and history, [which] no matter how
far back it goes...never finds nature, right, order, or peace86and the
antihistoricism of the Rousseauists, with their thinking of a presocietal
noble savage.87
During the French Revolution, he argues, the nation takes over the
state. For Sieys and the ideologues of the Revolution, the nation preexists
the state88; it is a particular being that must take the state in order to make
itself universal, to proclaim its rights, to protect the nation once and for all.
What we find in Sieys, to simplify, is an inversion of the previous Bourbon
order. The state does not exist as that which gathers together a land and its
indiscriminate multitude, but rather is now to be thought as an instrument
of the nation. Once it takes over the state, Foucault argues, what
characterize[s] the nation [at the time of Sieys] is a vertical relation
ship between a body of individuals who are capable of constituting
a State, and the actual existence of the State itself. It is in terms
of this vertical nation/State axis, or the Statist potentiality/Statist
realization axis, that the nation is to be characterized and situated.
This also means that what constitutes the strength of a nation is
not so much its physical vigor [as in Boulainvilliers]. What does
constitute the strength of a nation is now something like its capaci
ties, its potentialities, and they are all organized around the figure
of the State: the greater a nations Statist capacity, or the greater
its potential, the stronger it will be.89
Here we have in brief an account of nationalist yearnings since the days
of the French Revolution: no longer domination over another class, no
longer a depiction of a binary opposition within the state, but rather the
need to control the state, to exploit its intermediary powers between the
people and itself, the nation and itselfa Rousseauism read through the
nationalist guise.
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The essential function and the historical role of the nation is

not defined by its ability to exercise a relationship of domination
over other nations [n.b., though it will now turn its attention to
the barbarians to be colonized]. It is something else: its ability to
administer itself, to manage, govern, and guarantee the constitution
and workings of the figure of the State and of State power. . . . The
nation is the active, constituent core of the State. The nation is
the State, or at least an outline State.90
The state will be the instrument for the nations protection; it will join
with the disciplining of those, in a claim by Sieys not cited by Foucault,
who are not of my species, [who] are not my fellow men; a noble is not of
my species; he is a wolf and I shoot.91 During the eighteenth century, there
is a turnover of the thought of sovereignty from the state as king guiding
and creating a multitude to a conceptualization of an opposition between
the nation and that segment of the social that holds back its freedom, all
in an era in which techniques of security and political economy described
living as to live dangerously.92 Politics is motivated at this time, Foucault
implies, not by Aristotles righteous anger for justice, or Christian humility,
or even a Rousseauian pleasure in willing the good, but fear. (Thus all the
work of an earlier period that Stuart Elden notes linked terror and territory
to its common root in Latin.)93 National sovereignty, exploiting disciplinary
power, takes aim at the wolf of monarchical sovereignty, the carnivorous
monarchival power that deems might makes right, as in the La Fontaine
fable of the lamb and the wolf, and hunts it down: a regicide in fact, but
not the dnouement of sovereignty itself. As such, Boulainvilliers provides a
discourse essentially antiState, and these new discourses produce narratives
tying the nation to the state, marking the transition from the virtual [the
outline state of the nation] to the real, the transition from the national
totality to the universality of the State.94
This readies us for Clausewitzs nineteenthcentury dictum: war will be
politics by another means. Only from this nationalist context, Foucault argues,
can one understand the rise of the bio-political in the nineteenth century as
operating alongside governmentality and disciplinary powerall crystallizing
together into a pernicious national sovereignty more deadly than the old sov
ereign states, since war retreats from the historicopolitical discourses as the
field of intelligibility to the stasis of civil war: We see the emergence of an
internal war that defends society against threats born of and in its own body,95
like the bodys immune system that attacks the self for its own protection.
War, he argues, as the raison dtat turnsover to the biological, to an imma
nent, bodily conception of the nationstate.96 Racism as state policy is born.
138
Before turning fully to bio-political sovereignty, it would be helpful

review the heterogeneous forms of power Foucault was describing during
this period:

1. Sovereignty: Foucault uses this term, as we have seen, for the

functioning and logic of a given power of the state, especially the
state in its monarchical form. Where Foucault thinks sovereignty
as such (its selfmastery, selfpositioning, its place of exception
outside the law and outside any norm), well mark it, since to
refuse to compare Foucaults conceptualization of sovereignty,
for instance, to the work of Arendt, because he doesnt use this
term betrays the worst assumptions of nominalism: if he doesnt
use the name, somehow hes not discussing it. No doubt, for his
part, Foucault begins many of his lecture courses describing sov
ereigntyconsidered not in terms of the self or the other ways
found hitherto in this bookas a retroversion of power. Many
times, he discusses the older, familial forms of power (the sover
eign monarch) as a pedagogical means for teasing out nonstate
dispositifs. Limited to the rule of law, sovereignty, in Foucaults
use of the term, acts directly on the body (e.g., the supplice of
Damien the regicide in Discipline and Punish) in its right over
life and death. It utilizes ceremonies and fictions of the divine or
mythological self in order to render the kings subject obedient.
Foucault is said to think sovereignty as juridical, and therefore
conflated with the law.
2. Discipline: Unlike sovereignty, this power operates at the

microlevel. The scientist, the physician, and all manner of
experts break down...individuals, places, times, actions, and
operation, fixing processes of progressive training [dressage] and
permanent control, in the end dividing the normal from the
abnormal.97 Discipline works techniques of normation (norma
tion) that shape subjectivities based upon prescriptive models.98
Foucaults bestknown example is the panopticon, which func
tions through the gaze of the prison guard and the interioriza
tion of that gaze by its individual prisoners, who are unaware
of when and if they are being seen, Foucaults primary example
of political pedagogy in the early 1970s. Whereas sovereignty is
deductive, discipline is productive of docile bodies; it is a
technique, a how of power: how to survey someone, how to
control her conduct, her comportment, her aptitudes, how to
intensify her capacities, how to put her in a place where she will
be more useful.99

139
3. Biopower: This last quotation from Discipline and Punishhow

to put her in a place where she will be more usefulbrings us to
Foucaultian biopower, especially as it is developed in his 1978
79 lecture course, The Birth of Biopolitics. Foucault argues that
biopower operates at the level of population and on life itself,
not on particular bodies. The science of biopower is statistics.
Importantly, he teases out biopower not just in terms of the rise
of nationalisms, as we have shown and will develop further, but
also through the rise of civil society (what Arendt dubbed the
realm of the social) as well as liberal and neoliberal thought.
For Foucault, biopower cannot be thought without reference to
governmentality.
Bio-political Sovereignty
According to Foucault, biopower developed along with the dispositif or
apparatus of security, which in the eighteenth century provided for the
circulation of goods beyond the direct control of the state. What Foucault
describes here is in line with Arendts history of the rise of the social in the
Human Condition, since both agree that the political economy, the police
state, and governmental administration all grew to fruition with the rise of
civil society. For both, this confluence of events, as we noted in chapter
3, was coextensive with (a) the rise of economics as modeled on the house
hold as central to the techniques of government, and (b) the dominance
of metaphors depicting a national household that continues its mastery
over the political.
The social, on Foucaults account, exploits the dispositif of security,
which quelled the anxieties of this civil society, regulating its reality
through a centrifugal force that spread through a given space; discipline,
for its part, operates, on Foucaults account, by enclosing given spaces, such
as the prison, the madhouse, and the hospital. Security lets things happen
locally for optimizing the utility of the population, and the governments
experts, for example, the kings administrators, assume greater control in
line with the emergence of the powers of the police. This, of course, is
the era of the Physiocrats, whose very name derived from the Greek word
for nature. For Foucault, there is an inherent giveandtake between the
growth of the police and the rise of liberal economic thought, which more
and more views the economy as operating at the frontiers of the reach of
the state. Liberal political economy sees power as a selflimiting form, and
its task is to expand the utility of the population at the least cost in time
and money to the state, which obviously, though, does not and has not
precluded a powerful police operation. (Laterday political libertarianism
140
functions precisely by conflating staggering differences in economic ideology

from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.)
On this view, government, initially limited to the function of super
vision, is only to intervene when it sees that something is not happening
according to the general mechanics of behavior, exchange, and economic
life.100 This dispositifand here we should note that for Foucault liberalism
is a technique of power, not a form of power itselfgives rise to a conception
of economic freedom in which civil society is but a process, not a collection
of subjects under governmental authority. In other words, the rights of the
subject under sovereignty are not to be confused with the transactional
rights of political economy. Economic thinking will find among its tech
niques utilitarianism. The major shift at this time is the fiction of a homo
economicus over whom there is no sovereign.101 Again, without minimizing
all the differences between Arendtian archaeology and Foucaultian gene
alogies, this is precisely what Arendt identifies as the dominance of homo
faber and its efficiencies. The government is to be a frugal one, though
Foucault is also clear that liberal governmentality operates with the police,
a term that we will discuss in its specificity soon: there is an inseparable
conjunction, he argues, between the disciplines and liberalism.102 In cor
poratist states, such as Augusto Pinochets Chile, we find case studies of the
rather contented marriage of dictatorship and libertarian economics. In these
police states, a government...merges with administration, with all the
weight of a governmentality.103 Therefore, we do not have an economy
of powers in which one form (economism) replaces another (disciplinarity),
which had itself replaced another (sovereignty). Economic freedom and
disciplinary techniques are completely bound up with each other, Foucault
maintains.104 The flip side of liberalisms leave us alone [laisseznous faire]
is its culture of danger: the risk society of liberalism is conceptually and
historically allied to dispositifs of security.105
In the twentieth century, economic paranoia of the state becomes
manic, and neoliberalism envisions the subject as wholly sovereign, a
term Foucault does not use, but is clear from the movement he traces
from the laborcentric writings of economic liberalism in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries to the neoliberal emphasis on formal competi
tion. Neoliberalism is not centered on Lockean conceptions of property
and the exchanges of wages for labor. On the contrary, it depicts subjects
as freelancers, a term originating with medieval swordsmen, ever in con
trol of themselves and entering into arrangements for pursuing their free
interestsall in competition with each other. This is the wellknown risk
society, where we are each companies of one.106 Considered something
like ministates, we seek mechanisms of securityfreedom that provide the
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least exposure to danger, even as, for Foucault, the very existence of sav
ings banks, mass marketed detective novels, and ubiquitous pharmaceuticals
increase fears of senior impoverishment, crime, and disease, respectively.107
And we could add, precisely at a time where freelancers are left free of any
of the social securities of previous eras. In principle, the invisible hand of
capitalism is atheistic, since there is no master homo economicus in charge
of the economy. It claims that economics acts blindly or not at all, yet the
administrative police makes great strides in its surveying of the population
in the name of safety and security. Homo economicus is no longer considered
a natural figure, as in Locke, but instead a participant in a game or struc
ture of formal competition. Each is on his or her own, seeking an optimal
return on investments of time and energy, while measuring the debts owed
among one and all.
The other powers of governmentality produce a civil society that
is but the glue the holds these entrepreneurs together, an entanglement
of powers that Foucault underlines time and again in his later lectures. For
Arendt, as we saw, the social glue of society would become racethinking
and then racism, and Foucault argues there is a bio-political doubling
carried out since the subjects of right on which political sovereignty is
exercised appear as a population that a government must manage.108 In
this competitive, freelancing society is a biopolitics in which each is never
immune from the powers of the police state, or is rather attacked as part of
the social bodys immunitarian apparatus. There is a war of all against all:
as the U.S. Army put it in a series of 200708 television commercials that
inadvertently tied all of Foucaults considerations of biopower together, each
is an army of one, a freelancer in the oldest sense. Or as an example, we
can point to the rise of American exceptionalism and its security apparatuses
along with its call for freer economic tradeall in the name, bringing
Foucaults discussion together, of economic security. We will come back
to this point, where the laisseznous faire of homo economicus meets up with
the faire vivre (make live) and laissez mourir (let die) of the most potent
bio-political sovereignty.
Foucault, Schmitt, and the King Who Rules

but Does not Govern
These nationstate, disciplinary institutions, and the court bureaucracies
come together to deliver pernicious political violence. As the state becomes
the locus through which this violence operates, another element returns,
like the repressed, as Nancy writes: the reinstantiation of sovereignty with
biopower, which would make state racism possible and deliver on the worst
142
of its promises. Before coming to this last element, let us turn for a moment
to the powers that Foucault puts under the heading of governmentality and
pastoral power. The import of these other genealogies will become clear.
For Foucault, as he notes in Security, Territory, Population, governing is
not the same things as reigning,...[G]overning is not the same thing as
being a sovereign, a suzerain, a lord, a judge, a general, master, or professor.
There is a specificity, let us surmise, to what it is to govern beyond previ
ous descriptions of power.109 Here, he turns to Augustin Thierry, himself a
nationalist descendent of Boulainvilliers and historian of the early Germanic
peoples in France, who offered the republican dictum that the king may
rule, but he does not govern (le Roi reigne mai il ne gouverne pas).110 This,
for Foucault, phrases the modern political problem:
The privilege that government begins to exercise in relation to rules,
to the extent that, to limit the kings power, it will be possible one
day to say, the king reigns, but he does not govern, this inversion
of government and the reign or rule and the fact that government
is basically much more than sovereignty, much more than reign or
ruling, much more than imperium, is, I think, absolutely linked to
population.111
Foucault points out that this problem of governmentality has its ana
logue in a longstanding theological view of Gods power. God, it is said,
provides the general laws by which, in turn, his shepherds would watch
over individual members of the flock. Foucault also describes a striking
theologicalcosmological continuum, which provides the impetus, which
we analyze in the next chapter, for the work of Schmitt and Agamben: the
continuum in which power moves from God to the sovereign monarch to the
father of a family by way of nature and pastors.112 But, according to Foucault,
there is a break in this circuit of power during the late Renaissance.
The whole of Agambens Il Regno e la Gloria (2007) sets out to date this
break much earlier, to the beginnings of Christianity itself, while also
claiming, despite Foucault and Schmitts wellknown work on these specific
terms, that these concepts have rarely been thematized as such outside the
strictly theological sphere.113 Hell also claim, confoundingly, that Foucaults
mistake was to investigate this continuum only within explicitly politi
cal texts. Thus, Foucaults analysis needs to be corrected and clarified
(yet again) since, despite Foucaults extended analysis of pastoral power
back to many of the theological figures in Security, Territory, Population and
The Birth of Biopolitics, he appears to ignore the theological implications of
the term oikonomia.114 For Agamben, Foucaults references to a number of
the same, but not all figures important to Il Regno e la Gloria is evidence
143
that Foucault concentrated on medieval political treatises, and thus was

not attentive enough to work on these concepts in different milieux.115
However, Foucault misses none of the major claims available in Il Regno e
la Gloria, especially since much of Agambens text is not on the track of
these early Christian texts, but is given over to concepts and descriptions
derived from Carl Schmitts readings of this period in Political Theology II.
More pertinently, Foucaults analyses in his late70s lecture courses, Security,
Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, performed the genealogical
taskhowever successfully is another questionof providing a history of
the present that would lead his discussions of economy, security, and the
biopolitical up to the contemporary period (Agambens analysis stops three
hundred years before skipping to Schmitts analysis of democratic doxa). We
cannot help but pause and note what is a sovereign rhetoric that would
know what Foucault ignored, attended to, etc., all before a writer who
will have the last word over history and its paradigms in a masterful, sover
eign pedagogy, since he uses any supposed lack of attention as a teachable
moment for others on performing genealogies of concepts.
This sets us up better for the ensuing chapters of this book. Returning
to Foucault, the theoretical problem of this continuum arises because God
imparts but a general grammar, a set of immutable, intelligible laws, but
does not govern the world.116 The economy of salvation, then, becomes
very worldly, mundane even; something supplemental in relation to sover
eignty, something without a model is demanded of the sovereign, namely
an art of government over the res publica, the public domain (la chose
publique).117 Here, we could return to the whole of analyses in chapter 1,
while also noting that Rousseaus problem is precisely the relation between
the sovereign and the government.
Sovereignty evinces, on Foucaults account, a vicious circularity,
wherein the sovereign is to aim at the common good, which in the theo
ries of Pufendorf and Rousseau means nothing other than the exercising of
sovereignty itself, that is, the submission of subjects to sovereign: The end
of sovereignty is the exercise of sovereignty, the tautology of sovereignty
has always stipulated.118 Governmentality performs not through laws, as clas
sical sovereignty did, and his analysis teases out the insular circularity of
this monarchical sovereignty isolating itself on high from the administra
tive governmentality operating in the shadows behind the kings purview.
Governmentality directs itself to the care of the people through a range
of multiform tactics.119 Striking again an Arendtian theme, Foucault argues
that governmentality was linked to the rise of the bureaucracies of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whose principle was the care of the
people by a careful collection of data from a nation depicted as a large
household.120 What Foucault marksand I am simplifying his genealogy
144
hereis a shift from the circular raison dtat of the pregovernmentality

era (the sovereign selfrotection through terror over the territory) to an
ethos of care at a point when economic concerns came into the political
through the rise of mercantilism, which itself, he says, was a tactic by the
might of the sovereign.
Sovereignty, in this way, is renewed.121 Concomitant with the rise of
the bureaucracies came an invention of knowledges and disciplines through
which the bureaucracies of the state would govern by watching over and
caring for the nation. We thus witness a changeover from an earlier art
of governance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to these sciences
of government, a veritable political science focusing attention on popula
tion and looking at the aggregate effects of incremental movements by one
and all. Here we have the ideologies of the Physiocrats and their natural
isms and their focus on phusis that would be important to early liberalism.
Governmentality does not mark an excess of the state in all of these ideolo
gies, but nevertheless the government, according to multiple authors of the
period, aimed not at the states wellbeing, but the welfare of the popula
tion, the improvement of its condition, [and] the increase of its wealth.122
We live, Foucault argues, in a continuing era of governmentality and thus
it is important to understand its development:123
[T]he state can only be understood in its survival and its limits
on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality....First
came the state of justice, born in a territoriality of feudal type and
corresponding in large part to a society of law [Foucault conflates
sovereignty and law]customary laws [e.g., the British constitu
tion] and written lawswith a whole game of engagements and
litigations. Second, the administrative state, born in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries...that corresponds to a society of regula
tions and disciplines. Finally, the state of government, which is no
longer essentiality defined by...the surface it occupies, but by a
mass: the mass of population, with its volume, its density....And
this state of government, which is grounded in its population and
which refers and has resort to the instrumentality of economic
knowledge, would correspond to a society controlled by apparatus
(dispositif) of security.124
We can see Foucault redescribing discipline in these lectures in terms of
governmentality.125 In fact, Foucault suggests, sovereignty is an exemplary
form of this governance of the subject.126 Further, Foucault argues, It is
certain that in contemporary societies that the state is not simply one of
145
the forms or specific situations of the exercise of power...but that in a

certain way all other forms of power relation must refer to it.127
These discussions of governmentality, as is well known, refer Foucault
to older, Christian forms of pastoral power. This power, born again or
renewed in early modernity, will be one that will lead each lamb to its
salvation or leave behind those to be sacrificed as but lambs to the slaugh
ter in the exercise of power. Pastoral power is linked by Foucault to early
Christian practices in which the pastor watched over its flock preparing it
for eventual salvation, and in this way is associated with the care (cura) of
the shepherd (pastor). Modern pastoral powertheological in provenance,
biological in its mechanismswatches over the herd while also paying heed
to the material needs of each person. Foucault claims that Greek and Roman
discussions of power were territorial, and that pastoral power instead has its
roots in the Hebraic and Christian traditions. The fact that the pastor looks
after a flock that can wander, like a nation, over any particular territory, is
important to note. For his part, the shepherd must be constantly on hand
to the flock, without whom they would disperse:
The theme of keeping watch is important....The shepherd acts,
he works, he puts himself out, for those he nourishes and who are
asleep. He watches over them. He pays attention to them all and
scans each one of them. Hes got to know his flock as a whole,
and in detail. Not only must he know where good pastures are,
the seasons laws, and the order of things; he must also know each
ones particular needs. ...The shepherds power implies individual
attention paid to each member of the flock.128
Here we have the rhetoric and expectation of every national leader of
recent memory. Additionally, as Plato argues in the Statesman, the shepherd
would be like a god among men, and this is why Plato rejects the analogy
between the statesman and the shepherd for a thisworld politics. Mixing in
another of the analogies from the Statesman, Foucault argues that shepherd
is fundamentally a physician,129 which means that the shepherd will
continually render an account of the safety and salvation of his flock.
Rooted in the Hebraic tradition,130 pastorship becomes a form of governance
only with its reinscription in the Christian tradition and Christian agape.
This Christian pastorship
implies a peculiar type of knowledge between the pastor and each
of his sheep. This knowledge is particular. It individualizes. It isnt
enough to know the state of the flock. That of each sheep must
146

also be known....The shepherd must be informed as to the
material needs of each member of the flock and provide for them
when necessary. He must know what...each of them doeshis
public sins. Last but not least, he must know what goes on in the
soul of each one, that is, his secret sins, his progress on the road
to sanctity.131
Utilizing the Christian techniques of examination, confession, guid

ance, [and] obedience,132 pastoral power is the embryonic point of the
governmentality [whose] entry into politics marks the threshold of the mod
ern state.133 Christian agape provides not just for salvation, but also the
mortification necessary for saving ones soul. The modern pastor, Foucault
suggests, is the policeman, the one whose original power was to watch over
the religion, morals, health, and public safety (public salut) of the people
during the eighteenth century. As Nicolas Delamare puts it in his Trait
de la police (1705), the police must see to everything pertaining to mens
happiness; they were not, nor are they now, merely an apparatus of the law.
They are also the medium through which the laws and regulationsall the
calculations and tactics of the state134touch life itself.135 In this way, the
true object of the police becomes, at the end of the eighteenth century,
the population: climbing the pulpit of its renewed pastorship, the police
and the state essentially takes care of men as a population.136
In due course, then, the old raison dtat of the governmentality of the
seventeenth century is broken up into four elementseconomic practice,
population management, law and respect for freedoms, policewhich are
added to the great diplomatic apparatus (dispositif) that has hardly changed
since the eighteenth century.137 Politically, the shepherd will also be the
executioner who will love you to death and sacrifice you in the name of
the salvation and safety of the flock.138 Pastoral power, he writes, was no
longer a question of leading people to their salvation in the next world,
but rather insuring it in this world. And in this context, the word salvation
takes on a different meaning: health, well being (that is, sufficient wealth,
standard of living), security, [and] protection against accidents.139
We need only look to Carl Schmitt, wouldbe court philosopher to the
Third Reich, to see the stakes of this pastoral power. Foucaults genealogies
of pastoral governmentality relied on resources ancient, medieval, and
modern, which had also grounded Schmitts thinking in the 1930s. In his
earlier work, Schmitt had wondered about the dualism between reigning
and governing in other parliamentary state systems, a distinction brought
into relief by Thierrys dictum that the king rules but does not govern, a
point discussed by the jurist Max von Seydal.140
147
Political leadership and administration is in the hands of ministers,

who are responsible to the popular assembly and dependent on its
trust. The famous formula for this reads: Le roi rgne mais il ne
gouverne pas [The king rules but does not govern]. The question
posed by...Max von Seydal, what then remains of rgner if one
removes gouverner?, is answerable in reference to the fact that one
distinguishes between potestas [power] and auctoritas [authority] and
that the distinctive meaning of authority is made evident in regard
to political power.141
By laying out this supposed dualism in terms of the trinity of his
aptly titled Staat, Bewegung, Volk (State, Movement, People), Schmitt sought
to define and defend the specificity of the new German constitution of 1933.
Needless to say, Schmitt sees a sovereign path for bringing together this
dualism. He positsat a time in which his writings were at their most
influential in the Nazi hierarchythat the Fhrer, redubbed das Fhrung,
was just the figure to do so. In order to argue this, Schmitt specifically evokes
the pastoral care of the early church. Having already defended the propriety
of Hitlers moves under the previous Weimar constitution as that constitu
tions protector, Schmitt avers that the president, at that time Hitler, had
merely returned to his mandated position as the head of state as one who
rules and does not govern.142 As chancellor, though, Hitler not only now
served the function of ruling, but also had a new power Schmitt dubs, akin
to the Fhrers preferred title, Fhrung, meaning, he says, the person who
governs. Schmitt stipulates, Fhren does not mean to command, and he
claims the distinction between commanding and governing goes back to a
time in which the early Catholic and Roman authorities had distorted the
image of the shepherd and the sheep in line with a certain dogmatism.143
Schmitt then turns to a passage we cited earlier from the Statesman, arguing
that while in Plato the shepherd is of a different kind than his flock, there
is an unconditional racial equality [Artgleichheit] between the Fhrer and the
people of the party.144 (Needless to say, Schmitts mythopolitics leaves out
the Hebraic sources Foucault later cites.) Schmitt then references languages
that inherited various forms of the Latin gubernator (gouvernement, governo,
government, even the Gubernium of the Hapsburg monarchy) and argues
that the history of gubernator provides a good example by which a meta
phorical comparison becomes a concept that is both juridical and technical.145
We are not far, of course, from Foucaults later historical claims, though one
is left to wonder just how Schmitt can differentiate, as his discussion of the
secularization of theology necessitates, a metaphorical comparison from a
juridical or technical concept. Moreover, Schmitts linguistic analysis is
148
driven, despite its invocation of the early Church, by bad faith: he needed
to cover for the embarrassing fact that Fhrer was not derived from any
such sources, but was a translation of the Italian duce.
In 1933, as Hitler dissolved the German parliament as part of his rise
to power, the socalled Ermchtigungsgestz, Schmitt argued it was a measure
in line with the Weimarera constitutions Article TwentyFive. Next, Hitler
would declare a state of exception, a measure outlined in the constitutions
Article FortyEight. The only check in Article FortyEight on this power,
which stipulated that the parliament could declare an end to such a state
of emergency, had already been rendered null by the presidents previous
decision. A new constitution was put in placeSchmitt himself defended all
of this, referencing the pouvoir constitu posited by the French Revolutionary
EmmanuelJoseph Sieys to dissolve the national assembly during the French
Revolutionand the legal apparatus for a permanent state of emergency was
put in place. The Fhrer protects the law (Der Fhrer schtzt das Recht),
Schmitt wrote succinctly.146 By way of explaining the unexplainable, Schmitt
argues, despite the sovereign placement of itself outside the law, the sover
eign decision is, on Schmitts account, not arbitrary: it keeps in place the
very normalcy that prevents a slide into utter chaosnever mind the
political and philosophical tautological coup de force of this argument (not
least given the Nazi Partys violent role in 1933 in instigating all manner of
emergencies to give the Fuhrer greater power, a point about which Schmitt
was not oblivious), and no matter Schmitts earlier argument that no one
could call such a state of sovereignty to an end. Schmittianism thus thinks
le salut public (a term he used in the French) as both a goodbye or (salut)
to the public space as its supposed saving grace (salut). Here, we can cite
Schmitts wellknown description of the sovereign decision:
What characterizes an exception is principally unlimited authority,
which means the suspension of the entire existing order. In such
a situation it is clear that the state remains, whereas law recedes.
Because the exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order
in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary
kind. The existence of the state is undoubted proof of its superiority
over the validity of the legal norm. The decision frees itself from
all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute. The
state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of
selfpreservation, as one would say.147
We could spend an entire chapter following the turns of this circular reason
ing, of the foundationless fiction of the right of selfpreservationsover
eignty operates, Schmitt writes, exceptional to any norm, any law, and any
149
right, even presumably that right of selfpreservationbased on nothing

other than an appeal to what everyone knows: as one would say. In fact,
this presupposition of what one would say, the supposition as if one
spoke for another or for all, is a mark not only of a certain Rousseauism,
but of all sovereign performance.148
In any case, to indicate the pastoral care of Hitler, Schmitt utiliz
es Fhrung for his role as chancellor, as the one who will be governing
[Regierungakt], not just commanding [fhren] the people, though in his
person, as head of state, Hitler closes the dualism by performing both roles.
For Schmitt, this means that the democratic dualism between leading and
governing is sealed over with a secularized but also fully racialized, that is to
say, biopolitical, office through which das Fhrung will shepherd the flock
liv[ing] under the protection and the shadow of political decisions. In this
way, the movement and the people are united, with Hitler affirming his
supreme Fhrertum.149
Beyond the Sovereign Decision

The powers described by Foucault can all be recognized in Schmitts analy
ses, though to be clear, the different genealogies that pull them together
do not, as he puts it, evince a circular ontology (power that proves its
own power, as his critics have argued), since they are traced through hap
penstance and the individual histories he produces. As we will see, there
is a return to a notion of a topdown repression (so-called in La Volont
de savoir) in Foucaults work, linked rightly to the rise of police states and
their dangerous shepherding of the poor, the stateless, the refugee onto the
killing fields of our history.
These powers crystallizethat is, solidify even as they reflect off one
anotheras sovereign biopolitical power. On offer from Foucault are dis
tinguishable genealogies tracing formations of power that concatenated into
the most devastating and deadly regimes of the twentieth century. But we
should not isolate these different powers, as often occurs in the philosophi
cal work on Foucault, and thus see them as conceptually and historically
heterogeneous. In the later 1970s, Foucault was careful not to periodize these
formations of power, arguing instead that each was still operative, permeat
ing one another at a time when the problem of sovereignty is made more
acute than ever.150
We need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society
of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replace
ment of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality
one has a triangle, sovereigntydisciplinegovernment, which has as
150

its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the
apparatuses of security.151
Derrida, for example, continued to read Foucault to the very end as

providing periodizations of history, of epistemic and genealogical turning
points, with the upshot that he erased the singularity of event[s], in turn
producing a homogeneity on either side of such epistemic breaks.152 For
Agamben, this is his avowed means of proceeding. But this view of Foucault
was long in need of updating, and may indeed have belonged to a particular
period in Foucaults writing that Derrida long before had described in
Cogito and the History of Madness (1963). Derridas right that Agambens
work calls on us to reconsider, precisely, a manner of thinking history, of
making history, of articulating a logic and rhetoric concerning a thinking of
history, or of the event.153 As I have set out to demonstrate, this is exactly
what one finds in Foucault, or at least, one would have to admit, using
Derridas own logic, that the text of Foucault is itself always open to reading
otherwise. To take one example that is exemplary, Agamben cites Foucaults
descriptions of the panopticon and panopticism for what he calls his
paradigmatic method, which well describe in the next chapter. That is,
for Agamben, the panopticon is the paradigm of Foucaultian paradigms. But
Foucault did not leave the panopticon behind in the era of disciplinarity he
writes about in Discipline and Punish. His work was not simply a panopti
cism.154 Foucault did argue in 1972 that it formed the most general politi
cal and technical formula of disciplinary power.155 But he returned to the
panopticon on numerous occasions, reading it, for example, as the dream
of the oldest sovereign,156 as a general formula of liberal government,157
and as pervaded by the eighteenth century dispositif of security158; it was a
paradigm in the etymological sense: it was always showing up besides itself,
never as one power or one shape (paradigma). Which is all to say that its
time to put a final period on a certain reading of Foucaults periodizations, or
risk keeping his work locked up and surveilled from an invisible center as a
panoptic that sees only the sameold, sameold in Foucaults disparate works.
Returning to the question at hand, Foucault argues that the circular
ity of sovereignty, its vicious circle, operates after its supposed dnouement.
The state wields power over living beings as living beings, and its politics,
therefore, has to be biopolitics. Since the population is nothing more than
what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to
slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of bio-politics is thanatopolitics.159
It is in light of these claims that Foucault takes up state racism.
For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign pow
er, Foucault writes in The Right of Death and Power over Life, the last
chapter of La Volont de savoir, was the right to decide life and death.160
151
Derived from the Roman patria potestas, which granted the father the right
to dispose of his children and slaves, Foucault argues sovereignty in the clas
sical age was redefined in a considerably diminished form as an ability to
exercise power only in the cases where the sovereigns very existence was in
jeopardy.161 Foucault does not develop here, though he does elsewhere what
both Schmitt and Agamben will note about this peculiarity of sovereignty: it
is the sovereign that dictates those cases in which it is in jeopardy, operating
definitionally outside the law in order to ensure the effectiveness of the law.
Sovereignty as such never appears, pace Foucault, in a diminished form.
This is the sovereign exception. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault
teases over the theoretical paradoxes of traditional sovereignty.
The right of life and death [of the sovereign] is a strange right.. . . In
one sense, to say that the sovereign has a right of life and death
means that he can, basically, either have people put to death or
let them live, or in any case that life and death are not natural or
immediate phenomena which are primal or radical, and which fall
outside the field of power. If we take the argument a little further,
or to the point where it becomes paradoxical, it means that in terms
of his relationship with the sovereign, the subject is, by rights,
neither dead or alive....[I]t is thanks to the sovereign that the
subject has the right to be alive or possibly, the right to be dead.162
This is the right of the sword, the right to let live or make die, a
right that, as Foucault rightly remarks, leaves the subject neither alive nor
dead, at least in theory.163 In the nineteenth century, alongside the rise of
bureaucracies and the policing of morality and the civility of the citizens,
this right is complemented by a new right which does not erase the old but
which does penetrate it, permeate it.164 Sovereignty is not just the power of
the sword, the cutting of the political, but, with its ontotheological edifice
and its bioethics of care, has the power to make live and let die.165 It
is the power of the sword and the power of the physician who will cut off
a limb to save the body politic. Foucault is careful, as usual, not to trace
this trend through philosophicjuridical thoughtthough one could cite
Rousseaus life is a conditional gift of the state herebut at the level of
mechanisms, techniques, and technologies of power.166
In the contemporary period, power, Foucault believes, metastasizes
itself through an administration of life in the name of the security and
safety of populations. What is at stake in this power is no longer the
juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a
population, not a people. Power is situated and exercised at the level of
life, the species, the race, and the largescale phenomena of race.167 (Thus,
152
sexuality is an exemplary point through which it operates, given the nexus of

life and death, of population control, at stake.) In words oftcited, Foucault
argues, For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living
animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is
an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question
(in the double sense: as a problem and as a threat).168
Accordingly, if philosophy begins with Socrates dictum that the unex
amined life is not worth living, for Foucault, modern power begins with the
dictum or diktat that the unexamined life, the undisciplined, ungoverned,
and nonsovereign life, is not just death, but a threat to power and the life
of the nation. Life is reduced to its utility, becoming what both Foucault, in
his 198182 lecture course, and Arendt argue is zo e as opposed to bios.169 Life
as zo e is something to be made and produced, that is, fabricated as just
another element in a population carefully calibrated in a political economy.
Foucault, in his 198182 lecture course, argues that for much of Greek his
tory, bios was related to techne,170 that is, the knowhow that Aristotle had
argued was the part of the soul active in the making of poiesis. Recall from
chapter 2 that Arendt argued that the later Greeks, represented by Plato
and Aristotle, had replaced the prudence and praxis of politics civil life,
bios, with, respectively, the techne and processes of poiesis. This production
of bios, requiring this knowhow or techne, maps well on Arendts claims,
though Foucault does not repeat Arendts mythology of an originary Greek
political isonomy of the earlier archaic period.171
This bios/zo e distinction, of course, also comes to play a crucial role
in Agambens project on biopolitics, to which well soon turn in chap
ter 5. For his part, Foucault argues that though discipline is the form of
power that keeps individual bodies under surveillance, biopolitics oper
ates on a different level, addressing itself to manasspecies,172 an echo
of the speciesbeing (Gattungswesen) described by Marx in the 1844 Paris
Manuscripts. The techne of biopolitics is demography, and the place of
biopolitical intervention is the population. Under biopolitics,
regulatory mechanisms must . . . establish an equilibrium, maintain
an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for
variations within the general population and its aleatory field. In a
word, security mechanisms have to be installed around the random
element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize
a state of life.173
Foucault claims that biopower does not function on the individual, though
like discipline, it is organized around a statistical average, a norm that is
both regulative and regulating; discipline thus operates interstitially as a
153
mode of biopower. We now arrive at the point where racism is inscribed

into the mechanisms of the state....[T]he modern state can scarcely
function without becoming involved in racism at some point.174 Let me
quote him at length on these circumstances:
What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break
into the domain of life that is under powers control: the break
between what must live and what must die. The appearance within
the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction
between races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races
are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as
inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological
that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that
exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a
biologicaltype caesura within a population that appears to be a
biological domain. This will allow power to treat that population as
a mixture of races...to treat the species, to subdivide the species
it controls, into the subspecies known.175
Race, he argues, is not categorized by physical featuresthese means
of classification came after the racism that replaced Boulainvilliers race
warsbut instead by a normalizing teleology. Inferior races will include
all those that threaten the purity of the national body: foreigners (includ
ing and perhaps especially Jews),176 the mad, the prisoners, the malcontents,
the sexual pervert, the economically uselessthe figures of the pariah in
general. Boulainvilliers old discourse of a war between two nations had
disappeared. Rather, we have to defend society against all biological threats
posed by the other race, the subrace, the counterrace that we are, despite
ourselves, bringing into existence, those genetically born abnormal that must
be sequestered or destroyed for the sake of the whole immunizing itself:177
At this point, the racist thematic is no longer a moment in the
struggle between one social group and another; it will promote the
global strategy of social conservatisms. At this point...we see
the appearance of a State racism: a racism that society will direct
against itself, against its own elements and its own products. This
is the internal element of permanent purification.178
This permanent purification is not a relation between one and the other
of war, but rather is a confrontation of a biologicaltype.179 The stasis, the
internal war, of this teleological homeostasis of society is now biological.
The enemies that have to be done away with are not adversaries in the
154
political sense; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population
and for the population.180 Foucault is incisive on this point. He undermines
what he takes to be the whole talk of civility that becomes the mode of the
historicopolitical, the economic, and the juridicophilosophical discourses
of modernity. Wars are no longer fought for conquest; all wars are now race
wars. Colonialism is exemplary of this. Evolutionism and other appeals to
natural struggles for existence provide the narrative undercurrent for war.
This, of course, is not to pay heed to those who would deny evolution.
Rather, this discourse became a naturalized mythology providing biopolitics
mystical foundations. With all this in mind, racism becomes
the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be
killed. . . . Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism
alone can justify the murderous function of the State. . . . From this
point onwards, war is about two things: it is not simply a matter of
destroying a political adversary, but of destroying the enemy race,
of destroying that biological threat that those people over there
[and here] represent to our race.181
The other side of this, as Foucault notes, is a suicidal element con
tained in biopolitical power: the war against the other will make us purer;
it will destroy those who were unfit to live in our society anyway, even to
the point where this immunity for the sovereign self becomes autoimmune
and destroys the body politic it was supposed to protect. Foucault argues that
this racism is not bound to a hatred of one societal group, though hes not
denying that specific groups are marked as a disease to be eradicated; nor is it
a function of class; nor is it only a mythos hiding a territorial will to power.
The specificity of modern racism...is not bound up with men
talities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the
technique of power, with the technology of power. It is bound up with
this, and that takes us as far away as possible from race war and
the intelligibility of history....So racism is bound up with the
workings of the State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of
races and the purification of race, to exercise its sovereign power.182
Here is, in sum, his argument for biopolitical sovereignty as the summit of
a deadly politics of the living. Foucault argues that once power takes this
form, once it becomes enmeshed along a biological continuum, we find
the actual roots of racism.183 Ideologies and mythological suppositions of
later theorists aside, it is the techniques and technology, the accounting and
155
reasoning of the raison dtat, the pastoral shepherding of the policeman

over the precinct, that will be an operative racism. And, as we will see,
the purest biopolitical state is the one where the governed will take these
techniques upon themselves.
At this point, Foucault says, we have to take the example of
Nazism, which of course is not one example among others. No politics,
Foucault argues, not that he needs to, was more biologically controlled
and regulated. And, of course, the Nazi regime was the also the most
disciplinary. We could also say that no other state was more pastoral in
Foucaults sense, or governmental. In Arendts words, the Nazis attempted
to remove all spontaneity from humanity, which Foucault dubs the ran
dom element.184 But in order to prove itself as the purest race, the least
degenerate, the Nazi state was also the most suicidal; it was, in every
sense, dying to prove its purity. The classical right to kill of the state
would not just be generalized, as Foucault notes, but it would also be
turned eventually on the state and the very people it was meant to save.
These paroxysms of biopolitical power, the paroxysms of sovereignty dis
seminated across Nazi society, are the symptoms of the death drive of the
biopolitical, its thanatopolitics.
Sovereignty thus haunts, as Foucault notes.185 Its exceptional power
of and over the political cannot be regulated out of the political, even as it
takes on new forms and new techniques for seizing and seizing up politics.
It is not simply juridical, but on Foucaults description, part and parcel of
biopolitics.
Ultimately, everyone in the Nazi state had the power of life and
death over his or her neighbors, if only because of the practice
of informing....[M]urderous and sovereign power are unleashed
throughout the entire social body....We have, then, in Nazi
society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a
society which has generalized biopower in an absolute sense, but
which also generalized the sovereign right to kill....The Nazi
state makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees,
and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the
sovereign right to kill everyone, meaning not only other people,
but its own people. There was, in Nazism, a coincidence between a
generalized biopower and a dictatorship that was at once absolute
and retransmitted throughout the entire social body by this fantastic
extension of the right to kill and of exposure to death. ...A racist
State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State....This is where
the mechanism inscribed in the modern State leads.186
156
Sovereignty would be an exceptional power, that mad power that denotes

the mad of society, a perverted power that denotes the pervert, and so
on, and sovereignty would be the nom de guerre of the exceptional play
between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower.187
Hence, sovereign power is unleashed through the entire social body:188 a
national sovereignty that can make live and make diesovereignty as homo
fabers mastery. This is the terror of a monarchical sovereignty dissemi
nated through nationalized societies. Like Arendts Origins of Totalitarianism,
which pulled together different crystallized elements, Foucaults genealo
gies describe those elements that would come together in powers hold
over life in Nazism. His works analyze the disparate elements that form
what Arendt called the origins of totalitarianism: disciplinary power from
the rising technologies, institutions, and sciences of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries; biopolitics developed from the racethinking of the
eighteenth century into the fullblown racisms of the nineteenth century;
governmentality from the Physiocrats and early liberal thought; pastoral
power from early Christian notions of rule reinstantiated in the nineteenth
century as care of the nation; and an intensification of the Roman right to
let live and make die as a right of letting die and making live. As Falguni
Sheth puts it succinctly, while biopolitics and scientific management are
two dimensions of how races operates in modern society...they do not
exhaust the modes by which sovereign power instantiate and naturalize
racial divisions.189
No doubt, however different, the analyses on offer in Foucault and
Arendt follow a tragic arch. How could they not, in light of the history of
the twentieth century and beyond? But I dont think its the case in either
authorquestions of historicism and determinism asidethat each posited
an ex post facto account of the past based upon the camps. It could have
been otherwise. History as written does not mean it was written in stone. To
bear the lessons of the state of sovereignty, for Foucault, meant performing
genealogies rendering the narratives and narratology of sovereignty, which
works hand in glove with a calculation and accounting of the political as
governmentality and as the political theology of the salvation and saving
of the nation through its new shepherds.
These shepherds are the police in all its forms operating beyond the
view of the supposed sovereign, but nevertheless practicing biopolitical
sovereignty as the force of law beyond and within the law. Emancipated
from the law, Walter Benjamin argues, the police power is formless, like a
nowhere tangible, allpervasive, ghostly presence. This horizontal, ghostly
power, Benjamin famously argued, called for a new conception of history
in keeping with the insight that the state of emergency in which we live
157
is not the exception but the rule.190 It has been my argument that Foucault
provides just such a history. Benjamin notes,
Though the police may, in particulars, everywhere appear the same,
it cannot finally be denied that their spirit is less devastating where
they represent, in absolute monarchy, the power of a ruler in which
legislative and executive supremacy are united, than in democracies
where their existence, elevated by no such relation, bears witness
to the greatest conceivable degeneration of violence.191
Sovereign Freedom, or Freedom from Sovereignty

Foucault in his later lectures links governmentality to selfgovernance, and
this thinking of selfgovernance is one of the reasons he turns to the Greek
care of the self and selfmastery as the predicate for a difficult freedom.
Important for our concerns in the last chapter of this book, Foucaults con
ceptualization of freedom in these works, however, is never far from the very
types of freedom he contested in the early 1970s: practices of freedom in
which one acts in the shadow of power relations. Power in governmentality
is acting upon the possibilities of action of other people.192 In finding a
form of power neither warlike nor juridical, Foucault defines the freedom
he believes can be initiated in selfgovernance. This is not to say that for
him resistance and freedom take place outside of the governmentality of state
forms, but rather, that freedom is itself a form of governmentality, a form of
acting in reaction to others, that is, acting upon the action of others. This
is why there are few mentions in Foucaults work of equality, which marks
a notable distinction between him and Rancire, whose conceptualizes the
police by reference to Foucault. There is no fact of equality for Foucault,
since action upon the action of others denotes reverberating asymmetries
of power always in flux:
When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon
the action of others, when one characterizes these actions by the
government of menin the broadest sense of the termone
includes an important element: freedom. Power is exercised only
over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we
mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field
of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions
and diverse comportments may be realized. Where the determining
factors saturate the whole there is no relationship of power; slavery
is not a power relationship when man is in chains. Consequently
158

there is no facetoface confrontation of power and freedom . . . but
a much more complicated interplay.193
In the end, he argues, freedom has its locus in the recalcitrance

of the will, which founds freedoms intransitivity (intransitivit de la lib
ert).194 This certainly takes Foucault away from thinking of the subject
as produced by power, or at least wholly manufactured by power, given that
there is a will whose intransitivity allows a measureand I lean on this
wordand measuring of the self. This marks a return to a measuring of a
freedom of the will, of a freedom as power and possibility, one operating
in an agonal structure with power.195 No doubt, this is seen by some as
an advance in Foucaults later work, yet this is a return of a thinking of
sovereigntypresupposed here and never argued for, only pronounced in
the negative: freedom is that which is not governedthat at once puts
the subject in play as a relay of power and provides it with substantiality
as a sovereign subject.
This intransitivity was not a oneoff in Foucaults work. He once
noted, I dream of books that would be clear enough...about things for
others to use them freely, but without trying either to blur or hide the origi
nal sources. Freedom of use and technical transparency are linked.196 This
is a dream of a transparency of technique, which would in turn provide a
pure reading beyond discursivity and language, a supposition mirrored in his
view of a sovereign thinking freeing itself of its relation to praxis: Thought
is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches
oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.197
In this way, Eric Paras, in Foucault 2.0, finds resources for arguing, The
notion of strong subjectivity proved warm enough to accommodate an over
whelming passion for life and an inextinguishable belief in the primacy of
human liberty in the late Foucault.198 Paras evidently doesnt fathom just
where a certain passion for life had brought the political, according to
Foucault, nor indeed why only those having such a faith, along with its pas
sion and inextinguishable beliefs, should grow warm in the light of such
a sovereign freedom. Given the dominant politicaltheological rhetoric of
recent years, we could surely use fewer pious incantations concerning human
liberty. In any case, this primacy of a certain liberty, which Paras adapted
from selective readings of archived lectures that, upon publication, reversed
many of the contexts for his claims, meant that choice, freedom, reflection,
experience, agency...were the undisguised hallmarks of Foucaults last
philosophical interventions.199 This is a Foucault, on Parass account, who
could end his studies of the ancient world and the spiritual experiences of
mystics by arguing, I believe solidly in human liberty.200
159
In the end, though, Foucaults thinking of power would disrupt any

sovereign return to the subject: it cannot mean, as Sergei Prozorov argues, an
affirmation of sovereignty as a means to counter mechanisms of power.201
Indeed, such a return to a sovereignty is not amenable to Foucaults theo
rizations of power, whatever his insistence on a pure moment of intransi
tivity beyond power relations. Foucaults courses provide the resources for
delineating the formations of powerheterogeneous and heterotopicthat
would question any sovereignty of the self and any histoires of the purity of a
nation. Thus, we would be called to thinking freedom beyond the sovereign
self: There are more secrets, as he put in a 1982 interview, more possible
freedoms, and more inventions in our future.202
Nikolas Rose argues that Foucault offers the beginnings of a compli
cated genealogy of freedom, one that would put any such sovereignty as
suggested by Paras and Prozorov in question. Rose notes:
I think we can distinguish freedom as a formula of resistance from
freedom as a formula of power. Or rather between freedom as it
is deployed in contestation and freedom as it is instantiated in
government. I want to suggest some ways of understanding freedom
in this second sense: freedom as it has been articulated into norms
and principles for organizing our experience of our world and of
ourselves; freedom as it is realized in certain ways of exercising
power over others....A genealogy of freedom in this sense would
examine the various ways in which the relations between power and
freedom have been established. Such critical investigations would
not be critical of freedom....To adapt a formulation proposed by
Michel Foucault, such a genealogy would ask how we have come
to define and act towards ourselves in terms of a certain notion of
freedom. It would investigate the ways in which what we take to
be freedom has been historically put together, the practices which
support it, and the techniques, strategies and relations of power
that go to make up what we term a free society.203
As the publication of the late1970s lectures show, it was just such
genealogies that Foucault pursued in his histories of the rights of juridical
freedom under and as sovereignty, the production of free selfinterest in early
governmentality, as well as the freedom of the freelancer in neoliberalism.
Sovereignty will always have positioned itself as a substantial power, as hav
ing a power backed up by a substancedivine, natural, or otherwise. But
if we accept that power is not a substance, Foucault writes, that it does
not deriv[e] from a particular source, then we must also recognize, with
160
Foucault, that there is no power that is selfgenerating (autogntique) or

selfsubsistent (autosubsistante).204 Power, thus, can never be founded on
itself or generated by itself, which in the end means there is not a field
of forces that can be created by a speaking subjected alone.205
Foucault was careful to delineate a critical vigilance, the truthtelling
parrhesia of his later works, a thinking of freedom that I would valorize and
insist upon, a freedom of thinking as an arche for a genealogical enterprise
to speak truth to and about power in all its permutations. As he put it in
What Is Enlightenment? the theoretical and practical experience that we
have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always
limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning
again. But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder
and contingency.206 Writing in the years after the madness of another King
George and his pastoral helpers, we, too, are suspicious, as was Foucault, of
those waving the flag of rights and freedom. We should be looking for a new
right, Foucault once said, that is both antidisciplinary and emancipated
from the principle of sovereignty, a right, he said, to be different.207
Can we think such a nonjuridical right? A right beyond power (disciplin
ary, juridical, or otherwise)? And by what right? In any case, this is still to
be thought, both in the work of Foucault and in our work ahead: thinking
a politics other than its very making in the administrative monarchies and
in the latterday confessionals of those rendered to the torture rooms.
FIVE
What More Is There to Say?

Agamben and the Hyperbole of Sovereignty
Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer volumes (four now published, comprising

seven books)1 offer the most prominent and influential accounts of sover
eignty in recent Continental philosophy. Agambens writings are known for
their strikingly apocalypticin fact hyperbolictone as they mark a coda
to two prominent ends: the end of metaphysics and a certain epoch of
being as described by Heidegger, as well as the end of political history, as
announced by postKojvian ideologues and feared by those countenancing
the dnouement of the emancipatory hopes of modernity. For Agamben, any
accounting of a nonsovereign politics must confront this double closure,
since one would otherwise naively repeat the sovereigntisms of the past.
The only possibility left for us, he argues, is to really seize the contem
porary and to think of it as the end.2 This is not a charge for us to
choose or not to choose, since this is a task that the time imposes on us,
even as it presents to us an extreme danger. Agamben thus posits that
we need to take seriously...the theme of the end of history as well as
the Heideggerian theme of Ereignis as the end of the history of being, and
this also means thinking the end of the state as correlative to the end
of the history of Being.3 Only a thought that can mobiliz[e] one against
the other is, he argues, equal to this task before us.
Lets begins by remarking on this task. Foucault often reminded
his readers about the risks of hyperbole and the theatricality that often
plays a role in political polemics. The task of philosophy, he wrote in
Structuralism and Poststructuralism, is to describe the nature of today,
and of ourselves today. With the proviso that we do not allow ourselves the
facile, rather theatrical declaration that this moment in which we exist is
one of total perdition . . . or a triumphant day break4 The risk of hyperbole
161
162
is that we say too much such that we have nothing left to say. This is the
worry one confronts with the work of Giorgio Agamben, who is open to
the charge of hyperbole given his claims from seemingly minimal evidence
or particularly exceptional circumstances for what would hold sway over
an entire epoch in the West. Agambens thinking of the sovereign excep
tion, the way in which sovereignty is that which enforces the law and is
outside the law, has been much repeated by those diagnosing the post9/11
global war on terror. The crisis that Agamben identifies is one that cant
be simply wished away in modern parliamentary democracies: the police
state is internal (and external) to modern governance, as is demonstrated
daily in the movement of troops and other police actions by governments
both inside and outside their territories. This is the predicament of power,
one that is amenable to no amount of persuasion or discussion: might is
right, the sovereigntists of our day invariably say, and thats thattheres
nothing more to say.
What more is there to say? is a question preeminent in the face of
any sovereigntism, since the principle of sovereignty always involves get
ting the last word. Hence, we arrive at the theme of this chapter. We
will follow Agamben through his readings of history, showing the stakes of
various mythologies of the political (the beginnings of history and its end),
which means recasting his depiction of homo sacer and the entire Western
philosophical tradition that followed. Agamben perspicuously identifies key
moments in the long use and abuse of the concept of sovereignty while
attempting an intricate reconciliation of Schmitts theory of the sovereign
exception with the historical genealogies and archaeologies on offer from
Arendt and Foucault. Much is to be gained in reading him on sovereignty
and its crucial place in the political. However, the hyperbole often found in
Agambens writingnarratives that often describe thousands of years and a
near infinite series of texts in but a few pagesis not a feature of his work
that one could isolate from the central theses of his project. Its not enough
to contest his various philological and historical claims, for example, that
the camp is the biopolitical paradigm of the modern or that homo sacer
is an originally political phenomenoneven if soon enough, he will say
something that undercuts these claims anyway. Agambens hyperbole, in
fact, follows from his radicalization and critique of Heideggers account of
language. His theses begin precisely from an account of what there is left to
say, since he ultimately argues that to speak at all is to speak sovereignly. For
example, in Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, Agamben contends
that there is an intrinsic link between the human capacity for language
and its capacity for death. Heidegger had said as much in The Essence of
Language: Mortals are they who can experience death as death (die den
Tod als Tod erfahren knnen). The animal cannot do so. But animals cannot
WHAT MORE IS THERE TO SAY?
163
speak either. The essential relation (Wesenverhltnis) between language and

death flashes (blitzt auf) before us, but remains unthought.5 For Agamben,
Heideggers thinking places negation and death at the heart of the living,
producing an inner division in life. This caesura is one that has haunted the
tradition from the dawn of Greek thought in the form of an unresolvable
conflict between the experience of the living as both living and speaking,
of living as both a natural and logical being.6 In this way, both the faculty
for language and human beings innermost relation to death, reveal and
disclose its dwelling place as that which is always already permeated by
and founded in negativity.7 We will leave aside the leaps made here, the
throwingbeyond of words ahead of logical argument (logos), that is the mark
of any hyperbole in order to underscore the place of finitude in Agambens
description of language: the exposure to death that will return time and
again in his depictions of sovereignty.
What guides us is what more there is to say after his writings on sov
ereignty, in particular, his view of the sovereign ban inherent to language,
one that well find sets a trap for us the moment we open our mouths with
anything to say. In the first sections of this chapter, I will describe the
main lines and significance of Agambens project in Homo Sacer, which
builds upon the accounts we have already seen in Arendt and Foucault.
While doing so, I take seriously the proviso that any critique of Agamben,
as I noted regarding Foucault in the previous chapter, must not renounce
his work because it would leave us with nowhere left to go, that is, with
nothing to say. If indeed Agamben has identified the metaphysical task
that has led Western politics more and more to assume the form of a
biopolitics, we cannot wish away the forces he identifies simply because
its consequences are displeasing.8
We will also avoid performing an immanent critique that would
conclude that Agamben reproduces the sovereignty he defines, providing a
repetition of what it sets out to condemn.9 While this would, as Andrew
Norris argues perspicuously, put Agamben in the position of deciding up
the camp victims one more time, by way of a nominalism that accords the
inhabitants of the Lager a bare life, it risks leaving in place the structure
of sovereignty as Agamben describes it.10 Agamben thus would be guilty of
enacting his solidarity with the foundation of Western politics, but with
the upshot of having his views on such a foundation affirmed. We would
thus be condemning him for being right. The aim will be to follow the
logic that informs his differing accounts of sovereignty, language, and being.
We will set out to show a certain sovereigntism at the heart of Agambens
account, a sovereigntism derivable from his metaphysical commitments to a
pure givenness of being in the face of which the human is always a fallen
being. This sounds similar to an immanent critique, but the sovereigntism
164
in question is one that Agamben leaves unquestioned in building his own

reading of the tradition.
As is clear already, its important to keep in mind Agambens descrip
tions of language as we move along. As he depicts it, animals suffer from
no negativity since they are not split from within by language. Far from
critiquing Heidegger on this point, as is often suggested by those utilizing
Agambens analysis for rethinking the humananimal relation, he accepts
this analysis in toto. Agamben never contests Heideggers ontological claims
about human beings absolute heterogeneity from animality, only saying that
from the dawn of Greek thought, a sacrificial logic of the human from its
corporeal animality has been in place, a logic that is but a circumstance of
the human being as zoo n logon echon, as a living being that has language and
reason (logos). In other words, Agambens problem with Heidegger, Derrida,
and other philosophies of finitude is that they accept the Greek scission
between language and its other, a scission foreign to the experience of the
animal; it is the closure of just this scission that is the telos of Agambens
politics. In this way, the animal may not die, but it also does not suffer the
logic of sovereignty since it does not have relations to others that language
creates and maintains. It is ever immanent to the open in which Being
appears, whereas the human from this opening by way of language, claims
that rob animality of any language or use of signs while putting the bricks
and mortar on the human prison house of language.
This logic of the logos, for Agamben, is implacable, and yet the other
side of his work, from his earliest to his last, is a call for a praxis that
would somehow annul this ontological condition: here his hyperbole would
describe a leap in praxis out ahead of what he describes as our ontological
condition as speaking beings. Agambens critics have long noted the bifurca
tion between his pronouncements on metaphysics and his historical claims
about the entry of the metaphysical ban into the politics of modernity,
between an archaic principle of metaphysics and its final enactment in
historical events. But Agambens central point is that any logos (historical
or philosophical) would be sovereigntist. Insofar as humans are speaking
beings, there is sovereignty. This is the literal hyperbole that Agamben
finds in language; it always throws Dasein out of its selfappropriation into
a decisive relation with death and otherness. It is for this reason Agamben
offers an impossible politics, not simply because, as some have argued, he
delineates few means for surpassing the sovereign exception inherent to
Western politics. To be precise, his politics is impossible since it calls for a
praxis that would seek a plenitude of being beyond selfdifferentiation. On
this point, we will see an inexorable meeting point between the logic of
plentitude and the logic of death; the praxis of Agambens account would
be mute, gestural, and as such, with nothing left to say. He thus calls us
165
to a gesture of silence and quietism, since the gesture, he writes, is the

communication of a potential to be communicated. In itself it has nothing
to say, because what it shows is the beinginlanguage of human beings as
pure potential for mediation.11
As we will see, the logical relation inherent to language is refor
mulated in Agambens famous distinctions between bios and zo e, between
the sovereign and homo sacer, and marks a relation that calls us to non
logical gestures where word and praxis are enfolded upon one another. In
the end, Agamben offers not a reworked but a rather classic messianism,
one that is explicit in its calls for the miracle of a life (form of life)
beyond finitude, bringing to an end lifes exposure to death. The power
(potenza) of this form of life will be the pure gesture wherein a word
is inseparable from its utterance, shorn of any relation. In other words,
we will be provided in Agamben with a case study of how the logic of
paradise, a livingwithoutdifference by utter selfsameness, is but another
way of describing stasis and deatha case study of lessons on the state
ments of sovereignty. Agambens privileging of a certain autarkeia leaves
in place the central logic of sovereignty remarked upon by Arendt namely
the sovereignty of the self, which Agamben fears lost through linguistic
disappropriation and selfdifferentiation. In order to resuscitate this autarkeia,
Agamben is forced into all manner of philosophical decisions: a critique of
language as relational as well as a call for a messianism that is aligned to a
gestural recovery of the self beyond its relation to otherness. By doing so,
Agamben demonstrates, despite himself, how the logic of eternal life (the
end of any exposure to death in the messianic now) is also implacably
the logic of death (stasis and indifference).12 We will see that this is no
matter of hyperbole.
The Sacrifice of History

Appointments were based on birth and military and civil excellency,
always choosing the best. The magistrates retained their authority and
prestige. The laws were in good shape, with the exception of the law
of maiestas (si maiestatis quaestio eximeretur)....Nothing was safe
anything served as an excuse to shed blood.
Tacitus, Annals (4.6.24)
The influence of Agamben has derived from his histories and conceptualiza
tion of the figure of homo sacer. Looking again to this figure will provide an
opportunity to describe Agambens methodology and the aims of his work.
Given the dangers of the contemporary period, what is required, Agamben
has long argued, are genealogies that connect the most archaic principles
166
of Western thought to its senseless political praxis. The point is to pay atten
tion to what the political tradition, dating to before Tacitus, had described
as ancillary and exceptional to the political: the exception of the law of
maiestas and sovereignty, a mighty exception to the normal state of affairs
that Tacitus and others would just as soon praise. By doing so, Agamben
argues, we may yet find a means, in fact a means without end, for exceed
ing the logic of the exception plaguing the tradition. This requires, he
avers, not just a rethinking of what Foucault dubbed biopolitics, that is,
life as it is taken up and described through political dispositifs, but all that
makes possible the spectacular and extreme appropriation of language in
the contemporary period13:
The question In what way does the living being have language?
corresponds exactly to the question In what way does bare life dwell
in the polis? The living being has logos by taking away [togliendo]
and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis
by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it
[abita la polis lasciando eccepire in essa la propria nuda vita].14
Agambens depiction of homo sacer is best understood in terms of his method
discussed in Signatura Rerum (2007), where he argues for isolating para
digms that bring out of concealment the secret affinity between the archaic
and the modern.15 These paradigms, he writes, render intelligible a series
of phenomena whose parentage had hitherto escaped or can escape the
gaze of the historian.16 Each paradigm arrives isolated from the context
in which it takes place, only to the extent in which it, while presenting
its own singularity, renders intelligible a new ensemble through which it
constitutes a homogeneity (la cui omogeneit esso stesso a costituire). These
singular cases are said to produce a new ensemble for investigation,
while at the same time operating through each particular instance within
this ensemble. For Agamben, the paradigm of homo sacer is what render[s]
intelligible an entire epoch in the West. This eponymous protagonist of
Homo Sacer thus provides an essential function in modern politics,17 and
he will endeavor to link the archaic (the ancient metaphysical production
of bare life, which he dubs with the Greek zo e), for example, the ancient
homo sacer, and the modern sovereign production of that being that may
be killed and yet not sacrificed.18 For Agamben, it is only through homo
sacer, this quite old protagonist from Roman law, that the very codes of
political power will unveil their mysteries.19
These archaic codes, he stipulates, have hitherto been left undeci
phered, requiring an account that complete[s] or at least corrects Foucaults
thesis that bare life (nuda vita) has been utterly politicized in the modern
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period, a thesis that Foucault, according to Agamben, failed to develop given

his death in 1984.20 What Foucault missed, for Agamben, was the crucial
link between his genealogies of modern power and their corollary in archaic,
namely the figure of homo sacer.
Homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into [presa] the
sovereign ban and preserves the memory [conserverebbe la memoria]
of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension
was first constituted. The political sphere of sovereignty was thus
constituted through a double exclusion [doppia eccezione], as an
excrescence of the profane in the religious and of the religious in
the profane, which takes the form of a zone of indistinction [una
zona di indifferenza] between sacrifice and homicide. The sovereign
sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without com
mitting homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred
lifethat is, life that may be killed but not sacrificedis the life
that has been captured in this sphere.21
Agamben is less than clear about the relation between the human
being as sacred and accursed (sacer) and bare life as zo e. Agamben says only
that homo sacer in some way preserve[d] the memory of the originary exclu
sion through which the political dimension was first constituted.22 This
sacred being is exposed to death endlessly, and it should be emphasized,
of course, that this does not mean that homo sacer is to meet with certain
death, but that as homo sacer, life is exposed to death as an everpresent
possibility; it is this bare or sacred life that is the originary political ele
ment.23 Condemned as one who may be killed by any man, this exposure
or political beingtowardsdeath marks homo sacer as a limit figure between
life and death. He is a paradigm of double exclusion, since as sacred, this
life can neither be murderedbecause no human legal sanction applies
nor can it be sacrilized through ritual purification. Homo sacer thus, on
Agambens account, is regulated by neither human nor divine law.
Taking Schmitts descriptions of the sovereign decision, Agamben
begins Homo Sacer arguing that it is through the sovereign decision over life
that sacred life becomes what it is. The sovereign sphere is the exceptional
space both within the law and beyond it, and this exceptional sovereignty
is matched by a symmetrical and inverted figure over which it decides: homo
sacer. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill
without committing homicide, he writes, since no one has a right of appeal
or judgment over this decision. This killing happens without celebrating
a sacrifice, as occurred in the early application of the Roman poena cullei
or death penalty, where those killed were sacrificed and suffered pain as
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a form of ritual purification.24 Agamben leaves aside this sacred poena

cullei, since he argues that this death penalty is prior in time to the figure
of homo sacer. It would seem that the poena cullei,25 however horrific, fits all
too well into the regular order, and Agamben follows Schmitt in focusing
wholly on the exceptional moments of the political, even if this precipitates
a notable gap in his analysis (namely a discussion of the prominent form of
a sacralizing death penalty).
The homo sacer is inside Roman law as that which can be killed at
the same time as it is put outside of that law as an exceptional form of
life ever exposed to death.26 This archaic figure of Roman law would in
the end be but a historical instantiation of the metaphysical exclusion/
inclusion of bare life, an instantiation that preserve[d] the memory of
the latter up to the modern period. In this way, to contest the metaphys
ics of Agambens account would require taking up his claim, beyond the
history he reviews, that homo sacer is the content for the form of exclusion
found in Aristotle:
What is captured in the sovereign ban is a human victim who may
be killed but not sacrificed: homo sacer. If we give the name bare life
or sacred life to the life that constitutes the first content of sovereign
power, then we may also arrive at an answer to the Benjaminian
query concerning the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life.
The life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originarily
sacredthat is, that may be killed but not sacrificedand, in this
sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty.
The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an absolutely fun
damental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact originally
expresses precisely both lifes subjection to a power over death and
lifes irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment.27
Bare life, he argues, founds the city of men,28 since it fills in and
encircles the zone of indistinction between bios and zo e. That is to say, zo e,
as excluded by the sovereign, is immediately politicized, and the mark of
this politicization is lifes relation to the law and hence the sovereign right
over life and death. Once life is exposed to death, that is, its finitude, poli
tics is possible: Not simply natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or
sacred life) is the originary political element.29 The potential abandonment of
bare life is for this reason marked by the distinction between bios and zo e,
and homo sacer is not to be thought, as Schmitt argued, as a secularized
residue of the originary religious character of every political power.30 On
the contrary, homo sacer, sacred man, is a being whose exclusion from the
political sphere must be internalized via the law. In other words, there is, as
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we have seen on Agambens account, a homology between the exception of

sovereignty, the one whose decision upon the application of the law places
it outside and inside the law, and homo sacer, given that the sovereign is
the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and
homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.31
Both are exceptional, both are inside and outside the law, and homo sacer
and sovereignty mark the extreme limits of what has delimit[ed] what
is, in a certain sense, the first properly political space of the West distinct
from both the religious sphere and the profane sphere, from both the natural
order and the regular juridical order.32
This original political relation is the ban, the state of exception as
zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion.33
Biopolitics is not, as Foucault and Arendt seemed to argue, a modern phe
nomenon. Western politics is a biopolitics from the very beginning, and
the camp, he writes, not the polis, is its paradigm.34 Against Arendt, who
claimed plurality as the harbinger of the political par excellence, for Agamben
it is only bare life that is authentically political.35 And given that this
ban of bare life through its exclusion/exclusion is founded on the exceptio
of bare life, it is this sovereign politics that in turn appears as the funda
mental structure of Western metaphysics.36
For Agamben, the sovereign is produced in and through its relation
to homo sacer, and the production of bare life is the originary activity of
sovereignty.37 The sacredness of life, Agamben argues persuasively, should
not be posited as a contemporary defense against political evil, since sacred
ness expresses precisely both lifes subjection to a power over deathno
word here, though, about the Roman poena culleiand lifes irreparable
exposure in the relation of abandonment.38 Whats more, this relation is
irreducible to divine ritual, as Agambens describes it, and thus Schmitt is
wrong to suppose that sovereignty is a secularized theological remnant.
This is a staggering claim, given the longnoted close connection between
law and religion in ancient Roman life, by which the justification for
capital punishment was found in regarding it as a sacrifice designed to avert
from the community the wrath of an offended deity.39 Agamben notably
also never articulates why a figure dating to a quite early period of Roman
history (the XII tables were produced circa the fifth century BCE) during
the life of the Greek Pindar, prior to the life of Aristotle and others he
cites, somehow preserves the memory of what he says is nevertheless a
prior bios/zo e distinction that gets written, later, into Aristotles Politics. He
also fails to account, given the Roman kings accretion of the double status
as magistrate and pontiff, how any sovereign could rule over a figure that is
to be thought as separate from Roman religious practice. Given Agambens
influence over contemporary considerations of sovereignty, it is crucial to
170
revisit the figure of homo sacer as part of coming to terms with this lesson
of an originary sovereign fiction.
Homo Sacer: The Significance of Words

The story of homo sacer is an ancient one. What is at stake here is how one
reads the tradition; if one can dislodge the certainty with which Agamben
lays out the foundational role of this figure, then much of his analysis
must come down with itor at least being to quake. Derived from the
IndoEuropean *sak-, which means endowed with existence, the Latin
sacer has, as Agamben notes, long troubled translators and interpreters. By
the time of the comedian Plautus (d. 182 BCE), the term stood both for
the sacred and that which is evil. The key source for historians has been
the etymology provided by Sextus Pompeius Festus, whom best guesses put
at living in Gaul during the second century of the common era. Festus
produced twenty volumes copying and augmenting the previous work of
the Augustusera grammarian, Verrius Flaccus, in De Verborum Signifationes,
On the Significance of Words. Here is a selection from the entry that
Agamben discusses40:
One provides the epithet of sacer to the human being that the people
have judged (populus iudicavit) for a crime. It is not permitted to
immolate this being (fas est eum immolari), but whoever kills him
is not to be condemned as a parricide (sed qui occidit, parricidi non
damnatur); for the first tribuniatarian law [the XII tables] notes this:
if one kills the person who is sacred by the popular assembly, this
is not a parricide (si quis eum, qui eo plebei scito sacer sit, occiderit,
parricida ne sit).41 From this, one calls sacer in everyday language
every man who is bad or impure. Gallus Elius says that one calls
sacer everyone who is in some way dedicated by state law, whether
this is a temple, an altar, a divine space, money, or anything that
has been dedicated and consecrated to the gods.
Festus goes on to note that both the place and that which is dedicated in
a given space is sacer. But the ambiguity raised by the crucial central pas
sage (fas est eum...non damnatur), as Agamben and other writers argue,
is not easily reconciled: One would expect to find sacer to be used in
the closest connection with the quasisacrificial execution by the [fasces],
one interpreter writes. But, on the contrary, we find them over and over
again in cases where there was no execution at all resembling a sacrifice.42
Sources available from early Rome provide less in the way of depictions of
criminal law than regarding laws concerning inheritance and other property
matters. This is why Festuss text is important, since it steps into an archival
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gap regarding the transition in Rome between the kingships and the early
Republic, a period when political authority was being centralized.
Ritual killings were not new to Rome, though the XII tables of the
fifth century BCE do show a propensity for executions involving acts of
treason. Sources, including Cicero, describe all that remained of the XII
tables: the acts considered treasonous (moving boundary stones, breaking
agreements with patricians, and parricide) and their penalties. Everything
relating to early executions, including the declaration of homo sacer, remains
a matter of debate among classicists, including whether or not there was
human sacrifice in these early societies. For most crimes, punishment was
left to the patria potestas under the XII tables.43 What is unclear is how
sentences were adjudicated (by a central magistrate or by a popular assem
bly), though homo sacer does stand out as the ultimate in vigilante justice:
convicted, whether by a magistrate or an assembly of the people, the homo
sacer could be killed by anyone with impunity. The reasons given for this
are disparate, from the structure of ritualistic societies, as Gerard argues, to
the prosaic: the early Romans simply lacked any standing force to provide
the force of law and thus in certain cases left enforcement up to everyone.44
The controversy is best understood as trying to take the measure of what
was the norm in ancient Rome: capital punishment or sacer esto. If it were
the latter, then this would mean that the sacrificial relation was of relatively
minor importance in ancient Rome (and perhaps not so determinative of
an entire political and linguistic tradition).
W. Ward Fowler argues in his influential Roman Essays and Interpretation
(1920), that the double meaning of the Latin sacer is best explained (away)
through the structure of taboo, as a figure of religious horror and separation:
He is therefore sacer, not in the sense appropriated by the framers
of the ius divinum [divine law], of things made over to a deity in
order to please and glorify him, but in the more primitive sense
of accursed and left to a deity to avenge himself on if he be so
pleased. And as he was not in any true sense the property of the
god, or valued by him as such, like objects called sacra under the
religious law....In no sense whatever could he be thought of as
a sacrificial victim....In the ritual of sacrifice at the altar under
the ius divinum, the victim must be wholly acceptable to the deity;
it must be pure and perfect, and its passage out of the region of
the profanum into that of the sacrum is only consummated when
it has been slain.45
This description will be important in later sections of this chapter, when
we turn to Agambens conception of profanation. In any case, Agamben
cites Fowlers work and though he rightly, I think, critiques his use of sacer
172
as a synonym for taboo, he generally accepts Fowlers dubious claim that

the contradictions inherent in the figure of homo sacer can be reconciled
by a prearchival period, which for Fowler is an era of taboo rituals and for
Agamben is one of an originary, nontheological ban, that is, an archaic
logic of inclusion/exclusion. Claims for such a period before what is avail
able in the archive, of course, cant be easily adjudicated. Both Agamben
and Fowler claim that the declaration of sacer esto never left one to the
care of particular deities, since this is the mark of a being passing from the
profane to the sacred. In her magisterial Recherches sur lexpression du sacr
dans la langue latine, Huguette Fugier argues, though, that sacer esto always
implied a deity to which one was consecrated, and that any later usage
by Plautus to the contrary is but a much later (some four hundred years)
vulgarization drained of any juridical sense.46 In other words, using a
straightforward hermeneutic principle, we might not want to put too much
stake in the loose usage of a later comic writer, since, in sum, our entire
reading could end up the punch line to a joke.
I wont rehearse long this controversy, covered to some extent in Homo
Sacer, over the enigmatic passage in Festus. But what is crucial is the propor
tion of the breadth of Agambens claims to archival underdetermination. For
example, James StrachanDavidson argued nearly a century ago that homo
sacer was a figure who arrived during a complicated time in which the law
was written to protect the patrician class from the ascendant plebeians.47
Thus, one explanation for the homo sacer is that those sentenced to sacratio
capitis were already religiously sacrificed but, in a typical gap between law
and its application that Agamben elsewhere notes well, somehow escaped
punishment.48 Once sacrificedhence purifiedthe populus could kill homo
sacer without fear of pollution. Another explanation, provided by Claire
Lovisi, argues that all criminal punishments were left in private handsa
possibility to keep in mind given the lack of a standing police force at the
time. She argues, thus, that homo sacer was less an attempt to disseminate the
right of punishment than actually a countervailing centralization of authority
for the declaration and legitimate pronouncement of the sentence sacer
esto. The apparatus of the state, represented by the magistrates fasces (rods
tied up with an axe), was centralizing what would become its monopoly
over imperium powerthe right over life and death was hitherto granted
to heads of households (patria potestas).49 Thus, the declaration of the homo
sacer, while leaving punishment to individuals, was now taking declarations
for such punishments within an incipient state apparatus.
Much of Festuss other works have been lost (only the last half of the
volumes of De Verborum Signifationes is extant, and these have been damaged
by fire), and one should not, as Agamben does, rely on Festuss etymologies for
definitive statements about Roman law. He merely reports what is available to
173
him from six centuries before. More to the point, the entry cited by Agamben
does not end with this description, but also describes the use of the term by
Gallus Elius, who argued that far from a ban on [homo sacers] sacrifice, the
sacred always implies a sacrifice to the gods. In particular, homo sacer was
described elsewhere as to be sacrificed to the offended deity (piacularia hostia),
usually Ceres, and the penalty was often for the crime of terminum movere,
the movement of the sacred boundary stones;50 this crime was considered,
as one early statute put it, more severe than homicide,51 since of course it
had to do with the very limits and boundaries of the political.
One strand of the historiography on this topic is particularly
Rousseauian: the penalty was exacted by the early assemblies of the people
and the consecratio and judgment of the offender could be explained by the
fact that the assembly, like Rousseaus sovereign people, could not them
selves execute the laws. They had a general power, but not governmental
power, to use Rousseaus distinction. As such, the people simply abandoned
one of its own to the gods, making him or her an outcast in the truest sense.
Crucially, the homo sacer on this account was to die less at the hands of his
fellow man than by the divine agency that eventually takes us all. This does
not mean there was not a religious element to this, but simply that the early
Roman tablets touch lightly on religion since the people of Rome had dif
fering pagan rituals and these early laws negotiated their way among them;
the tables may have remained agnostic on the particular form of punishment
since to choose punishments would mean siding with one set of religious
customs over another, and paganism as such would be unimaginable without
such civic giveandtake, whether in Rome or elsewhere.
Historians often stop well short of Agambenian definitive statements
not out of naivet, as he suggests, but for the simple fact that historical
materials on the practice are short in supply. This is a crucial point, since
at the least it suggests that the historical, paradigmatic method employed by
Agamben is metaphysical in the oldest sense, working less from an archive
(or even a prearchive) available than a position held a priori. Let me be
more pointed: it is bewildering that the same philosopher who dedicates
numerous essays on methodology, citing agreeably from Foucault when not
chastising him, can at the same time ignore what Foucault took to be cen
tral: a genealogy, he wrote in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, must record
the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality.52 Our heri
tage, he noted farther along, is not an unbroken continuity that operates
beyond the dispersion of forgotten things.53 The aim is to see history not
in terms of a destiny, but to maintain events in their proper dispersion,
which means denuding them of any destiny or regulative mechanisms.54
For his part, Agamben sets out his methodological premise in What is a
Contemporary?:
174

[T]here is a secret affinity between the archaic and the modern, not
so much because of the archaic forms seem to exercise a particular
charm on the present, but rather because the key to the modern is
hidden in the immemorial and the prehistoric. Thus, the ancient world
in its decline turns to the primordial so as to rediscover itself.55
This is method by fiat, since there is no way to adjudicate claims about what,
beyond and before all evidence, secretly would have guided what remains
in evidence. More pointedly: this is a methodology oftfound in the sover
eign political theologies of mystics, a point to keep in mind as we turn to
Agambens later work in the next section. Otherwise put, the prehistoric,
as hidden and immemorial, is by definition prearchival and thus cannot
be contested at the level of postarchival claims and counterclaims, except
by what is indeed not hidden in the immemorial. Rather, one must work
backward from what is memorialized in the archive itself. We can see how
he proceeds otherwise in Homo Sacer:
In carrying out the metaphysical task that has led it more and
more to assume the form of a biopolitics, Western politics has not
succeeded in constructing the link between zo e and bios, between
voice and language, that would have healed the fracture. Bare life
remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is,
as something that is included solely through an exclusion. How
is it possible to politicize the natural sweetness of zo e? And
first of all, does zo e really need to be politicized, or is politics not
already contained in zo e as its most precious center? The biopolitics
of both modern totalitarianism and the society of mass hedonism
and consumerism certainly constitute answers to these questions.56
In a word, they do not constitute such answersor at least one should
undertake a vast study of an underplayed moralism (mass hedonism),
which would also explain his anti-modernist discussions of cell phones as
the most pernicious modes of subjectification in What is an Apparatus? In
any event, a cursory reading of his work reveals the repetition of his claim
that the modern is given its destiny from the archaic, with the lesson that
history never forgets, always operates by a hidden code, and remains abso
lutely faithful even when one most likely does not realize it.57
Since the question here is about historys faithfulness to itself, let
us turn again to Agambens account of homo sacer, which marvels at its
juridicopolitical status. The earliest Roman offices were a mixture of theo
logical and secular positions, if one can indeed tease out such a difference
at that time, though again incipient authorities may have wanted to touch
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lightly on specific practices. What subtends Agambens reading is a move

from what seems genuinely to be a zone of indistinction (between the divine
and the profane) to what is dubiously so (sacred life and sovereign life). In
the end, though, Agamben is right that homo sacer is exposed to death, but
this exposure is an exposure to the will of the gods and nature, that is,
to the whims of fortune one faced in the time it took to depart for exile.
This is a point to which well return.
The command by an assembly of the early Roman people of the infa
mous sacer estod leads us less to a thinking of a centralized sovereign decision
than one in which, recalling Foucaults description of the fully biopolitical
society of the Nazi era, each one was given this sovereign exception, this
right over life and death (impune occidi) over the outcast: this is truly the
remarkable difference between the homo sacer and the poena cullei, in which
the latter remained under the centralized power of the royal apparatus, while
the former was a right given to one and all, each sovereign and exempt
from the law of murder (homicidium or parracida). Homo sacer, in this lim
ited sense, stands less for a Schmittian sovereigntys symmetrical element
than that of a popular sovereignty. This point does not rule out Agambens
analysis, but certainly tempers his argument that the right over life and
death (vitae necisque potestas) was over a bare lifeone of his examples
is the son of the patria potestasgiven that this power or potestas is given
to the son as well. (NB, the pater in question had this power over any
number of grown sons and extended family members under his aegis, and
indeed, other fathers would fall under this pater in the familial lineage.)
Thus, pace Agamben, it is not the case that this power was limited to the
paterfamilias who held the patria potestas.58 Rather, each was potentially both
sovereign and sacer, or otherwise put, each sovereign self was ever exposed
to its own selfsacrifice.
Agamben cites Kroly Kernyi as explaining away the seeming con
tradictions of homo sacer by noting that what is sacer belongs to the gods
already and thus there was no need for...a new action.59 Kernyi sides
with those who view the sacratio as paradigmatic of the sacred. This is not,
as Agamben argues, such a contradictory suggestion. He contests Kernyis
reading in line with his claim that sacer esto is not the formula of a reli
gious curse, but is the originary political formulation of the imposition of
the sovereign bond.60 As the XII tables stipulate, though, the city is already
consecrated to the gods and it takes a forced reading to hold open a distinc
tion between religion and politics in early Romewhich Agamben holds
open long enough to lay out his analysis and then close it all up within
a zone of indistinction (zona di indifferenza). Far from being completely
incomprehensible as to why those who kill homo sacer are not stained by
sacrilege (the crime for which homo sacer, by moving boundary stones or
176
other forms of perduello, was guilty), those who can be killed with impu
nity have no profane element left since as utterly exposed to death, they
belong wholly to divine providence (ius divinum).61 In this vein, we need
only recall all the documented occasions in which the early Romans chose
suicide over the ignominia of other penalties, including exile. The family of
the Decii Mores, for example, made something of a family tradition of com
mitting suicide after defeats in battle.62 Turning to the ritual of the devotio,
the generals sacrificed themselves to Ceres and other infernal gods. Having
thus become sacer, as Livy and Cicero describe, the generals of the family
would ride on horseback to be killed by their enemies in order to spread
the dreaded miasma or pollution to the enemy (a right over the life of the
self that, at least in certain renderings of homo sacer, mirrors its relation to
the profane and acts of devotio). If he were to survive, the general would be
barred from any future religious ceremony. Livy notes that ordinary soldiers
would dedicate themselves to the gods of the underworld by burying a statue
seven feet in height, a suicidal selfsymbolization, we could point out for
later on, that would be for the sake of life, not death.63
We are led to ask less why is it not fas to put [homo sacer] to death
in the prescribed forms of execution, as Agamben puts it, than to ask why
he so quickly steps past all the forms of capital punishment on display in
the XII tables: What status can be accorded to the norm of Roman law,
including the penalties of death of those who do face sacrifice and immolari, the ritual sprinkling of mola salsa, and including those who suffer the
poena cuelli? In other words, if we agree with Agamben that homo sacer is
paradigmatic of a slew of phenomena, why rely on this protagonist if, say,
another paradigm without such problematic evidence would do and in fact
was far more common? Moreoever, why not simply follow up on the well
documented history of the imperium and what Tacitus calls the exception
of the law of maiestas, that is, the sovereign exception? Agambens choice
of paradigmsever reliant on the exceptionalis revealing in this regard.
From Homo Sacer to Vir Sacer

This is best seen in the figure of the vir sacer, another sacred man. Long
after the XII tables, the Lex Iulia, as amended by Caesar and Augustus,
provided for the capital punishment of anyone who committed the crime
of threatening the sovereignty of the peopleall hypocrisy aside, given
the state of the Roman republic at the time. The first century Lex Iulia
provided penalties, as did previous Roman law, for the crime of maiestas,
and only later was maiestas limited to threats to the sovereignty of the
imperium of the emperornot the people. Maiestas, Tacitus describes in
his Annals, could be threats either in word or deed against the peoples
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sovereignty, and the penalty was meted out to those dubbed vir sacer.64
This penalty of vir sacer certainly complicates the supposition that homo
sacer was unsacrificable, as does the early Roman view that the fate of
homo sacer was less up to individual men than the whim of the gods above,
a metonymy, if there ever was one, for the exposure of each of us to our
finitude and beingtowarddeath. In that sense, we are indeed, as Agamben
argues, all virtually hominis sacri. This last point could lead us in a whole
discussion of the link between Roman politics and its theological practices,
practices that were not as separable as Agambens analysis necessitates. The
crucial categories under question are less the divine and the profane than
the public and the private. As Lovisi argues, the development of criminal
law in Rome can be read as a slow publicization of executions, which we
can trace through the movement from homo sacer (necessitating killings by
private citizens) to vir sacer (those insulting the peoples sovereignty, later
transposed to the maiestas of a Caesar or Augustus and killed by public
officials). Early Roman law evinced no distinctions between legislative and
executive functions. Accordingly, where we are led after Walter Benjamin
to look from the law to its application, the gap that marks police violence,
the Romans often had one and the other, or rather, one without the other,
and this state of exception of the Roman imperium was no less frightening
for all that.
What one finds in Agamben is a minimum of evidence, since its pre
historical and immemorial, and a maximum of conceptual detail. Silences
in the record prove only the silence of the record, though as we have noted,
Agamben reads these silences as obscuring an underlying code that must
be brought to light through his paradigmatic method. Its hence striking how
much of what is extant must be avoided to make Agambens description of
Roman law in general consistent, not least the later distinctions between ius
divinum and ius humanum, or between private law and public law. Its also
striking, given Agambens account, that the Romans, as Donald Kyle makes
clear in his Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome, were not given to hiding
or depublicizing their spectacles of death at all. Whatever anthropological
theory we might take up for giving the reasons for these spectacles (struc
tures of taboo, psychoanalytic accounts of scapegoating, simple boredom,
etc.), Roman penalties of death were anything but obscure. Moreover, if one
cant find a continuity in Roman history regarding the treatment of those
given the penalty of death, why is this a figure as a paradigm of the West?65
Kyle notes that simultaneous rise of public justice and Romes public games,
and the maiestas of the imperium relied on an ongoing spectacle of death
as public attestations of power. In this way, the sovereign exception of Rome
could be seen in any gladiatorial competition, where, to avoid pollution to
the city, each gladiator was already pronounced sacer prior to his exposure
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to death in the games. And thus we can see a rather grim way in which the
ancient imperiumCaligula stands out in this regardplayed with the law
just as child would play with a toy, which will come to stand in Agambens
work for a privileged form of profanation beyond the state of exception.66
What is clear from Agambens analysis is not just that politics pro
duces bare life and the zones of indistinction he enumerates, but rather
that this was originary to the West itself. I underline this point since it is
often missed in analyses of Agambens work: the task is not to suture these
divisions, or even decry their undoing given that life has become more and
more clearly placed at the center of state politics.67 On the contrary, this is
politics as such. What Agamben argues for is decidedly not another politics,
not a politics that can testify to these crucial distinctions, but rather a true
state of exception, where life would not be exposed to death in zones of
indistinction. Thus, he looks for a new dimension, a real state of excep
tion.68 (A quick interpretive note: that which defies the current nihilism
and sovereigntism of our age is almost always prefaced by the words true,
pure, or real in Agambens parlance.) Agamben argues for return[ing]
thought to its practical calling,69 even if he also argues that it is the case
that there can be no return from the camps to practical politics.70 But this
was always already inherent to Western philosophy on his account and was
always already going to be the case historically; to use a stilted formulation:
it could not not be.
This leads us to the status of lifes irreparable exposure, as Agamben
describes it, since this exposure appears an ontological status conceptually
separable and thus unallied to lifes subjection in politics to a sovereign
power over death.71 This is why we would have to wonder about a life
without such exposure and any future conception of the form of life in
Agambens work. Secondly, to recapitulate what we have discussed above,
previous depictions of homo sacer are far more ambiguous than Agamben
admits, suggesting that the links between theology and politics, the gods
and politics, was not a metaphysical or ontotheological invention. This has
long been concluded not because historians and anthropologists have been
conceptually confused, but becausehere we can mark the radical closure
over history that Agambens paradigmatic method entailsthe historical
archive is incomplete in this regard (leaving aside for the moment that there
is no coherent concept of a complete archive), though what is available
strains the credibility of Agambens claims. Perhaps most prosaically, one
has to wonder about the determinism at work when these documents were
often unavailable to the Roman lawmakers themselves, which calls into
question any assumption that over a millennia of history and during quite
different political regimes, Romans kept alive a primordial flame for the
figure of homo sacer.
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The Glory of Another Sovereignty

This flame is one that has largely and without any notice been extinguished
by Agamben himself. In Il Regno e la Gloria (The Kingdom and the Glory
[2007]) Agamben sets out two paradigms that he writes need to be decoded
given their determinant influence on the general structure of Western soci
ety.72 As with Homo Sacer, Il Regno e la Gloria is given over to readings of
what has remained in the shadows, even apparently the shadows of all of
his previous work, namely, two paradigms of power: sovereign power founded
in the unique transcendence of God (NB, not in archaic Roman figures,
and reversing his previous claim that political sovereignty predated later religious concepts) and oikonomia, conceived as an immanent order pulling
together human and divine life.73 From the latter, he argues, modern
biopolitics is derived. It is difficult, as Leland de la Durantaye suggests,
in an otherwise heroic effort, to find any subtle coherence between these
claims and his earlier work in Homo Sacer.74 These are not different sides of
a single, continuing investigation, but strikingly different claims.75 Modern
political power, Agamben argues in Il Regno e la Gloria, is founded on the
Greek conceptualization of oikonomia, which grew in the coming centuries to
cover the relation between God the creator as well as His role as governor
and conserver of the universe. Agamben is interested in describing what
was notoriously lacking in the first volume of Homo Sacer: a description of
power as it operates beyond the sovereign exception, that is, how particular
sovereign decisions touch the lives of those deemed homo sacer, but recall
that volume one had said only the latter was determinative of the tradition.
Il Regno e la Gloria traces the genealogy of separable powers on view
in contemporary democracies, following Schmitts claims about he who
rules but does not govern in light contemporary parliamentary democracies.
Agamben calls for nothing less than rethink[ing] this history of power in
the West since its beginning given that oikonomia and the sovereign excep
tionagain, keep in mind the claims of the earlier worksubsist together
and interlink to the point of forming a bipolar system, the understanding of
which forms the preliminary condition of every interpretation of the political
history of the West.76
I have already discussed this problematic historical gaze, one that ren
ders history homogeneous in terms of its hidden codes, always having the
last word on the first word, the preliminary condition for every possible
interpretation. Regarding this sovereign grasp, the figure of homo sacer, as
described above, is indeed paradigmatic. In Homo Sacer and State of Exception,
Agamben argued that all theological concepts were inextricably founded on
the political, a complex reversal of Schmitts claim that all politics was a
secularized theology. In Il Regno, Agamben argues, as he did in Homo Sacer,
180
that Foucaults work needs to be corrected and extended, since it not

theologically rooted enough.77 For Agamben, despite his genealogy in the
Security, Territory, Population of governmentality from pastoral care, Foucault
had not followed up on the origins of this governmentality in the theological
writings of those he cites, a claim at odds with our own numerous citations.
For his part, calling the omission more than striking, Agamben provides
a masterful lesson in sovereign history, stating, while putting forward the
example of Foucault, that when one undertakes archaeological research,
one ought to take into consideration the possibility that the genealogy of a
concept or of a political institution may be found in a different sphere than
one could anticipate at the beginning of the investigation (e.g., ontical sci
ence, but also theology).78 In essence, Agamben faults Foucault for looking
through the political texts of Aquinas and other thinkers, but not their
overtly theological texts. Foucault thus rendered himself unable to complete
the genealogies that he began, though Agamben does argue that Foucaults
conclusions are generally correct. This is a bedeviling claim: if Agamben is
right that Foucault has uncovered the codes for Western politics, one would
think that he would not need to trace them in one set of texts or another.
This cuts to the very heart of Agambens technique or dispositif: he begins
by assuming a common origin for a family of concepts (e.g., oikonomia will
give rise to gloria and popular sovereignty), then lays bear the moment in
which this origin (dubbed a zone of indistinction) falls into distinguishable
characteristics in a given set of writings. Then he describes how this set
of concepts enters at some point during modernity into a perilous zone of
indistinction different from the first. We saw this motif concerning the Greek
concept of life (split during the Greek period into bios and zoe before entering
into a zone of indistinction in the last four hundred years) and homo sacer
(split from a pretheological common origin into sacred life and sovereign
life, then later distinguishable in religious and political concepts, and then
entering a zone of indistinction again in modernity). I lay out this framework
since what Agamben will often say is that all previous philosophers have
ignored a given crucial origin, one that secretly governs Western history.
This is the upshot of all mystical thinking, which forever chases immemo
rial origins that lead history from its secret and unspeakable confines. It
is only by sovereign fiat that one can dictate what and when some origin
took place, and why such an arche matters above all.
This would be a thinking of history in which one would always have
the right of last judgment, always presuming the right to have first discov
ered not just the secret history unlocked by paradigms, a history that had
hitherto been unavailable to foolish historians or historiographers.79 Only a
claim to omniscience would always already know who was the first great
thinker of sovereignty (Pindar), or when Western politics first constitutes
181
itself through an exclusion, or the first to understand the presupposition of

language (Hegel), and so on to many other examples in Homo Sacer. One
only knows the first if one knows all. Derrida rightly calls this Agambens
most irrepressible, consistent gesture.80 I wont repeat Derridas reading of
Agamben in La bte et la souverain, except to say that his implicit line of
attack is on Agambens selfpositioning visvis the archive, and thus is
important less for what he says about Agambens readings than concerning
how Derrida conceptualizes sovereignty otherwise. For example, by what
right can one ever presume a first when it comes to the complicated matters
of the first to recognize, the first to distinguish, the first to declare,
etc.? If this were a minor point in Agambens Homo Sacer, then Derridas
reading would be insufferable. But Agambens preeminent hermeneutic deci
sionand, indeed, its a paradigmatic one regarding every interpretation
is that these firsts matter above all else. Whatever may have been before
(and indeed after) these firsts is to be neglected, such that, for example,
Foucaults treatment of more or less explicitly political texts coming after
the period Agamben studies must be forever augmented by marking the
firsts that Foucault and so many others have missed, all to provide further
lessons to us on sovereign mastery.
Sovereign Relations
We can now return to the central claim of Homo Sacer, namely, that bare
life (nuda vita) is the first content of sovereign power, and its produc
tion is the original activity of sovereignty.81 There is little doubt among
even Agambens kindest interpreters that his claims about the history of the
movement of this content and this activity are imprecise. Pindar was
the Wests first thinker of sovereignty, but somehow Aristotles distinction
between bios (the life of well being in the polis) and zoe (bare life) pinned
Western metaphysics to an inclusion/exclusion of lives considered not worth
living; never mind that, as we noted in chapter 2, such an analysis is founded
on a distinction that is simply untenable in Aristotles works. In any case,
this metaphysical system will take a range of historical forms (Agamben
variously describes bare life as the body, the animal element of the human,
the bodies of habeas corpus, etc.), but nevertheless, biopolitics is at least as
old as the sovereign exception.82 The threshold to modernityone that
is on the move in his textsis reached precisely when zoe enters politics as
such, while the state of exception comes more and more to the foreground
as the fundamental political structure and ultimately begins to become the
rule.83 The process by which what was once at the kernel of the history of
metaphysics and the rise of the modern political state is one whereby the
realm of bare lifewhich is originally situated at the margins of the political
182
ordergradually begins to coincide with the political realm.84 The sovereign

decision is no longer an exception; it is, as Benjamin claimed, the rule.85
Bare life, as having entered the political, marks a zone of irreducible
indistinction between bios and zoe, but also between right and fact, between
physis and nomos.86 Eventually, these zones of indistinction begin to overtake
the text, where by sovereign supposition, signifier and signified,87 life and
law,88 law and violence,89 nature and culture,90 Bia and Dike,91 pure potential
ity and pure actuality,92 the sacred and the impure,93 sacrifice and homicide,94
and so on, are rendered as indistinguishable. Agambens point is that the state
of exception, which is the telos of Western metaphysics and Western politics
as we have known it, produces an indecidability among these oppositions,
such that there is no difference as such. The ultimate paradox that Agamben
identifies at the heart of the West is its negativity: its usage of a language
that is apodictic and propositional, and thus on his account relational and
sovereign. This leads to a situationI would say historical if the very term
were not rendered problematic given the indistinction between nature and
culturein which no distinctions can be made, except the very distinct
indistinctions that mark the zone of modern politics.95
In Il Regno e la Gloria,the zone of indistinguishability under discus
sion encompasses politics and theology, the divine and the profane, given
their inner solidarity from an earlier conception of glory.96 The relation
between oikonomia and glory, between power as government and effective
management and power as liturgical majesty and ceremony, has, he claims,
remained strangely overlooked both by political philosophers and political
scientists.97 Agamben is here addressing the relations among the different
forms of power, which we discussed in the last chapter. For Agamben, these
forms of power are but two: sovereign reign and oikonomia. To simplify a
complex set of readings of writers from the earliest days of the West to the
interwar period in Nazi Germany, Agamben resuscitates old arguments about
the Christian trinity. This in turn sends him on the hunt for the origins of
the Christian notion of relation, namely the oikonomia among God and his
pastorate, though in the end Agamben will also argue that the transforma
tion and splitting of the concept of sovereignty into oikonomia and reigning
is first depicted in the Arthurian legends of the roi mehaigni about a king
who rules but does not govern.98
Agamben wants to know why power needs glory, which he argues
has not been broached in the history of philosophy. This is not, of course,
the case, and in recent years alone one can cite a number of philosophers
working on the prostheses of sovereignty, including, pertinently for the
next chapter, Derrida, who argues that sovereignty, if it exists, does so only
through its selfglorification. But this was already the case in each thinker
we have discussed in this book. This is the central lesson of sovereign fic
183
tions. Indeed, all manner of philosophers on sovereignty have discussed the

relation between the sovereign and its magistrates to which the discussion in
Agamben is reducible. If theologians sought to answer how God, who is all
powerful, can act on the world without eliminating freedom and therefore
sin, then it is also the case that thinkers such as Dante and Aquinas dealt
with the problem of the indirect force needed by the sovereign in order to
act upon the people. One need only turn to Machiavellis Prince to see a
thinker teasing out the relation between sovereignty and glory; to borrow
an Agambenian formulation, it is more than striking that a discussion of
this key pedagogical text, written explicitly as a lesson of sovereignty, on
gloria is missing from his account.
Agamben argues that the relationship between sovereignty and glory
has become noticeably indistinguishable in the modern period, which is
hard to put together with his argument in Homo Sacer that the sovereign
ban was the controlling feature of modern politics. In any event, Agamben
offers a dualism of power, which Schmitt, recalling our discussion in the last
chapter, bridged through the figure of the Fhrung. On the one side, there
is sovereignty modeled on Gods transcendence. This sovereignty he simply
dubs political theology, despite his earlier claims in Homo Sacer concern
ing the pretheological nature of this form of sovereignty.99 On the other
hand, there is the immanent order of theological economy, from which
modern biopolitics completes itself (fino) in the actual triumph of economy
and government over any other part of social life.100 In the former, we find
monarchical sovereignty; in the latter, the bases, he argues, for democratic,
popular sovereignty. In the economy between the two, we have the divi
sion of powers in the Western parliamentary systems:
The modern state inherits, in fact, both facets of the theological
machine of the governance of the world, and it present itself as
much the providential state (Statoprovvidenza) as the destiny state
(Statodestino). Through the distinction between the legislative or
sovereign power and executive or governmental power, the modern
state assumes for itself the double structure of the governmental
machine. It takes turns (di volta in volta) wearing the regal attire
of providence, which legislates in a transcendental and universal
mode, but lets be (lascia libere) the creature over whom it takes
care. It also takes turns wearing the chary (losche) and ministerial
attire of fate, which executes in detail the providential dictates and
constrains reluctant individuals.101
In this way, we have the two sides of the modern state, one derived
from the theologicalpolitical paradigm of absolutism (kingship) and
184
the other from economicoprovidential paradigm (glory).102 Also notable

is that Agamben argues that the modern split between being and acting,
between ontology and ethics, has its roots in this theopolitical distinction,
since God cannot act on the world except through His ministers (angels
and saints), and thus He exists without partaking of action. It would take
too much space here to trace out his claims about governmentalitys link
to providence, though suffice it to say that providence here, as a form of
power, is akin to the discipline described by Foucault, and Agamben has
in mind the French terminology for the welfare state, ltatprovidence.
Modern democracies, he argues, are trustees of a theological inheri
tance, though one is left to ask what has happened to homo sacer and
whether he again has been sacrificed to history. Along the way, Agamben
argues that Carl Schmitt is unable to account for a sovereign who rules
but does not govern, a phrase that Schmitt discusses at length in Political
Theology II. No matter, all previous thinkers have left aside the secret
center of power in the West, namely, glory.103 In the latter portions of Il
Regno e la Gloria, Agamben goes farther, critiquing a variety of thinkers
for not deriving the necessary link between glory and sovereignty. What is
needed, he argues, is a genealogy that reaches beyond the disputes of the
early Nicene church to the imperial ceremonies of ancient Rome. Despite
all that Schmitt, Kantorowicz, and others depict in the works he cites,
Agamben argues that the fasci littorithe ancient symbol of rods bundled
over an axe, restored to prominence by the party that would take this sym
bols name104is the crucial symbol (insegne) of power. Agambens claim
is that the fasces littori symbolizes perfectly the relation between these two
forms of power, with the bundle of sticks representing the multiple magis
trates and the axe representing the imperiums absolutism.105
We will leave aside what Agamben described under this same symbol,
the fasces littori, in the first volume of Homo Sacer.106 For the Agamben of Il
Regno e la Gloria, the fasces littori symbolizes the relation of glory, and what
he ultimately wants to argue, despite descriptions of the divine substance
without which the theologians he cites would make little sense, is that there
is nothing but this Trinitarian relation, an originary oikonomia of the trinity
with nothing substantial to it.107 The semantic core of oikonomia, Agamben
argues, is to be found in its use for the rule of over the Greek home, where
no public laws existed as such. The economy of the home, then, is not
rulebound, but an arbitrary mastery. For Hannah Arendt, the political use
of metaphors from the oikos led to the development of sovereignty in Plato
and later writers. Agamben for his part argues that this arbitrary ruleby
definition, since there is no law standing over itcomes to denote the ad
hoc, miraculous participation by God in particular circumstances. Only by
understanding this arbitrary and exceptional rule of governance can we see
185
its link to absolutism in the state of exception. Agamben offers only this
homological structure to link the two in Il Regno e la Gloria: both operate out
side laws and pregiven norms.108 He thus sets the stage for political miracles.
In the end, Agamben collapses the two orders: there is no absolute
sovereignty as such, only the relation between these forms of power. The
emperor governs but has nothing beneath these vestments, as he puts it;
there is no there beneath the signs and insignias of power. At the heart of
the governmental machine is a void, an empty center represented on the
back cover of the book by the empty seat of power.109 In this way, Agamben
moves onto ground teased out in Derridas later writings on the prosthetics
of sovereignty, a prosthetic that is sovereigntys performance, which Derrida
puts under the heading of the comme si (as if) of sovereign supposition. In
Derridas terms, sovereignty always acts as if it existed, given the fictions at
the heart of its mystical authority.
The question arises: Whither the sovereign decision? What Agamben
puts under the heading of sovereignty is relationality as such (the oikonomia of
the trinity), and sovereignty is nothing but this relation. The absolutist form
of sovereignty operates by way of a pullingaway from the things over which
it rules, a hyperbole of itself in its utter transcendence. Thus, it needs the
prosthesis of glory. It is the glorifying relation that marks a certain pullingin
of power, and both of these sovereignties (pulling away and pulling in) mark
the social movements of force.
[T]he Trinitarian economy is the expression of a power and of an
anarchic being, which circulate among the figures according to an
essentially vicarious paradigm....Vicariousness implies, therefore,
an ontology, or better the replacement of the classical ontology by
an economic paradigm, in which no figure of being is, as such,
in the position of the arche; it is the trinary relation itself that is
originary. . . . There is no substance of power, but only an economy,
only a government.110
Agamben in this way offers a vicarious ontology of the economy of
power. There is no discernable arche, only occasions of power circulating
among beings, wherein one always acts in the place of anotheras in the
linguistic sign.111 This as structure will become more pertinent as we draw
this chapter to a close. What is unclear is how this power operates among a
people who would not be circulators of such a power (magistrates, etc.) but
would be recipients of this vicarious powerthose beings previously dubbed
homo sacer that are now to be governed by this unholy trinity. Agamben
ends his analysis with a quasi-Foucaultian view of power augmented by what
can only call a progressive view of history:
186

The providential state and the destinal state tend progressively to
confound themselves in the figure of the state of modern law, where
the law rules the administration and the administrative apparatus
applies and executes the law. But even in this case, the decisive
element remains that from which the machine in its ensemble has
been destined from the beginning: oikonomia, that is, the govern
ment of men and things.112
For this reason, the economicgovernmental vocation of modern democ

racies is not accidental.113 The determinism on offera closed system in
which early theological writings inexorably find their telos in modern democ
raciessuggests, as always in Agamben, an erosion of the concept of the
event, beyond those first and last events that the author himself identifies.
Last Words: The Language of

Sovereignty and NooPolitics
Humankind has by now reached its historical telos and all that is left to
accomplish is to depoliticize human societies either by unfolding uncon
ditionally the reign of oikonomia or by undertaking biological life itself
as supreme political task. But as soon as the home becomes the political
paradigmas is the case in both instancesthen the proper, what is
most ones own, and the innermost factitiousness of existence run the
risk of turning into a fatal trap. And this is the trap we live in today.
Agamben, Means without End
Returning time and again in Agambens genealogies is his long concern

over the place of human beings in relation to language. Though language
plays a seemingly minor role in Il Regno e la Gloriain the end, its cru
cialAgambens discussions of oikonomia in works published before and
after that work make clear his diagnosis of what ails the political: human
beings were first separated from themselves through language and in modern
democratic societies language has been further seized through the society of
the spectacle; hence we are witnesses of a mass hedononism.114 Agambens
descriptions of homo sacer and oikonomia suffer from a teleological and mas
terful view of history that renders homogeneous any possible reading of the
archive. These last words on history have the upshot of leaving aside, as
merely transitory, instantiated forms of the paradigms he mentions. Ernesto
Laclau and Jacques Rancire, for example, have argued that Agambens
claim that we all in a specific but extremely real sense...appear vir
tually as homines sacri is typical of a diagnosis that cannot tell the dif
ference between totalitarianism and modern parliamentary democracies.115
Ewa Ziarek, for her part, concludes that he forces an erasure of political
187
distinctions not just at the level of his genealogy, but also, as well cover
soon enough, in his descriptions of the undifferentiated form of life as the
depoliticized future.116 The consequence of Agambens avowed messian
ism is a thinking of nonracialized or gendered being, which is ultimately
to say, a nonhistorical one.
Agambens messianism should be taken at its word. Often one finds in
the secondary literature on Agamben descriptions of this aspect of his work
as if it were a deconstructed messianism, as one finds in Derrida, or at least
largely critical of this tradition. But Agambens texts are rife with metaphors
of concealment and deconcealment: early modernity only brought to light,
he says, the secret unity between power and bare life in the exercise of
sovereignty, and this biopolitics operates, though concealed, within meta
physics itself.117 All this as biopower secretly governs modern ideologies of
the Left and the Right (a view that Foucault also shared, though Foucaults
analysis is not as apocalyptic as that of Agamben). Uncovering these secret
and hidden collusions is what is necessary in the face of the telos of Western
metaphysics. Only this deconcealing can save us from the more and
more biopoliticization, that is, the increasing dominance of the state of
exception,118 as it returns philosophy to its practical calling.119 This would
be nothing other than the discovery, a bringing to light, of a new poli
tics...no longer founded in the exceptio of bare life.120 As should be clear
by now, Agamben discerns a hidden mechanism to history, one that, well
note, delivers us over to messianic now uncontaminated by difference and
history. His messianism is only notable for taking seriously the precautions
commonly argued by traditional sources on this topic. In particular, the mes
siah should not be thought as coming at the end of chronological time but in
the here and now of the kairos, the evental moment, and just as importantly,
as any reading of Revelation reveals, such a messianic kairos is to happen in
the midst of utter devastation: The innermost character of salvation is that
we are saved only at the point when we no longer want to be.121
Its true that Agamben does not argue for something like a biblical lit
eralism in his theology of the event, but this too is shared by the Jewish and
Christian messianic traditions. Thus, Agamben practices less a hermeneutics
of suspicion than a rendering of history in terms of its hidden codes, ren
dering unto this selfavowed contemporary122 the ability to bring to light
what previous thinkers were too unambitious to conceive. That Agamben
wants to render history as such inoperative (inoperosit)and thus with
it, all manner of sovereigntisms he describesonly compounds this point.
Rather than the proclaimed end of history, we are, in fact, witness
ing the incessant though aimless motion of this machine, which, in
a sort of colossal parody of theological oikonomia, has assumed the
legacy of the providential governance of the world; yet instead of
188

redeeming our world, this machine (true to the original eschatological
vocation of Providence) is leading us to catastrophe.123
As he returns thinking to its practical calling, Agamben argues for

thinking the inoperativity of life beyond the economy of glory and beyond
bios as separable from zo e, for which he utilizes the Greek zo e aio nios
(eternal life). In relation to this inoperativity, Agamben champions profa
nation as a making use of objects outside of any sacrality, which in turn
produces an unworking heterogeneous to the logic of capitalism, which to
say the least is destructive of the sacred as well.124 By such profanations,
life can be detached from various ends provided by capitalism and govern
mental regimes, thus able to work ceaselessly to interrupt the working of
the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war.125 Gestures
of inoperativity and profanation are the pure means that Agamben
valorizes in Means without End, since they enable a happy life, form of
life, or indeed eternal life (zo e aio nios) that collapses sovereign and
economic relations.126
This is not to say that this true profanation has nothing to do with
the contemporary economic order. Capitalism, he argues, is nothing but
a gigantic apparatus for capturing pure means, that is, profanitory behav
iors, and thus the unworking or rendering inoperative of the sovereign
state of things must thread the needle of finding a means for noncapital
ist profanation.127 But such profanations are ever difficult given that the
masses are ensnared in das Man and engaged in idle chatter, in which case
language not only constitutes itself as an autonomous sphere, but also no
longer reveals anything at allor better yet, it reveals the nothingness of all
things.128 This state of fully realized nihilism follows on from the extreme
expropriation of language carried out by the spectacular state.129 Operating
in the wake of this extreme expropriation, he argues, is a state power
that today is no longer founded on the monopoly of the legitimate use of
violencea monopoly that states share increasingly willingly with other
nonsovereign organizations...; rather it is founded above all on control
of appearance (of doxa), whose control is taken care of by a new class
of bureaucrats jealously watch[ing] over its management.130 We will leave
aside the conception of mastery and control necessary for any form of gov
ernance to have such a jealously guarded dominance over the mechanisms
of language and appearance. No such state of sovereignty exists, though
perhaps this is its newest fiction.
Let us circle in on Agambens conception of language. In Il Regno e
la Gloria, he argues that the ancient gloria and acclamationa thesis he
borrows from Carl Schmittis reproduced in modern doxa as spectacle,
which is now used to form democratic consensus.131 The spectacular state
carries out its work in line with the capitalist religion, such that society
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and government, like the three parts of the Trinity, are interrelated: the
triumph of the oikonomia marks the pure activity of government that
aims at nothing other than its own replication, all while it confronts the
most docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in human his
tory.132 Let me pause for a moment here to gaze up at the heights of this
hyperbole: this is a conspicuous claim found not just in Agamben, but also
in the opening of Julia Kristevas work on revolt133 and Bernard Stieglers
writings on modern technicity. This is a pretensehow could one even
begin to measure assertions about a most docile or most cowardly social
body?that forms the backdrop of reactionary claims that always puts the
thinkers in the sovereign position of exempting themselves from the lazy
and unthinking masses, as Bernard Stiegler describes them.134 For his part,
Stiegler argues that the masses dont give a damn, given the modern
media, or what Agamben describes as the new class of bureaucrats jealously
watch[ing] over [the] management of all spectacle, and there has been a
liquidation of democratic maturity and democratic responsibility, which
he says is populism.135 With rampant technologies of stupidity, Stiegler
argues, there is a threat that it might become literally impossible to (re)
educate those organologically conditioned brains that have become prone
to incivility and delinquency.136 Despite his critique of Agambens politics
as being without hope, both paint the present as the worlds midnight,
diagnosing a nihilism of the present and present a damning account of the
masses copped from Heideggers most reactionary writings on das Man. I raise
this point since there has been, at least since Plato, a consistent sovereign
mythos that is separable from bio- and theopolitics. What Stiegler champions
as noopolitics, from the Greek word for thinking, would be less liberatory
than another sovereign mythology about the mastery of thought and its elite
guardians pasturing to a docile mass of cowardsan undifferentiated flock
needing their shepherds. We have seen how Arendts critique of sovereignty
touches on just this mastery of the theoretical gaze. Lets leave this aside
for now, though a genealogy of such a noopolitics, its societal battles for
intelligence, and its sovereign fictions is surely in order.
For Agamben, in the society of the spectacle, none of the events
of human beings arise to the experience of pure means, living as most do
in a a jumble of events.137 But where there is the greatest danger, there is
the saving power: the pure activity of government is only possible given
the pure form of separation witnessed in capitalist religion:
[T]here is now a single, multiform, ceaseless process of separation
that assails everything, every place, every human activity in order to
divide it from itself....In its extreme form the capitalist religion
realizes the pure form of separation, to the point where there is
nothing left to separate.138
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On the one hand, Agamben argues it has become impossible to pro

fane (or at least it requires special procedures).139 He is ambiguous here
about whether or not this extreme form of capitalism exists, which leaves
open just how impossible profanation has become. He speaks of capitalist
religion...in its extreme phase, but this answers less about the practice
of capitalism than its guiding fantasy. What is at stake in this ambiguity is
what play in the structure of capitalism is left for some measure of free
dom, even if freedom as such is to be immeasurable. We will come to this.
On the other hand, in the contemporary state, the same generic essence
(language) is given autonomy such that it becomes the essential function
of the production cycle. What hinders communication, therefore, is commu
nicability itself: human beings are being separated by what unites them.140
We live, thus, in an age when it has become possible to experience our
own linguistic essence, to experience not some language content or some
true proposition, but the fact itself of speaking.141
This last point is central to Agambens project. In the first volume of
Homo Sacer, he argues that only through the realization of the indistinction
of bios and zo e in the camps does it become possible to render inopera
tive this distinction ruling the West for a millenniumnot by reinstalling
the bioszo e disjuncture but by marking its superfluousness. The danger
of the zone of indistinction is also that which opens up the saving power
of something other than what has ruled the West since its inception. In a
similar manner, Agamben argues that the widespread profanation and desa
cralization of capitalism means that all objects have been emancipated from
a relation of ends founded upon metaphysical or theological systems, and
thus are for the first time available for a new use: In its extreme phase,
capitalism is nothing but a gigantic apparatus for capturing pure means, that
is, profanatory behaviors. Pure means, which represent the deactivation and
rupture (la disattivazione e la rottura) of all separation, are in turn separated
into a special sphere.142 Those who perform this task will bring language
to itself, and will become the first citizens of a community with neither
presuppositions nor a state.143 Only then, he argues, can we begin to think
another living than being virtually homines sacri: zo e aio nios, eternal life,
which is the inoperative center of the human [and] which the machinery
of economy and glory seeks incessantly to bring within itself (di catturare
al proprio interno).144
Underlying Agambens analysis is his rereading of the Walter
Benjamins weak messianism, one hearkening an impossible divine vio
lence that would sweep away the everviolent gap between law and its
execution. Benjamins chosen example is the general strike, one that would
render an entire politics inoperative, not just reforming (via specific industry
strikes) the conditions of power at a given time. Benjamins weak mes
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sianism sought to delineate a temporality for historical materialism other

than the progressive view of history of certain forms of MarxistLeninism.
By aligning his own Marxism in his Theses on the Philosophy of History
to a faith in the redemptive moment that would ex post facto redeem
history hitherto, Benjamin offered much to later thinkers reconceptualizing
the notion of the political event, including Hannah Arendt.145 However,
as a messianism, it was also a despairing prayer for the end of the politi
calwriting when he did, who could blame him?and for a thinking of a
divine peace anathema to what Arendt called plurality.
We cannot simply abdicate the space of the political until it is suf
ficiently purified for its arrival. It is true that thinking the event may indeed
lead us to reformulate a notion of temporality146 that leaves the narrow
gate through which the which the Messiah could enter, as Benjamin put
it at the end of his Theses on the Philosophy of History. But we should
also be troubled by a divine violence that Benjamin, too, argued was noth
ing other than sovereign violence through and through.147 Here we find
the telos of Agambens work. Let me quote at length from the last pages of
his State of Exception:
Bare life is a product of the biopolitical machine and not something
that preexists it, just as the law has no court in nature or in the
divine mind....Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has
been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as constituent power
(that is, violence that makes the law), when it is not reduced to
merely the power to negotiate with the law. The only truly political
action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and law.
And only beginning from the space thus opened will it be possible
to pose the question of a possible use of law after the deactivation
of the device that, in the state of exception, tied it to life. We will
then have before us a pure law, in the sense in which Benjamin
speaks of a pure language and a pure violence.148 To a word
that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything [per
haps, another order of authority, which can win over (entraner)
without violence and persuade without convincing, as Rousseau
once put it], but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure
means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end.
And, between the two, not a lost original state, but only the use
and human praxis that the power of law and myth had sought to
capture in the state of exception.149
Here we have the lasting eclipse of the worlds interminable midnight.
Saying only itself means saying nothing at all. Is this not the dream of a
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certain Rousseau in the Origin of Languages and the Discourse on the Origins
of Inequality, a pure language that would be the perfect union of action
and word? There is a gesture here in Agamben to a thinking without the
state of naturethis is not a lost original state. But this is also the case
in Rousseau, whose Second Discourse already gave up any return to such a
space without violence, without law, without signs as representations, with
nothing but the pure act (of sovereignty) capable of showing the abjection
of bare life. Only if it is possible to think the Being of abandonment beyond
every idea of law will we have moved out of the paradox of sovereignty
towards a politics of freedom from every ban.150 This is the political as that
dangerous supplement to a reverie of a world without the law or the vio
lence of the letter. Note also this important emphasis on simply think[ing]
the Being of Abandonment beyond law; well see more of this noopolitical
sovereignty as we continue.
What is at stake in this discussion is what Agamben dubs the material
experience of beinggeneric.151 As I noted at the beginning of this chapter,
Agamben isolates the humananimal distinction in terms of the human
ability to use language to mark out their relation to given objects. Animals
are not interested in mirrors, in images as imageshere, Agamben simply
denies the undeniableand as such are not given to separating out symbols
and signifiers from the things themselves.152 Humans, he argues, separate
language from its beyond and become enamored by it, and the society of the
spectacle is but the telos of this human activity. Our ontological condition as
speaking beings is, on his account, such that we could not not form relations,
we cannot not but speak in the negative, that is to say, we could not help
but mark the presence of what our words are not. This is the as structure
of language, where words stand as the objects they represent, and he argues
that all manner of apocalyptic political dangers have resulted from this logic
of representation, which in the end is also the logic of sovereignty.153
In this way, Agamben does not merely argue that language forms a
relation in a structure homological to sovereignty; it is sovereignty. Whatever
history Agamben tells, whatever analyses of the contemporary period he
provides, we will only ever have sprung the trap set by our ontological
condition, which is how it is experienced everywhere on earth, in all
societies and all cultures today.154 And given this ontological condition,
given the sovereignty of language, the trap was set the moment we had
anything to say.155 It is for this reason we must emphasize this crucial pas
sage in the first volume of Homo Sacer:
[L]anguage...holds man in its ban [il linguaggio tiene luomo nel suo
bando] insofar as man, as a speaking being, has always already entered
into language without noticing it. Everything that is presupposed
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for there to be language (in the forms of something nonlinguistic,

something ineffable, etc.) is nothing other than a presupposition of
language that is maintained as such in relation to language insofar
as it is excluded from language [non matenuto in relazione con esso
proprio in quanto ne viene escluso]....As the pure form of relation,
language (like the sovereign ban [come il bando soverano]) always
already presupposes itself in the figure of something nonrelational,
and it is not possible either to enter into relation or to move out
of relation with what belongs to the form of relation itself. This
means not that the nonlinguistic is inaccessible to man [ci non
significa che alluomo parlante sia precluso il nonlinguistico] but simply
that man can never reach it in the form of a nonrelational and
ineffable presupposition, since the nonlinguistic is ever to be found
in language itself.156
Trapped in language, human beings speak and speak sovereignly in the
pure form of relation. Agamben parrots Schmitts claim about the sovereign
decision from Political Theology (sovereign is he who decides...) in this
description: Language is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of excep
tion, declares that there is nothing outside language (che non vi un fuori
lingua) and that language is always beyond itself. The particular structure of
law has its foundation in this presuppositional structure of human language.
It [precisely here: language] expresses the bond (vincolo) of inclusive exclu
sion.157 This is the law of language, ineradicable and foreboding, since it
provides for the language of laws.
For Agamben, what more, then, is there to say? He argues through
out his corpus that the only content a true profanation contains is a
saying that says only itself. This desire for a language saying only itself,
selfreferential and referential only to the self, founds his disparate analyses
of sovereignty. The unprecedented violence of human power, he writes in
his 1989 preface to Infancy and History, has its deepest root in this structure
of language.158 Agamben also notes in that preface that the motivum of his
thought, stubbornly pursued in his written and unwritten books (we also
leave aside all the questions of sovereign supposition about what one will
have written, but which, for all that, remains unwritten), is the meaning of
the there is of language.159 This there is is languages limit experience.
Infancy, Agamben argues, is the experience of this there is, and one
must purify thought in order to reach or return to it. For forty millennia,
homo sapiens have hitherto ventured to experience language as it is, to
have the experience of his speaking being, only to be thwarted by histori
cal instantiations of a language, as a state or patrimony of names and rules
which each people transmit from generation to generation.160 We have been
194
thwarted by history, however reconceptualized through messianic temporal

ity. Thus, beyond the invincible power of linguistic presupposition, the
references by language to that which is outside itself, there is the thing of
language, purified of the unsaid, and purified of any historical content
and thus this saying (dire) is one that is left, quite literally in Agambens
terms, without anything to say,161 the reverse of the deconstructive dictum
that in any democracy worthy of the name, there is always more to say.
The Hyperbole that Remains

Hyperbole is the extant remainder beyond the limit of all logic and logos.
Outside the exigencies of his accounts of a presuppositional language,
Agamben calls on us nevertheless to consider a faith in a true sovereignty
that would disconnect and render inoperative all modes of exchange and
social obligations.162 Language as such exceeds all determinative sense: the
there is of language is irreducible to any given history, any given ontology,
and any given language (Russian, Italian, Chinese, and so on). This is the
crisis forever engendered by the Tower of Babel, which represents the move
from infancy into the acquisition of language(s). The babbling of the child
is heterotopic to language and is thus the mark of profanatory gesturing,
and the child plays with the law in such a way as to render all structures
and legal systems inoperative.163 (No matter that all sovereignty plays with
the law in exactly this manner, as Kafkas oeuvre describes.) In this way,
Agamben testifies to the excess of languages and what can never be pinned
down by linguistic reference. As Agamben puts it, Man, instead, by having
an infancy, by preceding speech, splits the single language and, in order to
speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of languagehe has to say I,
the first step into the logos.164 Hence, mans nature is split at its source in
language, between the infant in language and the I that enters and produces
discourse.165 For Agamben, then, language as logos is the loss of sense: it is idle
chatter and robotic. The task of the coming community is to bring about this
return to pure infancy, a pure state of the use of language without ends, like
a childs babbling that is full of (non)sense and refers to nothing other than
its own jouissancesuch a thinking of jouissance is seemingly implacable in
considerations of sovereignty, as we saw in chapter 1s discussion of Rousseau.
This is what Agamben dubs the profane sufficient life that has reached the
perfection of its own power and its own communicability.166
Such a profane life, however, would also be a living (zen) without
livingwith (syzen). In the Time that Remains, his analyses of the letters of
Paul, Agamben discusses this perfection in terms of a messianic politics
that would produce the simultaneous abolition and realization of the as
if.167 Marking the internal scission of the sign as signifier and signified,
195
Agamben argues that any philosophy that counts on and reproduces this
scission, that is, the Lacanian adumbration of the chain of signifiers or the
deconstructive play of significations, also reproduces this logic of sovereignty.
In teasing out the temporality of the end of history, Agamben writes,
[I]t is not a question here of a transitional phase that never
achieves its end nor of a process of infinite deconstruction that,
in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the
bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the lawno longer
practiced but studiedis not justice, but only the gate that leads
to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the annulling of
the law, but its deactivation and inoperativity [inoperosit]that is,
another use of the law.168
Bringing about the end of the as if of language marks the real state
of exception that Agamben attempts to describe throughout his work.169
This real state of exception marks a sundering of the signifier from the signi
fied as well as the play of superfluous imagery and idle chatter in the society
of the spectacle. On this point, Agamben has much to say about commodity
fetishism as at bottom a linguistic phenomenon that wholly enshrines the
signifier, thus divorcing itself from any referents. The dream of the end of
the as if is also, notably, the dream of the end of any conditioned ethics,
since this would be end of any deliberative phronesis or Kantian categorical
imperatives, given that there would be no separation between word and
deed, between logos and praxis. Karl Barth, Agamben notes, stipulated that
there was no place for the as if in the messianic, and Barth had just this
ethical connotation in mind.170 This claim should be taken not only as a
suturing of law with its enforcement, as in Benjamins weak messianism,
but also the sating of any desire based on lack, since all illusion and fantasy,
on Agambens own terms, stipulates a minimal moment of the as structure
of language. We find a similar thinking Deleuzes vitalistic conception of
the indefinite life, that is, a purely immanent life, the primary examples
of whichas always isnt it?are small childreninfused with an imma
nent life that is pure power and even bliss. (How many theories of life
demand this theoretical labor of children? One can never grow up too late,
since childhood is complete power, complete bliss. But pure immanence,
if there is such a thing, is nothing but death, not life, since it would be a
black hole from which nothing returns. A life, to use Deleuzes phrase, as
pure power, would be nothing of the kind.)171 This is a call for a plenitude
of immediacy, an end to conditioning the unconditional, and Agamben is
right to stipulate that everything hangs on the moment and manner in
which the as becomes abolished.172
196
What interests us in Agambens reading of Pauls messianic com

munitymuch in line with his reading of Benjamins messianism in
Potentialitiesis how it renders Paulian faith (pistis) as an experience of
the word that marks a pure and common power of saying (potenza di
dire).173 This experience is to be understood in faiths relation to grace
(charis), which, as is well known, is purely gratuitous and thus outside any
rule or law that would capture it. (If it were a conditional gift, it would
not be grace, but caught up in an economy of giveandtake.) It must
be freed of any law of charity or such grace would be less than freely
given: charis must be freely given or it is less than grace. This is Pauls
account of the passivity of human beings in the face of Gods power. For
Agamben, grace is but the capacity to carry out good works indepen
dently of the law, since, as purely gratuitous, it also operates without
pregiven rules.174
Grace, pure gratuity, is the form of life that Agambens work has been
in search of. Contentless, grace is, he argues, a real sovereignty (autarkeia)
that ultimately bear[s] the task of sharing the impossibility of the law in a
hyperbolic way (kathyperbolen).175 Hyperbole is hence always extrajuridical,
since it operates outside any norms, and Agamben argues that perhaps
this has not been stressed enough.176 Perhaps it hasnt. In relation to this
hyperbolic way, autarkeia is a sovereign capacity that disconnect[s]
relations of power; in short, autarkeia is a sovereign power that relates lan
guage back to itself in utter transparency, while hyperbolically marking the
selfs pure givenness or gratuity beyond any law or norm and beyond the
sovereign exposure to death.
In sum, selfidentity is the pure form of zo e aio nios: eternal life expe
rienced in the now of messianic time is unable to change given its unre
latedness to any other.177 This zo e aio nios has a form that is tautological
and circularno relation to difference, to supplemental language, to the
other, a circle cycling back to itself without prosthesis, which has long been
the dream of the sovereign apologists depicting it as higher than height.
In Il Regno e la Gloria, Agamben champions Aristotles divine thought
thinking itself from the Metaphysics as a gesture toward the outside of the
political and philosophical circuit: an inoperativity of contemplation,
divine thought thinking itself (noesis noeseos noesis) deactivates bodily
and linguistic, material and immaterial practices.178 No doubt, it would. The
properly human praxis, he argues, returns upon itself to its abilities and
powers to live and to act, such that bios and zo e perfectly coincide in
Aristotles depiction of the vita contempliva, thus suturing what he took to
be an archaic caesura. Such is the power of the circle of thought thinking
itself, which as Aristotle noted long ago, would no longer involve itself with
the impurities of this world; this perfectly selfcontained activity would
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be a perfected pleasure (hedone) and a pure living (zen) uncontaminated by

anything outside of itself, while enjoying the sovereign jouissance of pure
autoaffection, since by definition it lacks nothing.179 This is Agambens
noopolitics.
Accordingly, real sovereignty exists in a real state of exception in
which nothing conditions it, since it is unpresupposed in the pure now
of the messianic, where it is utterly immune and saved from relations to
others and from time, which is rendered inoperative in the standing now of
sovereign selfpresence. The self thus would no longer need to indefinitely
maintain itself in similitude (in the as if), realizing the potenza or power of
the only real time in time itself.180
This is the reason we have followed Agamben thus far, since he offers
a masterful lesson on sovereign selfpresence and its relation to time. The
relation to the other is not simply the mark of death at the heart of life, an
exposing of the self outside of itself. At the same time, it is only by living
beyond itself in the trace of the time beyond the now, in the mutation of
the livingon (survival), that life traces itself as such. Derrida teases out this
logic in his discussion of the contamination of an presupposed purity, which,
as well see in the next chapter, is the mark of the as if of sovereignty:
One should not simply consider contamination as a threat, however.
To do so continues to ignore this very logic. Possible contamina
tion must be assumed, because it is also opening or chance, our
chance. Without contamination we would have no opening or
chance. Contamination is not only to be assumed or affirmed: it is
the very possibility of affirmation in the first place. For affirmation
to be possible, there must always be at least two yess. If the con
tamination of the first yes by the second is refusedfor whatever
reasonsone is denying the very possibility of the first yes. Hence
all the contradictions and confusion that this denial can fall into.
Threat is chance, chance is threatthis law is absolutely undeniable
and irreducible. If one does not accept it, there is no risk, and, if
there is no risk, there is only death. If one refuses to take a risk,
one is left with nothing but death.181
This is the logic of supplementarity that we discussed in chapter 1,
where language frustrates, Derrida argues, the enjoyment of the thing itself
as it moves through the trace of time beyond any risk.182 The moment of this
now, of this selfpresent potenza, would be completely autoerotic, a gesture
that would be pure of any absent presence and illusions that sidetrack us,
as Derrida put it long ago.183 How displeasing would be, then, this ultimate
pleasure. As Michael Naas argues, death is the very possibility of survival
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or living on and iteration in time as the condition for any conception

of eternal life.184 Let me stipulate this not as a Derridean point, but one
common at a simplified level to all manner of thinking that is nonmonadic,
which is to say, all thinking contesting sovereign selfpresence:
All dualisms, all theories of immortality of the soul, or of the spirit,
as well as all monisms...are the unique theme of a metaphysics
whose entire history was compelled to strive toward the reduction
of the trace. The subordination of the trace to the full presence
summed up in the logos, the humbling of a writing beneath a
speech dreaming its plentitude, such are the gestures required by
an ontotheology determining being as presence, as parousia, as life
without diffrance: another name for death.185
If life is to be envisioned without risk, without threat, without expo
sure to death, which was Agambens test for sovereignty, then one will
equate all threats, and think the mediation of the spectacle with the death
camps with accidental deaths on highways:
[T]he glorious body of advertising has become the mask behind
which the fragile, slight human body continues its precarious
existence, and the geometrical splendor of the girls covers over
the long lines of the naked, anonymous bodies led to their death
in the Lagers (camps), or the thousands of corpses mangled in the
daily slaughter on the highways.186
For those not satisfied by the logic of Derridean diffrance, let me turn
to quite a different example on offer from Slavoj iek in an afterward to
his collection The Universal Exception (2006). There, he takes note of animal
experiments conducted in 2003, in which robot arms were attached by wires
to the brains of two monkeys. The point that interests iek is the closing
of the gap between thought and its object, which Kant and Aristotle
had said was only possible for the mind of God (a point Derrida implic
itly alludes to above): an unmediated signifier/signified, a pure gesture by
which intellectual intuition directly influences reality, thus depriv[ing]
us of one of the basic features of our finitude.187 Here we would have
sundered the distance between mere thought and causal intervention into
external reality, which otherwise enables us to test the hypotheses of our
minds in order to let these ideas die instead of ourselves. (Needless to
say, the entire premise of these experiments question Agambens thesis that
animality is without signs, without language.) As in Derrida, the logic of
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finitude is not the logic of death, but of a survival beyond what iek calls
radical closure.188 Moreover, iek, citing Alain Badiou, suggests that such
experiments offer the dream of what he dubs a shamanesque obscurantism
that would harness together meaning and truth and, indeed, meaning and
life. Where the truth of the Real and the excess of life coincide, there
is, iek claims, only roboticism and death: creativity, language, and meaning
destroyed by a death drive wanting what is beyond finitude.189
Agamben, in his early Infancy and History, argued that a pure lan
guage and selfpresence (a being united with [its] nature) could find
nowhere any discontinuity, any difference through which any kind of his
tory could be produced and would never be able to see [history] as an
object distinct from himself.190 Sovereign selfpresence would be the end
of history, according to this claim, and it would also be an eternal life, zo e
aio nios, forever indifferent: a livingon no different than death. Such is the
price of this selfappropriating power (potenza), which Agamben calls the
pure I am able.191 Thus, to live on in the time beyond selfpresence is to
accede to the possibility of the worst, on this or that side of the messianic
principle. To live, in short, is to ever risk appropriation and being shorn
of our infancy.
This means growing up having to abide our fantasies and a politics
that would be more than a mere gesture. With Agamben, there would be
nothing left to say after his last word: we would be left only with the purity
of a certain hyperbole, which hangs over us like a spectral halo, circling
always back to itself in perfect beatitude, akin to the God described by
Aristotle as pure contemplation, a pure hyperbole circling as a testament
to a sovereign noopolitics:
One can think of the halo, in this sense, as a zone in which possibil
ity and reality, potentiality and actuality, become indistinguishable.
The being that has reached its end, that has consumed all of its
possibilities, thus receives as a gift a supplemental possibility. This is
that potentia permixta actui (or that actus permixtus potentiae) that
a brilliant fourteenth century philosopher called actus confusionis,
a fusional act, insofar as specific form or nature is not preserved
in it, but mixed and dissolved in a new birth with no residue. This
imperceptible trembling of the finite that makes its limits indeter
minate and allows it to blend, to make itself whatever, is the tiny
displacement that every thing must accomplish in the messianic
world. Its beatitude is that of a potentiality that comes only after
the act, of matter that does not remain beneath the form, but sur
rounds it with a halo.192
SIX
Derrida and the Limit

of Sovereigntys Reason
[A] questioning of sovereignty is not simply some formal or academic necessity

for a kind of speculation in political philosophy, or else a form of genealogical,
or perhaps even deconstructive vigilance. It is already underway. It is at work
today; it is whats coming, whats happening. It is and it makes history.
Jacques Derrida, Rogues
What must be thought, Derrida writes in the closing pages of Rogues, is

this inconceivable and unknowable thing, a freedom that would no longer be
the power of a subject, a freedom without autonomy, a heteronomy without
servitude, in short, something like a passive decision.1 To certain readers of
Derrida, this passage, coming near the end of Rogues, written some two years
before he passed away, would mark the ultimate failure of his thought. What
must be thought...: an exhortation, an ethical injunction, but seemingly
also a final plea at the end of a long career that, many believe, aimed at
destroying the very fundaments of equality and freedom, namely subjectiv
ity, autonomy, and selfsovereignty. What must be thought points also
to the future, to the future of a thought beyond Derrida himself, one who
would ultimately disappoint when it comes to thinking a freedom unaligned
to all that we have freely taken it to be: a power, an ability, or at least
the mark of a possibility of what one can accomplish, no matter the odds,
no matter the political regime, circling divinely in an absolute quietism.
Nothing would seem more unreasonable than that which is inconceivable
201
202
and unknowable, especially if we are to counter the problems of sovereignty

in our day, in the light and enlightenment of our day.2
Freedom and equality have been doubly positioned in a thinking of
sovereignty. On the one hand, sovereignty has been seen as the sine qua non
of freedom, since it is the selfs autoposition, its autonomy, its ability to rule
over itself through its own coercive force managing its passions that has been
taken to be the predicate for the selfs ability to carry its will into the world.
The dignity of the person in Kant, on Derridas account, but also going back
to the ruling (archein) of the self in Plato, or the ultimate autarkeia of the
sovereign God as pure contemplation in Aristotle, coopted and affirmed by
Agamben, has been aligned to the force of reason, to the reason of force
over the turns of the self. It is this coercive ability of the selfwhether
enacted or notthat is the basis for thinking an equality of one to another,
of one sovereign self to another. On the other hand, this sovereignty of the
self, its own selfrule and its equality with others, has been grounded in
national sovereignty, one that will protect individual sovereignty as a right
of citizenship. There is no need to revisit here all that we have reviewed
throughout our chapters on Rousseau, Arendt, and Foucault regarding the
sovereign fictions of nationalism and natalism, which have done anything
but protect the dignity, the sanctity, and finally the sovereignty of each
one. Butand this move is all important in the light and darkness of our
daythis does not mean that we must, at every turn, attempt to resuscitate
human dignity against sovereign cruelty by way of the concept of individual
sovereignty, the supposed invulnerability and indivisibility or autarkeia of
the self. We cannot simply take on one sovereignty we find abhorrent in
its insidious biopolitical and nationalist forms (political sovereignty) with
one that finds for us, in a part of ourselves, so much to like.
Certainly, we are often in want of sovereignty [en mal de souverainet],
wanting it even as its evil makes us ill.3 National or popular sovereignty
and selfsovereignty have called for the elemental prosthesis of one to the
other, even where, in sovereigntys very movement, it should never be in
want; sovereignty should never need anything else, if it is to be sovereign.
And yet the self and the nationstate is always already in want of sover
eignty, always in want of the force and enforcement of its own law, its own
autonomy. Sovereignty always, as we argued at the end of chapter 1, needs
its supplement, needs something beyond itself, for example, government in
the work of Rousseau, since a democracy in the strict sense could only
exist, let us remind ourselves, if there were a [sovereign] people of gods.
Sovereignty, as Foucault and Arendt argue, is also a power that is polyvalent,
a force of law and law of force, as Derrida would call it, that has spread
itself throughout the societies of modernity, sharing its right over life and
DERRIDA AND THE LIMITS OF SOVEREIGNTYS REASON
203
death, as Rousseau put it succinctly, a right that now means just as much
to make live and let die as it does to make die and let live.
Conceptually, a sharing (partage) of sovereignty is impossible, since
sovereignty in its most decisive moment is to be shared neither de jure nor
in fact. It cannot, without being in utter want (en mal), share itself in lan
guage or give an account of itself, making itself accountable and measurable,
which sovereignty in its utter want always already wants to avoid:
A pure sovereignty is indivisible or it is not at all, as all the theoreti
cians of sovereignty have rightly recognized....This indivisibility
excludes it in principle from being shared, from time and from
language...and thus, paradoxically, from history....There is
no sovereignty without violence, without the force of the strongest,
whose reasonthe reason of the strongestis to win out over [avoir
raison de] everything....If sovereign force is silent, it is not for
lack of speaking.4
It is alone: it absents itself from the political such that there is no con
trary of sovereignty,5 and one mistakes the stakes of this political artifice,
to take up the terms from chapter 1, if one thinks one can simply oppose
sovereignty. We are used to such binary pairs, but sovereignty, as exceptional
and alone, does not leave itself to be easily opposed, especially when one
risks the worst when opposing all sovereignty tout court. What is the lesson
here? Perhaps that the dream of a nonsovereign future is but the most
lasting sovereign fiction:
There is no contrary of sovereignty, even if there are things other
than sovereignty. Even in politics (and the question remains of
knowing if the concept of sovereignty is political through and
through) the choice is not between sovereignty and nonsovereignty,
but among several forms of partings, partitions, divisions, conditions
that come along to breach a sovereignty that is always supposed to
be indivisible and unconditional.6
This will be what Derrida calls sovereigntys constitutive and performative
autoimmunity: the moment it sets out to immunize itself, to protect itself
from the outside through its spreading out of force or by its use of language
and sovereign fictions, it also brings about its demise as sovereignty. There
is, in a sense, an impotence at the heart of powers height as sovereignty.
But, as Ive suggested throughout this book, I want to be careful here to
note that this should not bring a false hope for the final denouement of
204
sovereignty. We have seen too much of that in recent years: the stories of
the fall of sovereignty in the modern or postmodern age, in terms of the
subject or the nationstate, had become for a time part of the reveling of a
new world order. This, in a sense, is where the lessons of sovereignty and
a pure nonsovereignty in this book have circuitously led. There has been,
for example, a structurally similar critique of all forms of representation
whether in politics or in languageas ever disruptive of the pure moment
of selfpresence and sovereignty, or contrariwise, in terms of representation
of the self that is said to be the mark of tyranny. Inversely, we have also
seen concerns over the fall of sovereignty in light of the rise of other forms
of powereconomic (the rise and ubiquity of capitalism) or otherwise (dis
ciplinary power, societies of the code, and so on). This means that we
need to think sovereignty both in terms of its constitutive, performative
autoimmunity and also in terms of the ways in which, as Derrida puts it,
sovereignty has changed its shape and place.7
This change in shape and place is not simply due to the state rac
ism by which the state sees as its work the saving and salvation of a nation
of people. Nor is this change due only to the transformation of monarchical
sovereignty into national and popular sovereignty. With the loss of author
ity in the modern age, the performative backstop for sovereignty has been
laid aside. Each performative utterancethe words that are authorized to
declare an end to democratic debate, to declare war, and so onrelies on
previous performative utterances in a nearendless cycle: the performative
utterances of oaths and so on that still mark the ceremonies and glory of
power. These utterances then rely on previous performatives going back, for
example in the United States, to the foundational ex post facto delineation
of a right to declare a United States in a declaration of independence. But
the latter could still authorize itself, as does the Declaration of Rights of
Man and Citizen, in terms of a beneficent Creator, an inverted divine right
used against King George III by the American colonies. With the loss of
authority in the modern age, about which Arendt writes, there is no ultimate
legitimating authority. Sovereign fictions of pastoral power and oikonomia
aside, the performances and performative utterances of sovereignty are no
longer authorized per se by theological narratives; however much they are
still used, they have, Arendt claims, lost much of their force, except as a
shadowy set of complaints by religious reactionaries fully aware of this loss
of force. They are authorized by previous performative utterances and
performances of power, all of which is to say that, to put it simply, the
divine right of kings and its selfauthorization has been replaced by the
performances of the sword of the Leviathan, the police and its apparatchiks
that are the coercive force of the law and the law of force in modernityon
205
this point, Agamben argues persuasively. The Enlightenment, then, not only
brought to the fore reason, but also, with the concomitant loss of authority,
the reason of force, the raison dtat we have been tracking, whereby abuse
of power is constitutive of sovereignty itself.8
The changing shape and form of sovereignty is one often missed in
its conceptualization in light of the claims of Derrida, Agamben, and oth
ers in recent years. To take one example, JeanLuc Nancy, in a treatment
of sovereignty in The Creation of the World, or Globalization (2002), follows
up on the logic of sovereigntys selfpresumption as Le Trs Haut, as that
which is higher than height, but also as the highest in a system in which
it can be categorized within a vertical hierarchy. Nancy argues rightly that
sovereignty has been figured as the summit, as the height of the political
that is both higher than height, but also the summit by which it is the
sovereign in a given politics. He is clear that sovereignty essentially slips
away [chappe] from the sovereign.9 Echoing Kantorowiczs The Kings Two
Bodies, Nancy argues that the sovereign body belongs within a hierarchy
of a political system, for example, feudalism, in which it is primus inter
pares.10 But sovereignty itself must escape this hierarchy; it cannot exist
as the body at the height of a hierarchy since it depends on nothing, is
closed in upon itself, and founds itself through its own selflegitimation.11
Sovereignty itself is le trs haut as the detached summit, where it is the
Unequal itself. It is unequal to all kinds of equality or inequality.12 It is, in
sum, the apprehension of the incommensurability between the horizontal
[equality] and the vertical [hierarchy], between the base and the summit;13
it does not even share with others finitude or mortality. This at least is our
worst apprehension about sovereignty, namely its taking itself as the place
beyond the spacing of the political, there where it has only a relation to
itself [rapport soi] through which it gives itself its own laws, constituting
its autopositioning.14 Sovereignty thus is always ex nihilo, founding itself
on nothing other than its own rapport to itself. I wont go into all the
semantic and powerful valences of sovereignty and its twins that Nancy
treats well and at some length: summus, superanus, supremus, but also sum
mation, the capital and capitalism that figures along and beyond the summa
linea,15 which is to say, all the powers of measuring and the measuring up
to itself of and as sovereignty. Thus, he writes in The Truth of Democracy,
sovereignty is not located in any person; it has no figure, no contour; it
cannot be erected into any monument. It is, simply, the supreme. With
nothing above it. Neither God nor master.16
I bring up Nancys analysis because it takes up a continuous line of
thinking of sovereignty from Plato to Bodin and Hobbes, one which he
rightly describes as a sovereignty that takes place in thought and as think
206
ing.17 But what worries me is that this conceptualization of sovereignty gives

sovereignty too much and too little at the same time. While it recognizes
its ultimate failure, it also still sees sovereignty in terms of its medieval
conceptualization; it repeats the thse royale of the French monarchies, and
Arendt, Foucault, and Agamben would be right to call on us to think
sovereignty in its multivalent forms. Sovereignty is not just le trs haut, as
Foucault argues quite well, but also the lowest, le plus bas, the most vulgar
and democratic of forces in modernity. It is more or less than the lowest:
it is a vulgarity to the political in its most obscene and, as Derrida rightly
suggests, also its roguish power.18 In thinking about democracy, as we will
come to it, it is important to keep in mind democracys vulgar elements:
the demos that would make up a democracy. Another problem arises in
Nancys account. Let me quote from him on a thinking beyond or without
sovereignty, of a sovereignty without sovereignty, as he poses it, since
though his intervention against sovereignty has much to offer, it also must
give us pause, since it brings us back to some of the problems of natalism
and nationalism that Derrida confronts in his deconstruction of sovereignty
in his later work:
The difficulty is to think the political without a subject: not without
authority or the power of decision....This is an announcement
of the problem of equality with which modern politics has been
concerned, and sovereignty itself, which is defined as a summit that
is not measured by any given height. Together, liberty and fraternity
could represent this absence of the given height (of the origin
[fondement], of the father).19
What Nancy brings us back to is the second part of the quotation from
Derrida with which we began, namely, thinking a nonsovereign and there
fore nonsubjective freedom. The task of the remainder of this chapter will be
to tease out just what Derrida means by a nonsubjective and nonsovereign
freedom, one that needs to be thought with and against conceptions of
sovereignty either as le trs haut or as the most roguish element, le plus
bas. For Derrida and Nancy, freedom is an unconditional demand put upon
the political itself, one that for politics and democracy (and there is no
former without the latter, for Derrida) does not mean returning to a think
ing of the subject in the classical sense. But neither does it mean thinking
a sovereignty without sovereignty, an unconditional freedom, along the
lines of a thinking of fraternity and fraternalism, a Christian thinking of
the sharingout of the political in terms of the dead father, one that brings
us back to thinking community as communion.
207
Le Trs Haut of Mount Moriah

Before approaching Derridas discussions of freedom and equality, it is neces
sary to broach the distinction between the unconditional and sovereignty.
There is no doubt, as Derrida makes clear time and again, that sovereignty,
as mastery and making, as a wanting of the functionalization of the political
as its own prosthesis, takes itself to be an unconditional power for the work
of politics. Nevertheless, what he affirms is that it is necessary that there
be reference to some unconditional, an unconditional without sovereignty,
and thus without cruelty.20 Throughout his later texts, Derrida takes up a
number of unconditional demands placed upon each one, and he argues
that politics is the aporetic decision made in the face of these unconditional
demands, such as justice, which are undeconstructible.21 For Derrida, poli
tics takes place at the interstices between and arriving from these uncondi
tional demands: claims for unconditional forgiveness beyond reconciliation,
justice beyond the letter of the law, hospitality beyond its conditional forms,
the gift beyond the economy of giving, but also unconditional demands for
equality and freedom. It is unconditioned freedom, I will ultimately argue,
that is the sine qua non for any response and responsibility in the face of
these demands, all of which can be summed up, if too quickly, under the
heading of what Derrida calls the democracy to come. The passive deci
sions made in the face of who or what comes, in the face of demands and
counterdemands for justice, hospitality, and so on, are a mark of freedom,
if not, however, the sovereign subject:
[W]hat arises unforeseeably, what both calls upon and overwhelms
my responsibility (my responsibility before my freedomwhich it
nonetheless seems to presuppose, my responsibility in heteronomy,
my freedom without autonomy [my emphasis]), the event, the coming
of the one who or which comes but does not yet have a recogniz
able figureand who therefore is not necessarily another man, my
likeness [semblable], my brother, my neighbor. That is what is an
event worthy of the name can and ought to be, an arrivance that
would surprise me absolutely and to whom or for whom, to which
or for which I could not, and any longer, not respondin a way
that is as responsible as possible: what happens, what arrives, and
comes down upon me, that to which I am exposed...exceeds
any determinism but exceeds also the calculations and strategies of
my mastery, my sovereignty, or my autonomy. This is why, even if
no one is simply a free subject, there is in this place something
free, a certain space of freedom is opened...a spacing that is
liberated....I am exposed, destined to be free and to decide, to
208

the extent that I cannot foresee, predetermine, prognosticate. This
can be called freedom.22
As we have seen in the work of Arendt, there is no thinking the

event of natality wherever the political is preprogrammed, prefabricated,
where each way, each decision is already predetermined in the shadow
of sovereigntys hold over the polis. The exposure of freedom, as Arendt
and Derrida both argue, is a place of nonmastery, of nonsovereignty.
Freedom without autonomy is the condition of possibility for sovereign
freedom under discussion in the tradition. What Derrida supplements to
Arendts account, a prosthetic that is not just one prosthetic among oth
ers, is the supplemental nonfiguring of the other to whom I am always
already responsible, to whom I must give without condition, to whom I
must offer hospitality beyond and before any conditions, to whom I must
be just beyond and before any making of the law. It is thus not a simple
calculation of needs among these demands, but rather in each context liv
ing up toand this, for Derrida is the trembling of livingthe decision
that risks passing us by with regard to our responsibilities. This thinking
is inimical to sovereign selfpossession:
The concept of sovereignty will always imply the possibility of posi
tionality, of this thesis, of this thesis of the self, of this autoposition
of what poses or poses itself as ipse, as the self or same (le mme),
the selfsame or itself (soimme). . . . Dictatorship (and in a minimal
and strict sense, sovereignty is always a dictatorial moment, even
if one doesnt live in a supposedly dictatorial regime) is always the
essence of sovereignty, where it is linked to the power to speak in
the form of dictation, prescription, order or diktat.23
Derridas thinking of the political is not, then, a politics that leads
to bonne conscience, but rather one in which, to borrow the metaphors of
Arendt, one is always already caught in a web of unconditional demands
to which one is already responding (even if the response is no). This is
not to say, however, that Derridas work dreams of a pure politics in which
our everyday politics is but a falling or decaying (Verfallen) of the political,
that is, that there would be a pure giving, a pure hospitality, a pure justice
if not for the fact that all have been broken down, somehow, by language,
by laws, and by the measuring that is part of the political.
What I am seeking...is a prudent deconstruction of the logic
and the dominant, classical conception of nationstate sovereignty
without ending up with a depoliticization, a neutralization of the
209
political....What I am looking for would be a slow and differential

deconstruction of this logic without ending with a depoliticization,
but an other politicization, a repoliticization and therefore another
concept of the political.24
Where Rousseau, for example, dreamed of a community immanent to itself,
revolving without communication from one to another and where Agamben
dreams of a pure gesture without remainder circling in the noopolitics of a
messianic halo, Derrida insists that politics is always already contaminated,
that there is never a pure justice, a pure hospitality, and so onnor could
it be except by giving up on the future itself. He argues that wherever hos
pitality and immigration come to the fore, for instance, one must recognize
the measuring underway of the immeasurable responsibility that at the same
time cannot be denied: where measures are called for, the immeasurable
always contaminates this thinking in turn, since it calls into question the
selfauthorization of such a measuring, of such a stopping of the resources
of the political for the other. Wherever I say that I can give no more, that
I can be no more hospitable, it is always in the background that, whatever
the hardship, whatever the danger, I can in fact give more, I can in fact
be more hospitable, I can in fact be more just. Politics is in the end the
only chance for the unconditional, even where it is conditioned, where it
is measured, and where justice as an unconditional claim from the other
becomes the law of justice as fairness. Ethics and politics is the negotiation,
the foreverwithoutleisure (the nonotium of negotiation) of the condi
tioning of these unconditional demands, the calculation in the face of the
incalculable singularity of the other. It is precisely this negotiation that
marks what is happening, he argues in La bte et la souverain, as always
disruptive in and around sovereignty:
There are different and sometimes antagonistic types of sovereignty,
and it is always in the name of one that one attacks the another:
for example, it is in the name of a sovereignty of man, or even of
the personal subject, of his autonomy (for autonomy and liberty
are also sovereignty, and one cannot without warning and without
threatening by the same token all liberty, purely and simply attack
the motifs or the rallying cries of independence, autonomy, and even
nationstate sovereignty, in the name of which some weak peoples
are struggling against the colonial and imperial hegemony of powerful
states....Even in politics, the choice is not between sovereignty
and nonsovereignty, but between different forms of parting, parti
tions, divisions, conditions that come along to broach a sovereignty
that is always supposed to be indivisible and unconditional.25
210
In the relation between law and justice, for example, the law cannot live
up, cannot measure up, to justice, since justice always addresses itself to
singularity.26 Justice, as such, is unpresentable in the law, the universalizing
laws of politics or even in language. We are beginning to perceive, perhaps
too closely, the relation of the exception with regard to justice, hospitality,
that is to say, the unconditional, and the exception of sovereignty, which
is also unsharable in language. However, it is in the difference between the
two, in the interminable negotiation between mastery and its other, where
politics occurs. And this interminable demand of the unconditionalfor
example, the justice always exceptional to lawdoes not lead to a political
quietude. Its demands are hic et nunc, even when we would rather simply call
it a day, take our measure over the political, and thus leave it to a certain
sovereignty. It is here that another thinking of the decision, beyond the
decisionism of the sovereigntists, announces itself:
Justice, however unpresentable it remains, does not wait. It is that
which must not wait. A just decision is always required immediately,
right away, as quickly as possible. It cannot provide itself with the
infinite information and unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules, or
hypothetical imperatives that could justify it. And even if it did have
all that at its disposal, all the time and all the necessary knowledge
about the matter, well then, the moment of decision as such, what
must be just, must [il faut] always remain a finite moment of urgency
and precipitation....The instant of decision is a madness...a
madness because such a decision is both hyperactive and suffered
[suractive et subie], it preserves something passive, even unconscious,
as if the one was free only by letting himself be affected by his own
decision and as if it came to him from the other.27
The measures of the political come with their enforcement measures,
with their laws of force and force of law, the violence of political measures:
Law is inseparable from violence, immediate or mediate, present or repre
sented.28 This is not to offer an apologia for these enforcement mechanisms,
but rather to recognize that each law arrives with its enforcement in those
places where we expect that justice be done. And it is here that we must
split the impossible difference between sovereignty and the unconditional,
since it is the unconditional that offers the least assuranceand we must
recall all that Arendt wrote about the problems of assurance in philosophical
modernityin the always open wound of the political.
Abandoned to itself, the incalculable and giving [donatrice] idea of
justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst for it can
211
always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation, [which]

is always possible....An absolute assurance against this risk [the
risk of sovereignty and sovereigntism] can only saturate or suture
the opening of the call to justice, a call that is always wounded. But
incalculable justice commands calculation. . . . Not only must one [il
faut] calculate, negotiate with the relation between the calculable
and the incalculable, and negotiate without a rule that would not
have to be reinvented there where we are thrown, there where
we find ourselves.29
This is, no doubt, a difficult freedom, a freeplay between two logics,
two imperatives: the demands of law and the unconditional demands for
hospitality, for a giving (up) of the self, for freedom of the other, for equality,
in a word, for justice. There is no justice present to us, true, but there is no
chance for justice without the affirmation in the face of the other, the yes
in the face of who or what comes, without alibi and without yet perceiving
whether the other is my brother or son or neighbor, my semblable. This would
be the Here I am in the face of the others singularity, a welcoming that
would be the arche of the political rethought as other than, as Derrida writes,
picking up its Latin translation, a principle, a princedom, a sovereignty.30
Michael Naas touches upon this when discussing the aporias of hospitality,
in which one must always already welcome the other, no matter who, but
must also attend to the welcome of the particular, that is, one with a name,
a history, a specificity that is also beyond the property of a name:
Between the welcoming question, Hey, you there, whats your name?
and the police interrogation, Hey you there, whats your name?,
the difference is subtle but fundamentala difference between two
inflections. The difference is fundamental yet unmasterable, impossible
to regulate or determine once and for all by any science or law.
Welcoming some particular other, calling him or her by name, can
thus turn into an identification that would allow one to exclude
that other, or at the very least to make sure in advance that this
other is not going to abuse our hospitality. No code or context can
ever prevent the welcoming gesture from turning ugly. Yet for this
gesture to become effective, the other as strangeras essentially
vulnerable and destitutemust be identified, and so never wel
comed as a stranger....The double imperative prevents one from
ever achieving good conscience, from ever saying I do enough,
since by definition doing enough is never enough. Between our
responsibility and our actions, the passage is never given in advance
but must be reinvented with each welcome.31
212
The logic of reinvention implied in all of this is what has giv

en deconstruction itself a bad name: a relativism, a nihilism, and so on.
Nevertheless, it is the imperative of the other that calls into question any
right to sovereignty, any sovereigntism that would interrogate and always
already identify the other, and the other within oneself, thus foreclosing
the arche of the political in the name of its functionalization, its complete
measurement and mastery, in which there would be no freedom, no deci
sions, and no welcoming of the other in the name of justice, a universal
claim made on each one. And as Naas suggests, the difference may be noth
ing other than a difference of inflection, a certain passing in and out of a
passages of a text, a life, an institution. Let me cite one text, one political
pedagogy after so many others in this book, one that has been particularly
troublesome for the fate of the political, there from its ex post facto declared
beginning in a scene sometime before Moses, but not monotheism. Let me
quote the passage, though it is well known:
Genesis: 22 [1]...And it came to pass...that God did tempt
Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here
I am. [2] And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac,
whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer
him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I
will tell thee of. [3] And Abraham rose up early in the morning,
and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and
Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose
up, and went unto the place of which God had told him. [4] Then
on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place
afar off. [5] And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here
with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and
come again to you, [6] And Abraham took the wood of the burnt
offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his
hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. [7] And
Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he
said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood:
but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? [8] And Abraham said,
My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so
they went both of them together. [9] And they came to the place
which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there,
and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him
on the altar upon the wood. [10] And Abraham stretched forth
his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. [11] And the angel
of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham,
Abraham: and he said, Here am I. [12] And he said, Lay not thine
213
hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now
I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy
son, thine only son from me. [13] And Abraham lifted up his eyes,
and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by
his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him
up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. [14] And Abraham
called the name of that place Jehovahjireh: as it is said to this day,
In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen. [15] And the angel of
the LORD called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time,
[16] And said, By myself have I sworn, saith the LORD, for because
thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine
only son: [17] That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying
I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand
which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of
his enemies; [18] And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth
be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice. [19] So Abraham
returned unto his young men, and they rose up and went together
to Beersheba; and Abraham dwelt at Beersheba. (King James Bible)
This passage is a fabulous morality tale, the lesson of which, as Derrida
and Kierkegaard argue, is the lesson of a lesson, the moral of a moral to a sto
ry, in short, the ultimate lesson of sovereign fictions. In Fear and Trembling,
Kierkegaard argues that Abraham performs a terrifying teleological suspen
sion of the ethical in his sacrifice of Isaac. That is, he suspends his com
mitment to universal ethical standards (not to kill) for a higher end (telos),
his faith in God. Kierkegaard comes back time and again to this paradoxical
situation, in which the person of faith is called upon to follow a higher law
(for his love of God) while rejecting all laws. The person who does this
is dubbed by Kierkegaard the knight of faith, gallantly going beyond the
universal laws of ethics in order to follow the higher calling of faith, with
its nonuniversal, particular, and indescribable relationship to the absolute
(God), which he says, cannot be vocalized and must be suffered in silence.
Kierkegaard argues that it is ethics itself that is a temptation away from
God. Faith and ethics, as such, are at odds in the story of Abraham and
Isaac. If Abraham follows his ethical duty, his conscience, he will only
defy God. He ascends the mountain alone, without the help of the com
munity and with fear and trembling, Kierkegaard tells us. Being the knight
of resignation, as Kierkegaard calls the ethical person, is arduous enough.
Kierkegaard, or rather Johannes de Silentio, marks out the path of the person
of faith without the guidance of a church or even sure knowledge of what
is to be. Abrahams only guide is his faith. The act of sacrificing his son is
truly an act of madness, as Kierkegaard suggests, and Derrida argues that
214
there are no a priori ethical rules in the face of the Other (God) that can
countenance Abrahams act.
For Derrida, the situation of Abraham on Mount Moriah is the ethi
cal situation par excellence. However Abraham respondsfor his god or for
his sonrequires a freedom, a passive decision in the face of the absolute
other, and no ethical system, as Kierkegaard is keen to point out, can fix
the answer for the knight of faith beforehand. Derridas reading of this foun
dational sovereign fiction of the three monotheismsthose whose knights
of faith still fight it out in and around Mount Moriahis well known. But
here, I would make a different inflection. It is true that the ethical rela
tion, the relation to the absolute singularity of the other propels us into
thinking the paradox, scandal, and aporia of an ethics beyond ethical
rules. The moral of this sovereign lesson, Derrida writes, would be morality
itself, at the point where morality brings into play the gift of death that is
so given.32 Abraham is bound to God by an unconditional obligation in
the face of which his reply, all the way up the mountain is nothing other
than a simple, Here I am.
Derrida is right that Abrahams sacrifice is done in secret, and marks
the secretive and unsharable (nonpartage)33 essence of the decision made
in the face of an aporetic encounter with the other: There is no language,
no reason, no generality or mediation to justify this ultimate responsibility
which leads me to absolute sacrifice, an absolute sacrifice that is not the
sacrifice of irresponsibility on the altar of responsibility....Here I am is
the only selfpresentation presumed by every form of responsibility: I am
ready to respond.34
But I pause, I pause in fear and trembling, when Derrida argues that
the sacrifice of Isaac is the most common everyday experience of responsi
bility.35 Tout autre est tout autre, Derrida will argue, in an untranslatable
passage: every other is wholly other; every other is every bit other. Tout
autre est tout autre: a phrase that binds the universal (tout autre) and the
singular (tout autre). And this responsibility to the other and its infinite
alterity, is the basis for the aporias of politics and ethics. For Derrida, the
aporiathe lack of clear passage in these passagesof the relation to the
other calls into question all ethics that would leave us with good con
science:36 I can respond only to the one (or to the One), that is, to the
other, by sacrificing that one to the other. I am responsible to any one (that
is to say, to any other) only by failing in my responsibility to all the others,
to the ethical or political generality. And I can never justify this sacrifice.37
The other is taking the measure of us, and we must measure up,
impossibly, to the tout autre, the comewhatmay of the future. With the
patrimonial gesture of the story of Abraham and Isaac, a difference in read
ing would be subtle but fundamental. Secreted away in this story are not
215
just the words of Abraham, but the one given no chance for justice, the
thirtyyearold Isaac. Derrida notes that the story of Abraham and Isaac is
one of Gods sovereign decision[s].38 The story of Abraham and Isaac is the
first in a long line of lessons on sovereignty and political theology, the right
over life and death given to man by God, the ultimate patria potestas passing
that very right over life and death to the monarch of his people, Abraham.
But whether as Abraham or Ibrahim, viewed as a Jew, a protoChristian
(as in Kierkegaards account), or a Muslim submitting himself to God, we
must view this story with fear and trembling and not just because of what
it reveals about our relations to the other.
It discloses not just a lesson about ethics, but about the theology that
has long been the mystical foundation of sovereigns (operating in silence,
beyond the laws in order to protect the laws), those men who would save
the community by breaking its commandments against murder, there, from
on high, on Mount Moriah. This is the story of Abraham; this is the story of
all the knights of faith beyond the aporias of ethics, reducing their relation
to the other to a sovereign mastery in a continuous story of the right of
the father passed onto the son by the duty of sacrifice, supposed theological
covenants, and divine rights. The moral of this lesson, this sovereign fiction,
then, is thus not just morality itself, but also the right of the force of the
strongest over the weakest; it is a story of the reasoning of the strongest,
that coercive power that must remain in silence given the autoimmunity of
sovereignty. In short, it is a story of man who stands with the strongest of
the strong, God, against les hommes faibles, against his son, against his wife,
in giving death to the other. If we are to question a politics of patriarchy and
fraternity, we must first and foremost, in the name of the other, question the
silence of Abraham in the face of the weak, in the face also of the feminine,
all those that have already been sacrificed to the sacred order before this
narrative has begun, and, which is also part of this mythos, the narrative
force it would have for the future knights of faith and their pastoral power:
the silencing of women in the name of patriarchal and sovereign right in
the monotheisms of the future. Here we have the genesis of sovereign right
in the HebraicChristianIslamic traditions. In the name of the other, these
traditions must also be called to account, that is to say, taken on. Thus, we
can hear a certain inflection when Derrida argues:
I would say that according to situations, I am an antisovereigntist
or a sovereigntistand I vindicate the right to be antisovereigntist
at certain times and a sovereigntist at others. No one can make
me respond as though it were a matter of pressing a button on
some oldfashioned machine. There are cases in which I would
support a logic of the state, but I ask to examine each situation
216

before making a statement. It is also necessary to recognize that by
requiring someone to be not just unconditionally sovereigntist but
rather sovereigntist only under certain conditions, one is already
calling into question the principle of sovereignty. Deconstruction
begins there. It demands a different dissociation, almost impossible
but indispensable, between unconditionality (justice without power)
and sovereignty (right, power, or potency). Deconstruction is on the
side of unconditionality, even when it seems impossible, and not
sovereignty, even when it seems possible.39
There will be cases when one defends a certain sovereignty, for exam
ple, the sovereignty of developing nations, against the evil of the sovereignty
in want of more: the neocolonial powers and the rogue states of today.
Derrida writes, Nationstate sovereignty can even itself, in certain condi
tions, become an indispensable bulwark against certain international powers,
certain ideological, religious, or capitalist, indeed linguistic hegemonies that
would still represent...a rationalization in the service of particular inter
ests.40 But this sovereigntism would be in the name of the unconditional,
not in the name of the law of force and the reason of force of international
hegemony. The unconditional would be a force without force, a weak
force beyond the ontotheology of Abraham and his patriarchal heirs. A
democracytocome? That might be another name for the call, here and
now, of something other than stillsovereignlyled prayers and tears, that
is to say, a thinking that leads to the fear and trembling of the political.

In taking the measure of the lessons of sovereign fictions, it would be neces
sary to rethink freedom and its aporias, as weve begun to approach them
above. In the section that follows, we will pass through Derridas elucidation
of another freedom, one without autonomy, one without power and force,
one that troubles and trembles the thinking of democracy but nevertheless
ultimately confronts a long line of the fear and trembling of the politics
of sovereignty.
Freedom, of course, has for an entire heritage of thinking the political
been aligned with democracy and also a certain conception of sovereignty,
the moment when a decision within a democracy is to be made. This will
be true throughout the entire history of this concept, from Platos Greece
onwards.41 For Derrida, the autoimmunity of the democratic, the indetermi
nacy and selfcriticism at the heart of any democracy worthy of the name,
is nothing other than the freedom of play, an opening of indetermination
and indecidability in the very concept of democracy, in the interpretation of
217
the democratic.42 Derrida argues that there are two reasons for the turn in
his later writing toward the concept of freedom: First, the vacancy or disen
gagement, the semantic indecision at the center of demokratia. Democracy
would not gather itself around the presence of an axial and univocal mean
ing that does not destroy itself and get carried away with itself.43 Secondly,
he also notes that the we should be oriented to all the places in thought
where the interpretation and reinterpretation of freedom risks the disrupting
of the sending off, the allegation or claim of democracy. Wherever freedom
is no longer determined as power, mastery, or force, or even as a faculty, as
a possibility of the I can, the evocation and evaluation of democracy as
the power of the demos begins to tremble. If one values freedom in general,
before any interpretation, then one should no longer be afraid to speak
without or against democracy.44
This freedom in the concept of democracy is intrinsic to its plasticity,
which gives rise to a democratic thinking of the democratic. Democracy is
what it is only by spacing itself beyond being and even beyond ontological
difference; it is (without being) equal and proper to itself only insofar as it
is inadequate and improper, at the same time behind and ahead of itself,
he argues.45 Derridas thinking of freedom not only challenges a certain
concept of the political, but also the politics of the concept. For Derrida,
there is no democracy without deconstruction, as he argued in the Politics
of Friendship; there is also no deconstruction without freedom.46 Derrida has
long been attuned to indecidability in political structures, concepts, and
institutions, articulating the view that ethics, politics, and responsibility,
if there are any, will only ever have begun with the experience and experi
ment of the aporia.47
I am exposed, destined to be free and to decide....Between
knowledge and decision, a leap is required, even if it is necessary
to know as much and as well as possible before deciding....My
decision ought to be the decision of the other in me, a passive
decision, a decision of the other that does not exonerate me from
any of my responsibility.48
Derrida thus argues that any politics worthy of the name must be
marked through and through by structural indecidability and aporias, with
out clear passages and passes for what tomorrow. To dismiss the ordeal of
the indecidable is, for Derrida, to replace politics in general and democ
racy in particular with a machinelike program that would make decisions
and responsibility impossible.49 The aporias of freedom and democracy do
not paralyze politics, as many have feared and argued, but actually make
responsibilityand freedompossible in the first place. This is what allows
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Derrida in Rogues to claim, the aporia in its general form has to do with
freedom itself.50
What are we to make of this claim, though, that the aporiathat is,
the indecidability that gives rise to decisions worthy of the namehas to
do with freedom itself? Freedom, whether positive or negative, de facto or de
jure, natural or immanent to state apparatuses, has always been considered
exemplary of the subject who is, first and foremost, a master and sovereign
over itself. In political philosophy, Derrida writes, the dominant discourse
about democracy presupposes this freedom as power, faculty, or the ability
to act, the force or strength, in short, to do as one pleases, the energy of
an intentional and deciding will.51 To be free is to be sovereign, to be free
to do what one wants, even if this freedom threatens to become license, to
interfere in the selfmastery of others. Derrida thus argues that freedom can
be understood as a turn of phrase for power, for the ability to choose, to
decide, to determine oneself, to be master, and first of all master of oneself.
There is no freedom without ipseity and viceversa, no ipseity without free
domand thus, without a certain sovereignty.52 But this freedom, Derrida
argues, is always at war with itself, always threatening to do away with itself
in its very freedom: freedom is always free to be otherwise than freedom,
to free itself of itself. This is (its) autoimmunity. The double bind is that
we should deconstruct, both theoretically and practically, a certain political
ontotheology of sovereignty without calling into question a certain thinking
of liberty in the name of which we put this deconstruction to work, [w]hich
supposes a quite different thinking of liberty.53 As we have seen, Arendts
thinking of arche deals with just this problem. Nancy, for his part in The
Experience of Freedom, articulates what Derrida calls the autoimmunity of
freedom in the following way:
The philosophical thought of freedom has been thoroughly subordi
nated to the determination of an ontology of subjectivity. . . . [But]
freedom cannot be presented as the autonomy of a subjectivity in
charge of itself and of its decisions, evolving freely and in perfect
independence from every obstacle. What would such an indepen
dence mean, if not the impossibility in principle of entering into the
slightest relationand therefore of exercising the slightest freedom?54
Derrida treats this autoimmunity of freedom in Rogues through two
interconnected strands of analysis: first, a philosophical investigation of
the freeplay of concepts, including the concepts of freedom and democ
racy; secondly, a more obviously politicalthat is to say at once strategic
and performativerendering of the concepts of freedom and democracy in
response to political exigencies. In order to bring out the import of Derridas
219
conceptual and strategic interventions, I will treat these strands by turning

to Derridas reading of JeanLuc Nancys The Experience of Freedom in The
Politics of Friendship and Rogues.
Derrida begins his reading by noting that the relation between selfmas
tery and freedom is not just a modern conception, as Nancy suggests, but
in fact extends back to the depiction of democracy in Aristotle and Plato,
where it is said to be intimately related to both liberty (eleutheria) and free
will or license as an I can (exousia). Because of this relation between free
dom (eleutheria or exousia) and democracy, Derrida maintains that democracy
is the only system in which one always already has the right, the license, to
criticize openly everything, including the concept and history of the idea of
democracy; this is both its threat and its chance. This selfdeconstruction
or autoimmunity gives rise to the aporia of democracy: the demos of democ
racy is always free to rid itself of democracy, or, to fend off this possibility,
to limit democracy and curtail freedoms in order to save democracy from
its supposed enemies. We have seen both alternatives play themselves out
in recent years, for example, in Algeria in 1994, in Thailand in 2006, or
anywhere in which the police apparatuses and security agencies expand and
master the political in the name of protecting the democratic order.
For Derrida, Nancy is an ally for criticizing traditional notions of free
dom anchored in the selfmastery of the subject. Nancys texts are exemplary
for their attempt to think a nonsubjective freedom, one based not in the
mastery of the self, in ipseity, but in the thrownness, the spacing, of exis
tence, what might be called the exousia of exousia or free will. Nancy argues
that the metaphysical conception of freedom as mastery, as sovereignty, has
been but another way of mastering freedom, a mastering of freedom in the
name of mastery. Nancy writes:
Keeping a space free for freedom might amount to keeping oneself
from wanting to understand freedom, in order to keep oneself from
destroying it in the unavoidable determination of an understanding.
Thus the thought of freedoms incomprehensibility, or its unpresent
ability, might seem to heed not only the constraint of a limitation
of power of thought, but also, positively, a respect for and a pres
ervation of the free domain of freedom....[T]he metaphysics of
freedom...often finds itself exposed to the danger of having sur
reptitiously comprehended freedom . . . by having assigned freedom
a residence in knowledge and, above all, in the selfknowledge of
a subjectively determined freedom.55
The difficulty, Derrida argues, citing Nancy, arrives when one must deter
mine politically, indeed democratically...the spacing of a presubjective
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or precratic freedom, one that is all the more unconditional, immense,

immeasurable, incalculable, unappropriable insofar as it can in no way take
the form of a property.56 Undeniably, Derrida argues, this takes a form of
the impossible, an impossible that is at once reasonable, that is counting
and accountable: to share the incommensurable of freedom in a just, equi
table, and measured fashion.57 This is the traditional and wellknown aporia
of freedom and equality, the freeplay between the unconditional and the
conditional that must be negotiated in any politics, indeed, in any demo
cratic thinking of political and philosophical concepts. Nancys claim in The
Experience of Freedom is that fraternity names this very relation between
the conditioning (equality) and the unconditional (freedom). Fraternity is
equality in the sharing of the incommensurable, Nancy writes.58 This has
been a constant, though often unavowed theme throughout Nancys corpus,
from The Experience of Freedom to The Creation of the World, or Globalization,
in which, as we have seen, Nancy writes, Freedom and fraternity, together,
could represent the absence of the given height of sovereignty.59
But if what is shared out is already incommensurable, unmeasured,
what use is the word fraternity, which seems to put a certain measure, and a
nonfortuitous exclusion of the feminine, into the very sharing of the incom
mensurable? This is what motivates Derridas reading of The Experience of
Freedom in Rogues. For Derrida, the evocation and evaluation of democracy
as the power [kratos] of the demos begins to tremble when freedom is
no longer determined as power or mastery, as is the case in Nancy.60 But
Derrida is also interestedand this interest provoked much of Derridas
later workin this trembling of the demos of democracy. Traditionally
conceived, the demos is inaugurated at the moment it imagines itself to
be made up of equals, that is, those who are born free and equal.61 The
demos is the measuring out, the equalizing, of that which is by definition
unconditional, namely, freedom. Ultimately, Derrida is worried that Nancys
fraternalism might follow at least the temptation of a genealogical descent
back to autochthony, that is, to a thinking of the demos that repeats a
tradition that limits rights and freedoms to men of native birth, to the
exclusion of women and immigrants from the rights of a familial circle.62
Derridas critique of Nancy is at once strategic and conceptual. Nancy
has argued, as he does in an appendix of fragments to The Experience of
Freedom, that his use of fraternity is deconstructive, since it evacuates the
term of its traditional meaning in order to reinvest it with another thinking
of the political.63 This has been an approach familiar to those who have
followed Derridas readings of hospitality, the gift, and, of course, democracy.
But Derrida notes, pointedly, any time the literality of the familial and
phallocentric implications ha[ve] been denied, for example, by claiming
that one was speaking not of the natural or biological family (as if the
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family were ever purely natural and biological) or that the figure of the
brother was merely a symbolic and spiritual nature, it was never explained
why one should hold onto this figure over any other, including those various
figures of the feminine: women, mother, sister, and so on.64 One thus has
to ask oneself, Derrida writes, one has to ask Nancy, why he is so keen
on keeping the word fraternity in order to the say equality in the sharing
of the incommensurable or freedom.65
For his part, Derrida argues that it is not enough to say that one is
taking on the tradition in the combative sense, since the very use of certain
terms cannot help but take on the tradition affirmatively, whatever ones
intentions. This is the place of Derridas conceptual politics: to point out
not just the freeplay of concepts, but also the way that they have sedi
mented into particular hierarchies throughout the tradition. The continued
use and affirmation of certain terms, for example, fraternity, Derrida argues,
risks foreclosing this freeplay of freedom and the democratic, which is an
experience of the impossible, the trembling of diffrance between fraternity
and its other. Derrida argues that Nancys acceptance of fraternity as the
free sharing of the dead father is but a repetition, in another register, of
a Christian and/or Freudian notion of community, or communion, as the
sharingout of the body of the dead father.66 This part of the tradition is
unacceptable, especially, though Derrida doesnt mention it, since Nancy
calls for a fighting for fraternity. Nancy writes:
Fighting for freedom, equality, fraternity, and justice does not consist
merely of making other conditions of existence occur, since it is
not simply on the order of a project, but also consists of affirming
hic et nunc, free, equal, fraternal, and just existence.67
But what is left of of democracy once the traditional foundations of
the demos (birth) and kratos (the sovereign individual) have been called
into question? Can we think of a democracy that would register an expe
rience of the alterity of the other, of heterogeneity, of the singular, of the
notsame, the different, the dissymmetric, the heteronomous?68 In the end,
these questions lead us to Derridas articulation of the democracy to come
and its relation to the question of freedom.
With the nonconcept of the democracytocome, Derrida takes up
and affirms a term that has resonances with ancillary tropes, including fra
ternity, that Derrida would want to critique. Derrida himself has worried
about his use of the word democracy, which he says in Paper Machine, can
only be use[d] anxiously.69 But Derrida writes, for strategic reasons, that one
must take on democracy in the name of democracy, especially since any
democracy is always influenced by the recognition of not being adequate
222
to its model, a formulation that could not said of fraternity. In fact, the
former is taken up in a bid to question, critique, and displace the latter.
Derrida asks in The Politics of Friendship:
Is it still in the name of democracy, of a democracy to come, that
one will attempt to deconstruct a concept, all the predicates asso
ciated with the massively dominant concept of democracy, that in
whose heritage one inevitably meets again the law of birth, the
natural or national law, the law of homophilia, civic equality
(isonomy) founded on equality of birth (isogony) as the condition
of calculation of approbriation and, therefore, the aristocracy of
virtue and wisdom, and so forth?70
And so the possibility is always raised of abandoning the name, of betraying
the heritage of the name of a concept, in this case democracy, in order to
live up to its name, Derrida argues. [T]o keep this Greek name, democracy,
is an affair of context, of rhetoric or strategy, even of polemics, reaffirming
that this name will last as long as it has to but not much longer, saying
that things are speeding up remarkably in these fast times, is not necessar
ily giving in to the opportunism or cynicism of the antidemocrat who is
not showing his cards.71 It is here that Derrida makes explicit his isonomy
between deconstruction and democracy: no deconstruction without democ
racy, no democracy without deconstruction.72 It is also here that Derridas
generalized politics of the concept meets up with a specifically political
intervention or invention.
In Rogues, Derrida thinks this through the problem of the vulgar
ity of the roguish demos, those appositional to the sovereignty of the kra
tos of democracy.73 Though Derrida identifies himself as a rogue of sorts,
it is this roguish trope that helps Derrida to take up the problem of the
mob, those whose nationalisms Arendt reviewed at length in the Origins
of Totalitarianism:
The voyou [rogue] is always a part of mankind, always human, of our
kind, and almost always a man....From a political point of view,
the representatives of order, the forces of bourgeois or moral order,
try to present as Voyous all rebels, agitators, and insurgents, indeed
all revolutionaries, whether they come from bad neighborhoods or
from the suburbs, whether they erect barricades, as in 1848, 1870,
or 1968, or commit acts of vandalism, crime, organized crime, or
terrorism. This is as true for the revolutions of the left as for those
of the right. Fascism, Nazism, populism, todays movements of the
far right also often recruit from among a population that might eas
223
ily be described as a voyoucracy, Criteria are often lacking in this

area, which is also a zone, that is a belt, for distinguishing between
voyoucracy and the people as plebeians, between democratic elec
tion, referendum, and plebiscite.74
Derrida, of course, is thinking of the role of the banlieue, the zones in around
French cities that, like the ghettos of the United States, have played as
setpieces in demagogic reactionary speeches in France, since it is in the
banlieue where the other lives (even where the state has all but made life
unlivable). In the United States, it is these places in which votes are least
likely to count, or to be counted well. But it is also in these poorest of the
poor regions of any state that populisms of a pernicious kind give rise to
racism, there where the superfluous find mechanisms for a backlash against
the forces containing them in these zones, often in ways not amenable to
a thinking of justice, though we must never forget that these crimes are
nothing on the scale of the whitecollar and other forms of criminality in
the capital and in capitalism that go unpunished as the jails fill with the
socalled criminal element of the banlieue. In sites labas and en bas, le plus
bas, from the capital, the promise and the dangers of a democracytocome,
of a democracy that counts all the votes and voices (voix), there is, as in
the capital, an indecidable limit between the demagogic and the demo
cratic, between those in want of sovereignty, whatever its shape and form
(as democracy or the voyoucracy of the criminal underworld), and those
responding in the face of the other, and its never fully determinable which
is which.75 This requires another thinking of rights and also another think
ing of citizenship beyond or within the nationstate, in short, engag[ing] in
another experience of belonging and in another political logic.76
When I speak of the democracy to comethis thing that can
appear a little mad or impossibleI am thinking of a democracy
that would no longer be bound in any essential way to citizenship.
Here again, I come back to the same apparent contradiction: I am
not against citizenship; it is necessary, and one must even fight for
certain human beings who have been deprived of it, so that they
might finally gain it. But the rights of man must also be extended
beyond citizenship.77
In Specters of Marx, Derrida ties this thinking to what he calls the
new international, a haunting from the future of an international move
ment that Derrida argues is the only hope, the only hope now, to borrow
the felicitous and enigmatic phrase of Sartres last interviews. As Bill Martin
puts it, Derridas writing is related to a double trauma: a trauma not only
224
from the future [as the other that interrupts the presence and present of
the self], but indeed of no future.78 As Derrida wrote in Of Grammatology,
The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It
is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be
proclaimed, presented, as a form of monstrosity.79 It is in the face of this
possibility of no future, of no future worthy of the name, that Derrida
speaks of a responsible and nonnave hope now, of a hope from the future
that impels us, now, to anticipate, to work, to think, that is, to be engaged
in another spacing of the political that is represented in a weak force [of]
movements that are still heterogeneous, still somewhat unformed, full of
contradictions, but that gather together the weak of the earth, all those
who feel themselves crushed by the economic hegemonies, by the liberal
market, by sovereigntism, and so on.80 Let me quote at length from Derrida,
from Specters of Marx, because it is here that he ties together his thinking
of the democracy to come with the thinking of the promise of an event of
another thinking of the political beyond its mechanization.
Even beyond the regulative idea in its classic form, the idea, if
that is still what it is, of democracy to come, its idea as event
of a pledged injunction that orders one to summon the very thing
that will never present itself in the form of a full presence, is the
opening of this gap between an infinite promise (always untenable
at least for the reason that it calls for the infinite respect of singu
larity and infinite alterity of the other as much as for the respect
of the countable, calculated, subjectal equality between anonymous
singularities) and the determined, necessary, but also necessarily
inadequate forms of what has to measured against this promise. To
this extent, the effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise,
like that of the communist promise, will always keep within it,
and it must do so, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope
at its heart, this eschatological relation to the tocome [lvenir]
of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be
anticipated. Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what
one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve,
welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise
of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything
in return and who or which will not be asked to commit to the
domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, State, nation,
territory, native soil or blood, language...), just opening which
renounces any right to property, any right in general...opening
to what is coming...to the event that cannot be awaited as such,
or recognized in advance therefore, to the event as the foreigner
225
itself, to her or to him for whom one must leave an empty place,
always in memory of the hope.81
Derrida long noted, on the one hand, that the interminable analysis
of the aporia of democracy as ultimately indefinable, deferred, and displaced,
that is, democracy as diffrance, gives rise to indecision. But, for Derrida,
this indecidability is, like freedom itself, granted by democracy, and it con
stitutes...the only radical possibility of deciding; it is the only hope now
of the future.82 In other words, the decision is the event of the tocome of
democracy, its future, which is never satisfied with democracy as it stands,
here and now. At this indecidable limit, we can see the true force, the force
without force, of what Derrida calls the passive decision:
If an event worthy of this name is to arrive or happen, it must,
beyond all mastery, affect a passivity. It must touch an exposed
vulnerability, one without absolute immunity...there where it
is not yet or is already no longer possible to face or face up to the
unforseeability of the other. In this regard autoimmunity is not an
absolute ill or evil....What must be thought is this inconceivable
and unknowable thing, a freedom that would no longer be the power
of a subject, a freedom without autonomy, a heteronomy without
servitude, in short, something like a passive decision.83
Are we free to think, to experience, such a freedom? If it is no longer a
matter of mastery, no longer a power of the I can, then it is also no longer
a matter of deciding for this freedom, of freeing the self for such a decision,
of simply fighting for freedom or even a fraternity, of a decisionism or volun
tarism that has no other relation than to the solus of the ipse. Deconstruction
as an attunement to the autoimmunity of freedom and democracy is not a
philosophy of the emanicipatory promise, of a teleological messianism with
its theological fear and trembling, but a thinking of the free space of the
promise itself, the radical perhaps within any system, institution, or living
being open to the radical future, the democracy to come, the coming of
the other:
It is a question here, as with the coming of any event worthy of this
name, of an unforeseeable coming of the other, of a heteronomy, of
a law coming from the other, of a responsibility and decision of the
otherof the other in me, an other greater and older than I am.84
Absolutely heterogeneous to any programin fact, autoimmunity is that
which calls for the event of the irruptive decisionthe decision is indeed
226
a weak force, always at risk and risking itself in the face of what or who
knows what. What could be more undemocratic, less open and intelligible
to the demos of democracy, than this and what Derrida called in The Other
Heading a freedom to be invented. Every day. At least. And democracy
along with it.85 To the democrat, to those who believe in freedom and
think this freedom should be comprehended and experienced by all, this all
may sound, as Derrida admits, like a dangerous obscurantism. But Derridas
deconstruction of democracy and freedomrethought as the sending of a
heritage still to come, of a democracy to come as this very sendingleads
not to a political quietism paralyzed in the face of what Derrida suggestively
calls the kho ra of the political.
Rather, taking on democracy and freedomquestioning power ( kratos)
and the measuring out of the people (demos)is the unconditional claim
made upon all those who take themselves to be the friends of freedom and
democracy. And this claim would form nothing other than what Derrida
called in Faith and Knowledge a coautoimmunity. This is the death
drive at work in every community, one weve seen in Rousseau, the prin
ciple of selfprotection that also leads to the demise of a community
rethinking itself in its selfcontesting attestation. Keep[ing] the autoim
mune community alive means being open to...the other, the future,
death, [and] freedom, that is, a being without sovereignty and a hope now
apposing the reason of the strongest.86 This coautoimmunity, then, would be
nothing other than the community of the question announced by Derrida
long ago in Violence and Metaphysics, that is, the questioning of sover
eignty and a questioning of freedom that motivates us to work, each day,
for a future worthy of the name.
CONCLUSION
The Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours contains ten books, chronicling

in some seven hundred pages of Latin text the history of the Franks from
the beginning of the world up to and past the pivotal story of Clovis to
Gregorys own years spent as bishop in sixthcentury Gaul, passing along
the way the reign of each important sovereign (Adam, Abraham, Solomon,
Theodisius, and so on). Here are his concluding sentences:
From the beginning until the Deluge, 2242 years.
From the Deluge until the Passage of the Red Sea by the Children
of Israel, 1404 years.
From the Resurrection of our Lord until the death of Saint Martin,
412 years.
From the death of Saint Martin [who brought Catholicism to Gaul]
until the year mentioned above, that is the twentyfirst year after
my own consecration [as bishop], which is the fifth year of Gregory,
Pope of Rome the thirtythird of King Guntram and nineteenth of
Childebert II, 197 years.
This makes a grant total of 5792 years.
In the name of Christ, here ends Book X of my history.
Thinking of a way to close this book on sovereignty, I must admit a small
temptation to end just as did Gregory of Tours in 594 CE. He noted in his
preface what a poor period is this that he lives in and that a history that
would keep alive the memory of those dead and gone, and to bring them
to the notice of future generations. He writes to mourn the passing of his
brother, Peter, killed in his church by heretics, but also all those who have
given their lives, Gregory believes, in the march of one sovereign to the
next in a theologicalpolitical history of the world, which begins with Adam
and ends with a selfaccount of Gregorys ascension to officea settling of
227
228
accounts, a livre de raison of the entire world. For Gregory, the history of
sovereignty is nothing other than the reign of one king after another fight
ing, as he says in Book I, the heathens and heretics. To the readers of
today, this conclusion, above, may look something like Borgess Chinese
encyclopedia entry quoted at the beginning of Foucaults The Order of Things,
or worse, an absurd Francocentrism that sees the history of the world wholly
in terms of a people, now thankfully Catholic and saved none too soon from
the heathens, though we are sadly all too aware that sovereigns everywhere
write their own histories with their reign as the telos of history, especially
those who believe themselves to be knights of a fighting faith. In any event,
close readers will note that in counting off this theologicalpolitical lineage
(Adam qui genuit...), the count is off, the problem of an iteration of
copies and copying of Roman numerals from Gregorys text. A number so
precise, yet ruined by the iteration of writing: 5,792 years.
In tracing the works of Boulainvilliers, Rousseau, Arendt, Foucault,
Agamben, and Derrida, I could have continued on in this history, continued
on in perfectly democratic style with a discussion without end, a discussion
however, that must be, as Aristotle noted long ago in the Politics about the
byturns of Greek democracy, put to an end, called to a stop, perhaps in the
most sovereign way, as a slicing away at the final page of the text. And so
let me call this book to an end, some fourteen hundred years after Gregorys
death, some seventytwo hundred years since the Sovereign is said to have
brought forth this world, by returning to Gregorys history, since it would
come to play a crucial role in a strange affair in France, laffaire Clovis in
1996, which, in the farce of French politics, would have to involve Jacques
Chirac, a pope, a rightwing demagogue, and the story of a headsmashing
barbarian.
September 1996 marked one of those rare times when one finds in the
daily newspaper accounts of a king of the early Middle Ages, in particular
the baptism of Clovis to Catholicism in the fifteenth year of his reign,1
though of course all too often newspapers only recount and provide no
accounting for the movements of sovereignty. Facing defeat at Alamanni,
as Gregory puts it, Clovis was forced to give up by necessity what he had
refused of his own free will, namely his allegiance to the Germanic pagan
ism. Seeing his troops defeated, he was moved to tears, and Clovis, like so
many sports heroes after him, called upon God to manifest himself through
his victory, at which point, Clovis says, I will believe in you and I will
be baptized in your name.2 Following his victory, Cloviss wife called forth
Remigius, Bishop at Rheims, from where, incidentally the vase of Soissons
had once been taken. (Remigius was later given sainthood for this miracle
as well as his apparent ability to raise men from the dead.) Clovis asked the
bishop for help in baptizing him and his army, which Clovis feared would
CONCLUSION
229
rise in open revolt at the idea. Gregory does not report what sage advice
he gave the kingabout this, both maintained a sovereign silencethough
Gregory notes that after their meeting, Clovis told the bishop, I will go
and put to them what you have just said to me.3 He arranged a meeting
with his leudes, three thousand in all, and, as Gregory puts it, no words
were necessary: God in his power had preceded him. The menand they
were all men, with the assumption that their entire families would convert
with themall shouted in unison: We will give up worshipping our mortal
gods, pious King, and we are prepared to follow the immortal God about
whom Remigius preaches.4
Hearing this unanimity, Clovis, as Gregory reports it, asked that he
might be baptized first, and like some new Constantine he stepped forward
to the baptismal pool, ready to wash away the sores of his old leprosy and
to be cleansed in flowing water from the sordid stains which he had borne
so long. Before the bishop, Gregory was said to have bowed his head in
meekness and soon after, the three thousand men in his army were bap
tized at the same time.5 The year was 496 CE, or is said to be 496 CE,
though most medieval scholars agree that the date is likely incorrect due to
the very problems of iteration from Gregorys manuscript.6 An index head
ing for Clovis in the English edition of the Historia Francorum provides as
nice a summary as any of Cloviss life after the baptism (I have removed
the page numbers and inserted semicolons):
Saint Remigius explains the Catholic faith to Clovis and baptizes
him and his men; beats [his rival] Gundobad;...marches on
Poitiers; kills a soldier foraging on land belonging to Saint Martins
church; seeks a message from Saint Martins church; . . . establishes
the government in Paris; persuades Chloderic to kill his father, King
Sigibert the Lame; kills Chloderic; the Ripuarian Franks accept
his rule; kills Chararic, King of the Salian Franks; they accept his
rule; he bribes the leudes of Ragnachar;...gradually extends his
dominion over Gaul; kills one after another of his blood relations
[to ensure that his son would rule after him]; dies in Paris and is
buried there.7
Some fifteen hundred years after Cloviss baptism, Gregory, who provides the
first and most repeated account of Cloviss life, would have his wish that his
work would keep alive the memory of those dead and gone. Clovis would
become, and remains, a shibboleth of sorts for French politics, even after the
formal separation of church and state in 1905. In 1996, Pope John Paul II
announced he would serve mass during days of celebration in September,
helping to honor the fifteenth hundred anniversary of Cloviss conversion,
230
said to mark the beginning of the French nation, long before the French
Revolution, and long before September 22, 1792, when France proclaimed
its first republic. It would be no accident then that the pope, with the
blessing of sorts from Jacques Chirac, would give his mass on September
22, 1996, a double anniversary in which all of the tensions of modernday
French politics would come to a head.
The Right struck first in laffaire Clovis, as it became known. JeanMarie
Le Pen held rallies in April, holding forth on Cloviss muscular Christian
ethics, his role as founder of France and the Merovingian dynasty, and, of
course, his heretofore unknown opposition to abortion (though not, appar
ently, to slicing off the heads of other mensuch are the vagaries of the
pro-life position in the vitalisms of modernity). Le Pen and other rightists
argued that France was the eldest daughter of the Church, echoing Charles
De Gaulles claim, following a long history of monarchs, For me the history
of France begins with Clovis, chosen as king by the tribe of Franks who gave
their name to France...the decisive moment is that Clovis was baptized
a Christian. My country is a Christian country.8 Thus, for the right-wing
and Gaullistsincluding Jacques Chirac, who proclaimed the year before
that France would always remain faithful to her Christian heritage in a
visit to RomeClovis was the father of a country, her first sovereign, and
during the colonial period, school children across Africa and Martinique
would learn and repeat each morning that French history was their history,
that Clovis was, in a sense, their first monarch as well. And with Clovis,
we are not, of course, very far from imperialism and a certain thinking of
freedom as ferocity, as Le Pen would find so amenable in a Frank barbarian
who killed off much of his own family and destroyed army after army while
uniting France, with Paris as its capital, in 508 CE.
On the Left, various committees were set up, invariably arranged
around a leftist non, such as the committee France is not Clovis, which,
incidentally, is as good a summary as any of Boulainvilliers contentions.
Other groups, such as SOSRacisme, the French Communist and Socialist
Parties, the Comit de lAction Laque, and, as one would expect, the Rseau
Voltaire, stepped forth to add their support to the non movement. As the
ceremonies approached, some fourteen books were published on Clovis,
with secularists on the Left arguing that the French nation was the daughter
of the Revolution, defender of the Rights of Man and Citizen against reli
gious dogmatism, that is, they were defenders of a French lacit in the face
of Le Pens National Front. Looking to diffuse the controversy, Chirac set
up an official Clovis commemoration committee to celebrate the origins
of the nation.9 Needless to say, no one from the Islamic communities of
France was asked to join, and 1996 also marked a year of heightened vio
lence against Muslims in France. Even those on the Left seemed to agree,
republican or Catholic, there was indeed a French identity, and as Susan
CONCLUSION
231
Terrio argues, both the Left and Right were trying to think a way to reduce
what JeanClment Martin called the now ubiquitous social conflict [frac
ture sociale].10 Wholly neglected as well was the great problem in thinking
any continuity in the French nationstate (leaving aside the whole problem
that nations and states simply did not exist in their contemporary forms
in the days of Clovis, or even in the days of the Revolution), namely, the
Vichy era, which would seem to give pause to proclaiming either Frances
eternal Catholic or republican values, or especially an unending line of
succession either from Clovis to the present or between the various French
republics.
In any event, let us not forget that republican or Catholic, there were
all too many on the Left and the Right who would identify, at least implic
itly, with an argument advanced in the weekly magazine LExpress, which in
1994 provided a cover of a woman in a black tchador under the headline,
The Plot: How Islamists are Infiltrating France,11 evidently a problem going
back to Boulainvilliers late conversion from Frankish nationalism to Islam.
As Emmanuel Todd, an anthropologist, put it in the Express article, The
French attitude starts from a universalist presupposition: if people have the
behavior similar [semblable] to ours, they are welcome! We are for mixing
of populations! And that is incompatible with the preservation of immi
grant cultures. We strive for the universality of Man.12 In case one would
think Todd was somehow jesting, he added, Lets express French generosity.
With an absolute droit du sol: that children born on French soil be French,
which means that they accept our values, secularism, the status of French
women....The assimilationist model [is], I repeat, the opposite of racism.
Well, it does bear repeating.
Others worried that Clovis, the ferocious Frank, would hardly be the
model that France should teach to its own voyous. As Suzanne Citron put it,
Are we going to propose him as a model to the young of the banlieues? Do
we want merchants to launch a new tshirt craze with Clovis smashing the
skull of the warrior of Soissons? Or for the Corsicans to adopt the Frankish
sword [frame].13 A difficulty, perhaps, of nationalist autoimmunity. This
is the problem, as Citron could have noted: the Frank sword is, of course,
doubleedged, as seen in a number of the depictions of Clovis smiting the
leude who had smashed the vase of Soissons.
No one questioned whether all French had to assimilate to a model
of respect for woman and secularism: Le Pens citizenship was safe. Some
sixteen years later, France and the West continue to face their own con
tinued problem of rogues, immigration, the sanspapiers, and admixture of
biopolitical theologies, all the while wrestling with their supposed universal
isms, threatened at each step by Islamicists, or even, apparently, just a young
girl attending school wearing her tchador. A questioning of sovereignty must
at each step question also a supposed generosity, a hospitality that requires
232
the other to be so semblable, to be like us, and to leave unquestioned the

sovereigntism of a Clovis, even as one critiques his use as a model for those
whom we suppose are already the barbarians, the rogues in our banlieues and
ghettos. Left aside is the sovereigntism that led to the creation of those
ghettos in the first place, to the creation of the very sites in which Islamic
terrorists and others learned their trade, funded by American and European
police and policing agencies; left aside is the ferociousness of all sovereignty,
popular or otherwise, still all too cloaked in theologisms and universalisms
demanding the other bow to nationalist pretensions.
It is perhaps too late in the day to see the glimmer of resistances
and appositions in all their formations across the globe to sovereigntisms,
to the nexus of sovereigntism and capitalism that would form the world in
its own image through globalization; this is what occupies this generations
Occupy movements. If there is to be hope now, then we must form poly
valent resistances to sovereignty, perhaps through a thinking of a popularly
sovereign pardon that undermines that very sovereignty and opens oneself
to the other, whenever and wherever popular sovereignty is used to iden
tify and take hold over one and the other; perhaps through a thinking of
the public spacing of action, its arche; through a genealogy of sovereignty
and its telos in forms of pastoral and governmental powers; or through an
engagement with a thinking of freedom and sovereigntys autoimmunity. Is
it too late in the day to think another universalthe unconditional that at
the same time is attuned to the singular (tout autre est tout autre)beyond
a multitude of semblances, beyond the soiled droit du sol? Are we still free
to think a freedom, equality, but not fraternity, with all the problems of
natalism and paternalism the latter raises? Sovereignty continues to have
its day. As so many others are put to the question by sovereign force, it is
we, too, that are put in question. All that is not for another day, though it
requires a thinking for what tomorrow.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1.Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies, 5.
2. On the historiography of Clovis in the period of Boulainvilliers and his
interlocutors, see HenriDuranton, LEpisode du Vase de Soissons vu par les historiens du
XVIIIe sicle. For Foucaults account, see Society Must Be Defended, 15053.
3. Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, II, xxvii.
4. Cited in Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 150.
5.As with all of Boulainvilliers works, the Dissertation sur la noblesse de
France was published posthumously. Though Diderot rightly noted that Boulainvilliers
was quite famous in his time (cited in Simon, Thse principale, 1), few editions of his
work were published. I am grateful to the Newberry Library in Chicago for its help
in tracking down this and other original manuscripts. Elliss text is the only extensive
work in English on Boulainvilliers in recent memory, though the latters work has
proved crucial not only to the intellectual debates of his time, but also to the genealo
gies of nationalism and racethinking in the work of Hannah Arendt (e.g., Origins of
Totalitarianism, 18082) and Foucault, who devotes two lectures to Boulainvilliers in
his 197576 lectures at the Collge de France, published in English as Society Must
Be Defended. Rene Simon offers a helpful introduction to Boulainvilliers in his Thse
principale: Henry de Boulainviller: Historien, politique, philosophe, astrologue, 16581722.
Simons work is strangely marred by some notable errors, including the publication
dates of Boulainvilliers work. In addition, Simon follows some of Boulainvilliers later
enemies by changing his name as he does. This would be no matter of small import
to Boulainvilliers, whose work, to say the least, is a defense of his patrimony and his
genealogy, all attached to a history of his property and lineage, that is to say, his proper
name. Simons introductions to the two volumes of Boulainviller: Oeuvres Philosophiques,
however, provide a helpful overview of Boulainvilliers philosophical work. The selec
tions in the Ouevres Philosophiques include refutations of Spinoza as well as essays
on the body, human fate, the world, and a tooshort, although ultimately unoriginal,
essay (written in letter form to his son as he prepared for the priesthood, though he,
like Boulainvilliers elder son, would die before his teenage years were out) on the rela
tion between human freedom and Gods perfect sovereignty. There, Boulainvilliers
distinguishes between human will, which can act on the world (and thus would fall
under the prescience of God) and the intellectual liberty of all, which provides for
some space of freedom, he believed, under the power of the Sovereign. Like Rousseau,
Boulainvilliers argument for human freedom is question begging: without freedom, he
argues, there would be no morality, and thus would make any moral laws useless (Volume
233
234
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
II, 341). Nonetheless, the Oeuvres Philosophiques does include important philosophical
texts. These include letters and essays in which Boulainvilliers, who published the first
French translation of Spinozas Ethics, showed a growing sympathy for Spinoza, as well
as from his last work, written the year before he died, Vie de Mahomed (1730 and 1731;
published clandestinely in Amsterdam with London on the title page). In this work,
Boulainvilliers presents Islam as a more rational religion than Christianity, arguing
that it is much more accepting of the progress in science. Boulainvilliers seems to find a
kindred spirit in Islams founder, saying that Islam not only freed its converts of supersti
tion and strange forms of mysticism, but also took down, through Mohammeds teach
ings, the despotism of Eastern monarchs. The comparison with the corrupt Western
churches is inescapable (and of course, the centralized quasidivine monarchies of
Europe), which Boulainvilliers had long blamed for its help in bringing down the power
of the nobles from the thirteenth century onward. Only the Revelation provides us with
the knowledge that Christianity is the true faith, but readers of Boulainvilliers found
this assertion halfhearted, accusing Boulainvilliers of having joined, in his last days, the
heathens to the East (Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 572). The separate political theology
that Boulainvilliers finds in Islam will have to wait for another time.
6.Though he used Boulainvilliers histories in his own reconstruction of
Salic and Roman laws as guideposts for thinking of an ongoing French constitution,
Montesquieu remarks, dryly, As [Boulainvilliers] work is penned without art, and as
he speaks with the simplicity, frankness, and candor of that ancient nobility whence he
descends, every one is capable of judging of the good things he says, and of the errors
into which he has fallen. I shall not, therefore, undertake to criticize him; I shall only
observe that he had more wit than enlightenment, more enlightenment than learning;
though his learning was not contemptible, for he was well acquainted with the most
valuable part of our history and laws (Spirit of the Laws, XXX: 10).
7. For Boulainvilliers place in the enlightenment, especially his philosophical
contributions, see Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 56574.
8.Boulainvilliers, Ltat de la France, I, 3234.
9.Michael Naas, Comme si, comme a in Derrida from Now On, 200, my
emphasis.
10.For an excellent summary of Foucaults notion of counterhistory, see
Thomas Flynn, Foucaults Mapping of History, 33: Counterhistory...assumes
a contrapuntal relationship to traditional history, whose conclusions it more rear
ranges than denies and whose resources it mines for its own purposes. For Foucault,
Boulainvilliers forms such a contrapuntal relationship to the history of his period.
Boulainvilliers is not one example among others for Foucault, as Society Must Be
Defended, his 197576 lecture course, makes clear. His work, for Foucault, is instru
mental for rethinking society as one always at war within itself, as a more or less hori
zontal movement of forces that has one of its nodal points in the sovereign, but is not
reducible to this vertical relationship, as the royalists and their historical accounts of
the time assume. See Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 16274.
11.Naas, Derrida from Now On, 200, my emphasis. See also, Dclarations
dindpendence, Otobiographies: Leseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom proper,
920.
235
12.Ibid.
13. Michael Naas, An Atheism that (Dieu merci!) Still Leaves Something to
be Desired, 56.
14. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, Volume 2, 381.
15.Bodin, On Sovereignty, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.8.
16.Jones, France, 151.
17.Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 74, my emphasis.
18. This was done in order to cure those touching the king of various ailments.
Having supposedly received curative powers from Saint Remigius, by way of Edward
the Confessor, a Bourbon monarch would often heal hundreds of people in a sitting
as the infirm came forth by to touch him. Henry IV, Louis XIVs predecessor, is said to
have healed as many as 1,500 people at a time, seeking cures, as when all sovereigns
are called forth, for what only a god could save them from. The name Kings Evil or
scrofula now refers to a rather malignant form of tuberculosis.
19.Jones, France, 128.
20. Ibid., 36.
21.Schmitt, Political Theology, 27.
22. Ibid., 63.
23.Ibid.
24. Ibid., 15.
25. Ibid., 13.
26.Boulainvilliers Doutes sure la religion suive de lanalyse du Trait
TheologicoPoliticus de Spinosa [sic], published in London in 1727, is a critical examina
tion of Spinozas discussion of miracles, the Hebraic bible, and freedom of religion.
Boulainvilliers reading of Spinoza is, for the time, generous, though he ultimately
favors a Cartesian dualism over the Spinozistic monism of nature.
27.Spinoza, Political Treatise, 690: III.2; see also II.21. Spinoza here may have in
mind the crucial distinction between multitudo and populus, which is found in Hobbes
and numerous other sources of the period. The English word people, which can take
both the third person singular and plural, hides this important distinction. In Hobbes,
the multitudo is a set of individuals (e.g., those persons in the state of nature). What
happens, via the contract, is that the multitudo is united as a populus. Boulainvilliers
brings this distinction into his naturalization of a certain order of races, differentiat
ing between the nation des Francs, a nation of individuals, and the nation franoise,
the united race of French (the nobles) who should rule France and thus are its politi
cal component (see below in the Introduction). Paul Virno writes for many thinkers
trying to resuscitate a certain Spinozism of the multitude: For Spinoza, the multitudo
indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the
handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One (Virno, Grammar of the
Multitude, 21, his emphasis). This, strictly speaking, is true (...[multitudinis] which is
guided as if by one mind), but it ignores the move in Spinoza to treat the multitudino
as if it were one, which is precisely the move of the very sovereignties being contested
in Virnos work, and obviates a discussion of those fictions that would come to provide
this move from the multitudo to the as one in modernity.
28.Spinoza, TheologicalPolitical Treatise, 55254, IV, 16, my emphasis.
236
29. Ibid., IV, 17 my emphases.

30.Boulainvilliers, Dissertation sur la noblesse de France, 30.
31. Ibid., 37.
32.Boulainvilliers, Ltat de la France, I, 16, my emphasis.
33. Ibid., I, 25, my emphasis.
34. Ibid., I, 24.
35. Ibid., I, 17.
36.Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 15253. It is unclear just what
Foucault means by this birth. Of course, Foucaults genealogies must begin some
where and integral to elucidating the present is to juxtapose it with the naissance
of a given concept, for example, the birth of biopolitics in the title of his 197879
lecture course, or the birth of clinic in La naissance de la clinique (1963), or even The
Birth of a World (1969, collected in Foucault live [interviews, 196684], 5761). We
will return to a similar discussion relating to Agambens conception of the privileged
archaic origins in chapter 5.
37. Ibid., 130.
38.Ibid., 13031.See also Mona Ozouf and Franois Furet, Two Historical
Legitimations of Eighteenth Century French Society: Mably and Boulainvilliers.
39. See, for example, Rancire, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 8991.
40.Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 133.
41.Boulainvilliers, Essais sur la noblesse de France, 1921.
42.Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy, 41617.
43. See his Histoire critique de ltablissement de la monarchie franaise dans les
Gaules, especially section III.
44.Boulainvilliers, Dissertation sur la noblesse de France, 30.
45.Boulainvilliers, Ltat de la France, I, 26.
46. Ibid., 127.
47.See Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 134. Arendts description of
Boulainvilliers and his importance to what she calls race thinking before racism
matches up well with the account given by Foucault. But it is not clear that, as she
writes, it was Boulainvilliers intention to break up the unity of the nation and claim an
original and therefore eternal distinction, between the nobility and the other estates,
unless Arendt is claiming that this nation is one of a collective people used in a way
synonymous with citizenry, etc., and not based on a common genealogy or blood. As J.
K. Wright points out well, and Foucault himself suggests, there was no such thinking of
nationhood, as Arendt appears to describe it, prior to the period in which Boulainvilliers
is writing. It is true that a number of commentators, such as Dubos, identified a French
nation as unified in principle, but it was unified only in its obedience to a sovereign
king extrinsic to that nation. See Wright, National Sovereignty and the General Will,
206209. We can also note the change between the 1694 and 1832 dictionaries of
LAcademie Franaise: Dictionnaire de LAcadmie franaise, 1st Edition (1694): Nation.
s. f. Terme collectif. Tous les habitants dun mesme Estat, dun mesme pays, qui vivent sous
mesmes loix, & usent de mesme langage [etc.]. 6th Edition (183235): NATION. s. f. coll.
La totalit des personnes nes ou naturalises dans un pays, et vivant sous un mme gouverne
ment. [etc.].
48. Ibid., 78.
49. Ibid., 12, my emphasis.
237
50.Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy, 205.

51.Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus
Publicum Europeaum, 48. Stuart Eldens Reading Schmitt Geopolitically: Nomos,
Territory and Groraum (2010) offers an excellent overview of Schmitts thought
specifically when it comes to the limits of space and territory, which because of lim
its of space cannot be treated adequately here. But notable about Schmitts Nomos is
the history it provides, arguing that the era of Westphalia to World War I in Europe
marked a glorious era of an interstate order where ius publicum ruled, where war was
relatively stable, and where there was a strict differentiation of civilians and combat
ants in war. It is a masterful fiction, which is not only strictly circumscribed in terms of
time to leave out just what was not so ordered in the European system (covered well in
Arendts Decline and Fall of the NationState, in Origins of Totalitarianism), but also
the entire era of colonialism. But this is a fable within Europe as well, and one need
not visit all the various wars of the era in which war was not contained in the way
depicted in Schmitts fable (Nomos of the Earth, 16468).
52. Ibid., 47.
53. Ibid., 48.
54. Ibid., 80.
55.La Fontaines fable plays a part in a number of important works on
sovereignty, including Carl Schmitts Concept of the Political and Jacques Derridas Rogues.
56.Nancy, Inoperative Community, 9; Badiou, Metapolitics, 149.
57. Both Simon Critchley and Alain Badioufrom quite different directions
have argued for just such a thinking of a nonstate politics, whether in terms of a
renewed communism (Badiou) or an anarchic opening of the political (Critchley). See
Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance and
Alain Badiou, Lhypothse communiste. See also my Just Demanding: An Encounter
with Infinitely Demanding.
58. Here are the relevant lines from Baudelaires Fleurs du mal:
Souvent, pour samuser, les hommes dquipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.
peine les ontils dposs sur les planches,
Que ces rois de lazur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traner ct deux.
Ce voyageur ail, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, nagure si beau, quil est comique et laid!
Lun agace son bec avec un brle-gueule,
Lautre mime, en boitant, linfirme qui volait! Ce voyageur ail, comme il
est gauche et veule!Lui, nagure si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!L'un
agace son bec avec un brle-gueule,L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme
qui volait!
59.Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 20.
238
NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE. Rousseau and the Right of

Life and Death over the Body Politic
1. This is not to say that Rousseau is an entirely modern thinker, though this
is a claim made by many theorists of the political since. All that is said to be modern
about Rousseau follows from his long engagement with the thinkers of antiquity: no
Rousseau without Aristotle, no Rousseau without Plato, and certainly no Rousseau
without Cicero and the republican thinkers of Rome.
2.All citations of the Social Contract are from On the Social Contract in
JeanJacques Rousseau: Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress (New
York: Hackett Publishing). Reference to the earlier Geneva Manuscript and earlier ver
sions of the Social Contract are given in the form Abbreviated Title, Book. Chapter.
Paragraph. For example, this citation, from Book 1, chapter 5, paragraph 4 would
be given as Rousseau, Social Contract, I.v.iv. The French is from Ouvres Compltes.
Citations to other Rousseau texts will be given in Chapter. Paragraph form.
3. For a fair and concise account of Rousseaus impact on the French Revolution,
see Graeme Garrard, Rousseaus CounterEnlightenment, 3140. As Garrard rightly points
out, Rousseau, the proper name, has been as much influenced by the Revolution as vice
versa. Rousseau has long been interpreted through the French Revolution, whose lead
ers had appropriated him for their own purposes. This inclined both pro- and coun
terRevolutionaries towards seeing a continuity between Rousseaus ideas and those
of the Revolution, an idea that was widely held then and has remained popular ever
since (Garrard, Rousseaus CounterEnlightenment, 40). See also James Swensons On
JeanJacques Rousseau Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution. Swenson
notes that as early as 1791, LouisSbastien Mercier called Rousseau one of the first
authors of the Revolution, and Swenson argues that there are at least three sets of dif
ficulties for anyone looking for a direct link between Rousseaus work and the events
of the Revolution. First, the public at large generally took little notice of Rousseaus
overtly political texts, such as the Social Contract, prior to the Revolution, except inso
far as they were of some controversy among public officials. It was Rousseaus literary
works that were widely read and acclaimed. Second, at the start of the Revolution,
Rousseaus admirers could be found in all political camps, a point that might appear
strange, unless one recalls Boulainvilliers legacy for thinking a nationalism subtending
aristocratic claims to governance. Third, interpretations of Rousseaus works during the
Revolution were often selective and highly partial. Swensons basic contention is that
these paradoxes stem from the structure of Rousseaus discourse itself (Swenson, On
JeanJacques Rousseau, x). If Rousseau was one of the first authors of the Revolution,
as Mercier claimed, it was because he provided the terms in which the logic of events
could be interpreted. James Millers account of Rousseaus effect on the revolution
is also helpful, tracing as it does the cult of Rousseau that appeared up to and dur
ing the Revolution, especially in the writings and speeches of Mournier, Robespierre,
and other revolutionary figures. See The Oracle and the Revolution, in Rousseau:
Dreamer of Democracy. In 1793, the cult of Rousseau reached its peak, and the
National Convention on 29 fructidor, year II, ordered Rousseaus remains moved from
Ermenonville to the Pantheon in Paris, noting, in a passage that would help Garrards
case, that the Social Contract produced little effect in 1762 because people did not
239
understand [it] enough to profit from its maxims. It is the Revolution, the con
vention concluded in impeccable logic, that has explained to us the Social Contract
(cited in Miller, The Oracle and the Revolution, 163). After his interment in Paris,
ceremonies for Rousseau were performed throughout France, including processions in
Paris and Lyon in which actors playing Emile and Sophie carried banners with the
authors sacred words, including Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,
and To renounce ones freedom is to renounce ones status as a man, the rights of
humanity and even its duties (Ibid., 164). Though Swenson doesnt say this, it is likely
true that at this early stage, the mottos derived from the Social Contract were probably
as well known at the time as Libert, galit, fraternit ou la morte, which was painted
on Parisian roofs beginning in the year Rousseaus remains were moved. The popular
sovereignty of the Revolution had found its mystical foundation. The seculareven
that which is avowedly antiCatholicstill operates within the structure of the theo
logical, one buttressed, bloodily, by a virulent natalism.
4.Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, 15. Nancys reference is to the Social
Contract, I.viii.i: Although, in this [postcontract] state, he deprives himself of some
advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties
are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended,...instead of a stupid and
unimaginative animal, [the state] made him an intelligent being and a man.
5.Nancy, Inoperative Community, 9.
6. See, e.g., Badious Lide du communisme, in Lhypothse communiste and
Anarchic MetapoliticsPolitical Subjectivity and Political Action after Marx, in
Simon Critchleys Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. For
an excellent rendering of Badiou within the Rousseauian tradition, see Nina Power,
Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude: Badiou and the Political Subject.
7.Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, 1921.
8.Rousseau, Social Contract, I, 7, 10.
9. Ibid., II, 4, 8.
10. Ibid., II, 1, 3.
11. Ibid., IV, 1, 1.
12. Ibid., II.vii.viii.
13. In this vein, Bernard Stieglers work is instructive. See my review of Taking
Care of the Youth, as well as the last section of chapter 5.
14.Delillo, Mao II, 7.
15.Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy, par. 48.
16.Rousseau, Social Contract, III.iv.ii, my emphasis.
17.Shklar, Men and Citizens, 16869.
18.Rousseau, Emile, 22526.
19. See n. 28 in the introduction.
21. Emile, 226.
22.Ibid.
23.Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, III.ii.
24.Rousseau, Social Contract, I.i.ii, my emphases.
25. On the problem of nature in Rousseau, see Paul De Mans Allegories of
Reading, 24951. Nature, De Man argues, is in Rousseau a selfdeconstructive term.
240
It engenders endless other natures in an eternally repeated pattern of regression.

Nature deconstructs nature, hence the ambiguous valorization of the term throughout
Rousseaus works. Far from denoting a homogeneous mode of being, nature connotes
a process of deconstruction redoubled by its own fallacious retotalization. In other
words, nature in Rousseau is a metonymic standin for the fragmented stage prior
to the coalescence of the political state, civil religion, and the change of men into
citizens.
26.Rousseau, Social Contract, I.iv.i.
27. Ibid., II.vii.viii.
28.Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, 13839; see also The Complexity of
Sovereignty, 25.
29. In this way, Rousseaus genius was to attempt a separation of sovereign deci
sionism and its miracles from the political, at least as Schmitt argues (see above). But
he also keeps the sovereign creation of the people, which previously had been the power
of monarchs who instituted a people or populus, as De Maistre attests, faithful to an
entire tradition of political theology. De Maistres critique is notable, since writing
after a death of certain divine right, that is a certain death of God over the political,
he has nothing left but the law of force to argue on its behalf: people simply need to
be dominated.
30. De Maistre, Against Rousseau, 5354, emphasis in original.
31. Ibid., 53.
32. Cited in Connolly The Ethos of Pluralization, 138.
33.Rousseau, Social Contract, I.v.iiiiv.
34. Ibid., II.iv.vivii.
35.Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 1314.
36.Aristotle, Politics, 1317b19.
38.Rousseau, Social Contract, I.vi.viii, translation modified; see also E, 460.
39. Althusser, The Social Contract (The Discrepancies), 95.
40.Ibid.
41. Ibid., 96.
42.Rousseau, Emile, 461. my emphases.
43.Rousseau, Social Contract, I.vii.i; Althusser, The Social Contract (The
Discrepancies), 97. Derridas later reading of Rousseau, in La bte et la souverain, focus
es as well on these moments of the as in the Social Contract.
44. Ibid., I.vi.vi.
45. Ibid., I.vi.viiii.
46. Ibid., 0.ii.
47.Rousseau, Government of Poland, IV.viii.
48.Rousseau, Social Contract, II.vii.viii.
49.Ibid.
50. Ibid., II.vii.i.
51. Ibid., II.vii.iv.
52. Ibid., II.vii.iv.
53.Rousseau, Government of Poland, VI.ii.
54.Rousseau, Social Contract, II.vii.xi.
241
55. Ibid., II.viii.iii.

56. Ibid., II.x.v.
57.Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, preface, par. 9.
58. Ibid., Ex., par. 7.
59.Rousseau, Social Contract, I.iv.i.
60. Ibid., II.vii.
61. Ibid., II.xi.iii, my emphases.
62.Rousseau, Government of Poland, III.vii.
63.Rousseau, Social Contract, I.i.ii.
64. Ibid., I.iv.iv.
65. Ibid., I.i.ii.
66. Ibid., II.iv.i, my emphasis.
67.Rousseau, Social Contract, III.i.xixxx, my emphases.
68. Ibid., IV.i.i.
69.This is the crux of Arendts critique of Rousseau. See, for example, On
Revolution, 7679.
70.Rousseau, Social Contract, II.v.ii.
71. Ibid., II.v.iii, my emphases.
72. Ibid., IV.vi.iii.
73. I.vi, my emphasis.
74.Rousseau, Social Contract, IV.vi.iv.
75. At least in the Social Contract. The fate of Julie in La Nouvelle Hlose is an
explicit sacrifice of the feminine to the universal order of law. It is Rousseaus explicit
claim to counter a particular patriarchal tradition that saw the state on the model of
the family. See, for example, Discourse on Political Economy, par. 89. As with Aristotle
in Book I of the Politics, Rousseau argues that the analogy is inapt, given the different
conditions of ruler and ruled. Whereas Aristotle, of course, finds a natural authority
between master and slave, Rousseau rejects the patriarchal model because it leads,
he believes, to a form of mastery inimical to the conditions necessary for the social
contract. Rousseau, in part, was instrumental in defeating just this form of theoreti
cal patriarchalism. Nevertheless, as Carol Pateman notes, Rousseau and other con
tract theorists may have rejected paternal right, but they absorbed and simultaneously
transformed conjugal, masculine patriarchal right such that the social contract is
nothing other than a fraternal agreement always already excluding women and the
feminine. See Carole Pateman, The Fraternal Social Contract, 4559. To cite but
one example, the Tutor in Emile gives only one direct command in the pedagogical
process: Sophie must be sent away before Emile is to learn about politics and his role as
a citizen. This is not to say that another reading of Rousseau with regard to the feminine
is not possible, but such a reading must always take into account the force of this first
maneuver within Rousseaus text itself.
76.Rousseau, Social Contract, I.iv.xi.
77. Rousseau, State of War, par. 57.
78.Rousseau, Social Contract,, II.vi.vii.
79. Some examples among others: In every body politic, there is a maximum
force that it cannot exceed, and which has often fallen short by increasing in size.
The more the social bond extends, the looser it becomes (Rousseau, Social Contract,
242
II.ix.i); A body politic can be measured in two ways: namely, by size of its territory
and by the number its people. And between these measurements there is a relationship
suitable for giving the state its true greatness (Ibid., II.x.i); The same laws cannot be
suitable to so many diverse provinces which have different customs, live in contrasting
climates, and which are incapable of enduring the same government. Different laws
create only trouble and confusion among the peoples who live under them....They
intermingle and intermarry and...never know whether their patrimony is truly their
own; Scarcely any people can preserve itself except by putting itself in a kind of equi
librium with all [other peoples] (Ibid., II.ix.iv); etc.
80.Rousseau, Social Contract, III.ix.ii.
81.Ibid., I.vi.iii.
82.Ibid., I.vi.iv.
83.Ibid., I.vi.viiviii.
84.Derrida, Of Grammatology, 295.
85.Rousseau, Social Contract, I.iv.iv.
86.Ibid., III.xiv.i.
87.Ibid., I.
89.Rousseau, Social Contract, II.iv.iii.
90.Ibid., I.iii.i.
91.Naas, Taking on the Tradition, xviii.
92. This is part of what is at stake in the discussion of Stieglers noopolitics,
the politics of thinking, in chapter 5.
93. Ibid., viii, my emphases.
94. Ibid., 20, my emphases.
95.Rousseau writes, in a letter to Madame dpinay, dated March 1756,
Learn my dictionary, my good friend, if you want to have us understand each other.
Believe me, my terms rarely have the ordinary sense (quoted in Hendell, Citizen of
Geneva, 140).
96.Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 4749.
97.Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, II.xxxvi.
98. Cited in Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144.
99.Ibid., 281.
100. Ibid., 8.
101. Ibid., 51, inserts are by Derrida.
102. Ibid., 36.
103. Ibid., 295.
104. Ibid., 119.
105. Ibid., 252.
106. Ibid., 137.
107.Agamben, State of Exception, 88.
108.Derrida, Of Grammatology, 302, my emphasis.
109. Ibid., 130.
110. Ibid., 125.
111. Ibid., 127.
112.Derrida, Rogues, 1011.
NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO
243
113.Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 6570.

114.Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 2122.
116.Rousseau, Social Contract, III.xi.iv.
117. Ibid., III.xiii.iii.
119. Ibid., 296.
120.Ibid.
121.Rousseau, Social Contract, III.xiv.i.
123.Rousseau, Social Contract, III.xv.xii.
124. Ibid., III.xv.iv, trans. modified.
125. Ibid., II.i.iii, trans. modified; OG, 297.
126.Derrida, Of Grammatology, 297, my emphasis.
127. Ibid., 296.
128.Rousseau, Social Contract, III.xi.ii.
129. Ibid, III.xi.ii; III.iv.viii.
131.Rousseau, Social Contract, I.vii.ii.
133.Rousseau, Social Contract, III.xi.i.
135.Virgil, Aeneid, XI.321.
136. See, for instance, Rousseau, Social Contract, IV.iv.
137.Virgil, Aeneid, XI.334.
138. Ibid., III.xi.
139. See, for example, Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World: Lectures and
Essays from Thirty Years, 222.
140.Rousseau, Social Contract, II.v.ii.
141. Ibid., II.v.iv.
142.Ibid.
143. Ibid., II.v.vi.
144. Christopher Kelly writes, Rousseauian political activism, then, requires
that one remain open to the possibility of complete withdrawal from the community as
part of the fulfillment of ones civic duty (Kelly, Rousseau as Author, 136).
145.Rousseau, Social Contract, II.v.vii.
CHAPTER TWO. Arendts Archaeology of Sovereignty

1.Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 447.
2. Upon putting last minute revisions on this chapter, I want to note that
this lacuna is quickly being corrected, with three recent treatments of sovereignty in
her work: Peg Birmingham, On Violence, Politics, and the Law (2010), Andrew
Arato and Jean Cohen, Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External Sovereignty
in Arendt (2009), and James Martel, Can There Be Politics Without Sovereignty?
Arendt, Derrida and the Question of Sovereign Inevitability (2010). Each takes up
244
Arendts discussions of sovereignty in relation to the law. My work here is more syn
optic, and Ill treat Birminghams claims at more length than I can do for the others.
3. Birmingham, Holes of Oblivion: The Banality of Radical Evil, 80.
4.Ibid., 81.
5. Birmingham, On Violence, Politics, and the Law, 21.
6. Birmingham, Holes of Oblivion, 83.
9.Arendt, Between Past and Future, 18.
10.Arendt, Life of the Mind, I, 212, my emphasis.
12.Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 197.
14. Such a direct link would be the typical hubris of philosophy: to assume that
its ideas form the very world under discussion. Let me quote from Arendt as she offers
a tentative (none of [this] is thought through at all) discussion of the relationship
between the history of philosophy and totalitarianism. I suspect that philosophy is not
altogether innocent in [the making of human beings superfluous, the mark of radical
evil]. Not, of course in the sense that Hitler had anything to do with Plato. (One com
pelling reason why I took such trouble to isolate the elements of totalitarian govern
ments was to show that the Western tradition from Plato up to and including Nietzsche
is above any such suspicion.) Instead, perhaps in the sense that Western philosophy
has never had a clear concept of what constitutes the political, and couldnt have one,
because, by necessity, it spoke of man the individual and dealt with the fact of plurality
tangentially (Arendt, ArendtJaspers Correspondence, 166).
15.Arendt, Human Condition, 207. Arendt argues that she is not offering a
history of this period, and frankly her take on the consolidation of power in the Greek
citystates from the early kingships is rather cheerful: just a glorious attempt to con
solidate the gains of action within a place where they could be remembered in a space
that continued to be one of norule. One could argue that we do not view these early
kingsAgamemnon was a king, for Arendt, but no rulerin the light Arendt presents
them since the consolidation of Greek history, its mythos, after this period worked from
within the categories that set up rule as foundation for the political; it could only see
these kingships on the models of family life and the rulerruled relationship, as does
Aristotle, for example, in the first book of the Politics. However, some caution is neces
sary in this regard, since Arendts writings (based, as her footnotes suggest, largely on
the writings of Homer) simplify greatly a period of strife in Greek history. In other
words, it is not clear that the Greeks would offer such clearcut distinctions between
the polis and the oikos, as Arendt would have it, or be so agreeable about the leader
ship (but not, apparently, the rule or mastery) of an Agamemnon, whose portrayal in
Homer, along with Arendts beloved Achilles, is equivocal, given their passions and
the slaughter left in their wake. That Arendt champions these heroes without noting
their fatal flaws (of course, the very notion of a fatal flaw derives from Achilles) is
disconcerting since the action that these men were engaged in was prepolitical as
she defines it: violent acts of wara war that ended in the burning of a whole city as a
result of so much prepolitical pathos. And though it is not a history, Arendts narra
245
tive is certainly from the side of the victors, those who on her own account mastered
the home and could enter the polis because they were neither women, nor slaves, nor
household workers.
17. Ibid., 15.
18.Arendt, Human Condition, 5.
19.Greek philosophy is a miraclea creation ex nihiloonly if one always
already demarcates Greece as the beginning of the European adventure, that is, if one
excludes all the give and take between the peoples of classical Mediterranean cultures,
as well as the give and take that helped to reconstruct that tradition during the late
Middle Ages. This miracle begins the Occident, the story goes, and this Occident can
continue to tell itself its own story of mastery and selfmasteryeven as it continues to
undergo its own critique after the break of its tradition. A wonderful story, as Frantz
Fanon put it well, that continues Europes narcissistic dialogue...vigilant [and] ready
to defend the GrecoLatin pedestal (Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 40). It is crucial
that Derridas questioning, for example, of sovereignty in Rousseau and LviStrauss,
as we discussed in chapter 1, is concomitant with a questioning of their Eurocentrism.
A questioning of sovereignty is also a questioning of the grounds for colonialism and
imperialism, as Arendt herself argues in Origins of Totalitarianism.
20.Arendt, Promise of Politics, 17778, my emphases.
21.Arendt, Human Condition, 4, my emphases.
24. Ibid., 194.
25. Ibid., 95.
26. Ibid., 144.
27. Foucault, quoted in Davidson, Ethics as Ascetics, 128.
28. Hadot, Forms of Life and Discourse, 490505.
29. We are unconvinced that Arendts distinction between zoe and bios holds,
that is, whether for the Greeks zoe was a bare life shared with animals, in contra
distinction to the bios of the polis, which was a life infused with meaning and infus
ing meaning through the words and deeds of action. Arendt cites Aristotles Politics
(1254a7) in this regard. I wont go into a lengthy description of all the places that
Aristotle uses the terms in his texts, though it would appear that he uses them inter
changeably. Most notably, the highest life (zoe) is that of the prime mover of the
Metaphysics, one encompassing pure actuality beyond what can occur in the activity,
say, of the polis. This zoe of theos would not, it seem, be a bare life, let alone one belong
ing to the condition of the oikos (see, for example, 1072b27). In fact, as Arendt argues,
it is the theoslike life of the philosopher, the life of pure contemplation (theoria) that
is the telos of Platos political theory, if not Aristotles as well. Thus this zoe, far from
being a debased life, is that which the political is formed to beget, and thus forms the
original ontotheological edifice (the theorein or seeing of the forms or of God in the
leisure provided by the proper political state) that leads to the privileging of the vita
contempliva over the vita activa in Plato and Aristotle. What is important, in the end, is
that this opposition is operative in Arendts account.
246
31. Ibid., 41.

32. Ibid., 58, 114.
33. Ibid., 28.
36.Foucault, History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, 143.
38. Ibid., 208.
39. Ibid., 126.
40. Ibid., 228.
41. Ibid., 156; she is quoting Marx.
42.Arendt, On Revolution, 78.
43.Arendt, Human Condition, 158, my emphasis.
45. Ibid., 254.
46. Ibid., 209.
47. Ibid., 257.
48. She also divests others of the capability of having politics and thus freedom:
barbarians to the East who have no understanding of politics (Arendt, Between Past
and Future, 157) and the Swahili to the South, for example, who speak a nonlan
guage and thus could never have what Arendt notes in The Human Condition is a pre
condition for the life of action, that is, of worldly meaning (Arendt, On Violence, 96).
49. If we extend Arendts critique of the rulerruled relationship (and, for her,
its ancillary meansend distinction) to all forms of thinking, as she does in Life of the
Mind, then we see that Arendt is not just engaged in a rethinking of what we took to
be the concept of the political, but also the hierarchization of concepts, that is to say,
a (non)politics of concepts: thinking and judging that takes place without banisters
and is aporetic in its attempt to judge ones responsibility always from the point of view
of the other, without preestablished rules or measures, within the sheer givenness of
being and appearance.
51. See the section, Beyond the Sovereign Decision in chapter 4 for a similar
discussion by Foucault.
52.Ibid., 222. Though her explanation for Platos protoauthoritarianism is
straightforward, Arendt ignores Platos explicit rejection of the rule of law as the best
political regime in his political dialogues, as well as Aristotles similar rejection in the
Politics. Each argues that a monarchy ruling without laws, in the unlikely event that
a person with such a political episteme or techne could be found, would be politically
what is most divine, the telos toward which all politeia are constituted. See, for example,
Stateman, 293d, and Politics, 1332b. As Plato writes, laws are like an ignorant per
son since one cannot ask them any questions, even if it would be for the betterment
of the polis (294c). So long as [the statesman] acts to preserve [the polis] on the basis
of expert knowledge and what is just, making it better insofar as he can, this is the con
stitution that alone we must say is correct....[A]ll the others...are not genuine and
not really constitutions at all, but imitations (293e). The worst constitution, however,
is one not ruled (archein) by one with techne, one who is not even a ruler over himself,
247
and thus incapable of ruling over a city; here he becomes a governing his own house,
let alone the household of the city. In this case, given that a theos ex anthro pon (a god
among men) has not been found to rule, it is the laws or customs (nomoi) that must
rule (303b).
53.Plato, Republic, 540a.
54. It is Augustine, though, for Arendt, who gives us the modern conception of
the will (Arendt, Between Past and Future, 14648).
56.Plato, Republic, 463c.
57.Arendt, Between Past and Future, 11617; Human Condition, 223.
62.Ibid.
63.Arendt, Human Condition, 220, my emphasis.
65.Ibid.
66.Ibid.
67.Ibid.
68.Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1013a1315.
69. Ibid., 1003a27.
70. Ibid., 983a9.
71. e.g., Ibid., 1111a20.
72. Ibid., 968a24.
73. Ibid., 1076a35.
74. Ibid., 1075a2125.
75.Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1113a39.
76. Ibid., 1064b1.
77. Indeed, it is also found in Agambens Il Regno e la Gloria as something of
the supposed remainder left over once an unworking of the sovereign machine
has begun. For Agamben, Aristotles conception of thought thinking itself is not the
ultimate sovereign circularity (if not tautology) but is rather the hidden place in the
Western tradition of an inoperativity that is now the first political task of unworking
the political itself (Agamben, Il Regno, 274). Modernity has for so long forbidden to
the political as well as to that which is the most proper of human being, and for this
reason, Agamben argues for a restoration of the political to its central inoperativ
ity (inoperosit), an operation that consists in rendering inoperative (inoperose) all
human and divine work (Ibid., 11).
78.Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072a21.
80. Ibid., 189.
81.Arendt, On Violence, 82.
83.Arendt, Life of the Mind, I, 210. As she remarks in a letter to Mary McCarthy,
The chief fallacy is to believe that truth is a result that comes at the end of a thought
248
process. Truth, on the contrary, is always the beginning of thought, thinking is always
resultless....Thinking starts after an experience of truth has struck home, so to speak
(Arendt and McCarthy, Between Friends, 24).
85.Arendt, Essays on Understanding, 320.
86.Arendt, On Violence, 7.
88. I am indebted to Patchen Markells explication of this passage in The Rule
of the People: Arendt, Arche, and Democracy. Markell is correct to suggest the need
for a fuller reading of this passage and Arendts translation since it offers an important
entry point, an arche, into her thinking of action and beginning. Markell points to its
importance, though I wont repeat his full explication here: It indicates that the being
of a beginning is actually not best conceived as a state. Action understood as beginning
is an ongoing activity whose future is uncertain, and indeed whose past is uncertain
as well, in so far as the character of one act as a beginning hangs on its future recep
tion. For this reason, it might be better to speak of action as something that...never
simply or definitively is (The Rule of the People, 7). Patchell also points out that
Arendts translation (dubious or wonderfully mischievous at first glance) overturns
Dantes solipsism (the repetition of ones likeness) in favor of an acting directed
toward others, and thus inherently pluralistic (Ibid., 910). My point above is to tie
this retranslation of Dantes Aristotelianism to an overturning or turningabout that
Arendt performs on Aristotles metaphysics as well. For another take on this passage,
which Patchell borrows from as well, see Susannah YoungAh Gottliebs Regions of
Sorrow, 16265. What seems to draw Arendt to Dante is his articulation of a politics,
whatever his views on sovereignty, which marks freedom as the raison dtre of the
political (Dante, De Monarchia, 1.9, 69).
89. The original is as follows: Nam in omni actione principaliter intenditur ab
agente, sive necessitate naturae voluntarie agat, propriam similitudinem explicare; unde fit
quod omne agens, in quantum huiusmodi, delectatur, quia, cum omne quod est appetat
suum esse, ac in agendo agentis esse modammodo amplietur, sequitur de necessitate delecta
tion....Nihil igitur agit nisi tale existens quale patiens fieri debet.
90.Dantes De Monarchia, trans. Prue Shaw, 1.xiii, 23. I have italicized the
critical difference in the translations.
91.Ibid., 1.xiii.1.
92.Ibid., I.ii.23.
93.Ibid., II.i.3.
94. Ibid., I.xiii, 3; Metaphysics, 1049b2426.
95.Arendt, Life of the Mind, II, 207.
97.Ibid., 184.
98.Ibid., 192.
100. Ibid., 198.
103. Ibid., 229.
NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
249
104. Ibid., 233.

106.Ibid.
107. Arendt also critiques the safeguarding of ones sovereignty and free
dom through the retreat to a supposed freedom of thought. She writes, We are
inclined to believe that freedom begins where politics endseither in thought, the
privacy of the home, or the marketplace (Arendt, Between Past and Future, 149).
109. Ibid., 245.
110. Ibid., 202.
111. Ibid., 191.
112.Demosthenes, Against Medeia, 21.20710.
113.Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1380ab.
114.Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, vii, my emphases.
115. Ibid., 269.
117. For a concise version of her critique, see Wendy Brown, Sovereignty and
the Return of the Repressed, 25.
118.Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 2736.
122. Ibid., 23133.
123. Arendt ends her chapter on action in The Human Condition with a refer
ence to the birth of Christ, the only first birth that is valorized in the chapter, recall
ing that the human being must go through a second birth in order to enter the political
through words and deeds. Arendt also, in numerous places, including her speech of
behalf of Heideggers eightieth birthday, aligns her thinking of arche to Platos invoca
tion in the Laws: The beginning is like a god which as long as it dwells among men
saves all things (arche gar kai theos en anthropois idrumene sozei panta [775c]).
126. Ibid., 176.
132.Arendt, Promise of Politics, 234.
CHAPTER THREE. The World is at Stake

1.Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 279.
2.Ibid., 26869.
3.Anne OByrnes Natality and Finitude (2010) offers excellent discussions
of Arendt on this theme, especially in chapter 3, while also connecting these writ
250
NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
ings to later developments in the work of JeanLuc Nancy. See also OByrne, Nancys
Materialist Ontology, in JeanLuc Nancy and Plural Thinking.
4.Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, vii, my emphases.
6.Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1.
7.See, for example, her comments on historical narrative in The Image
of Hell: The real story of the Naziconstructed hell is desperately needed for the
future...[yet] the story in itself can yield nothing but sorrow and despairleast of all
arguments for any specific political purpose (Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 200).
8.Foucault discusses the boomerang effect of colonialism and colonial
ist genocide as well, arguing that practices of power first used in European imperi
alism returned to Europe and were inscribed in its own political mechanisms (See
Foucault,Society Must Be Defended, 103, 257).
10. Ibid., 230.
11.Ibid.
12. Ibid., 231.
14. Ibid.; see also 406.
15. See especially his On Populist Reason.
16. What Is the People? in Means without Ends.
19. Ibid., 292.
21.Ibid.
22. Ibid., 74.
25.Arendt in On Revolution distinguishes between the French Revolution,
founded on pity and the needs of the social, and the more properly political
American Revolution, which attempted, but ultimately failed, to set up a framework in
which a space of freedom could exist. In this way, the American Revolution attempted
to found a new authority in its constitution, paying heed to the central idea of revo
lution, which is the foundation of freedom, that is, the foundation of a body politic
which guarantees the space where freedom can appear (Ibid., 125).
26. Ibid., 61.
27. Ibid., 8889.
29. Ibid., 275.
30. Ibid., 231.
31. Ibid., 245.
33. Ibid., 275.
34. As to the why of sovereignty, the answer oftgiven, even by socalled defend
ers of democracy, is that at the end of the day, a decision must be made; endless discus
sion will leave us with no results. The violence of sovereignty, with its assumption of
NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR
251
unquestionability and unaccountability, is nothing if not efficient, even its enemies will
allow. (Thus so many banal conversations about how fascism at least made the trains
run on time.) This making of the space of action is, as we noted, a central theme in
The Human Condition.
36. Ibid., 269.
37.Agamben, Means without End, 2122.
38. Ibid., 272.
39. Ibid., 278.
40. See, for example, The Washington Posts 2010 series, Top Secret America,
available at http://projects.washingtonpost.com/topsecretamerica/.
41. Ibid., 287.
42. Ibid., 28384.
43. Ibid., 292.
44. Ibid., 447.
48. Ibid., 269.
49.Agamben, Means without End, 104, my emphasis.
50. Ibid., 103104.
51. See, for example, Foucault, Omnes et Singulatim, 31621.
54.Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 295, my emphases.
56. Ibid., 131.
57. Ibid., 132.
60.Arent, Between Past and Future, 93. Paul Ricoeur argues that the problem
of authority becomes that of sovereignty in modernity due to problem of violence and
the infinite regress of legitimacy (Gratton and Manoussakis, Traversing the Imaginary,
135). This formulation is a bit broad, but captures part of the dynamic in the rise of
national sovereignty.
CHAPTER FOUR. Torturing Sovereignty

1.Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 121.
2.Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 31.
3.Agamben, Homo Sacer, 2021, 12122; Foucault, History of Sexuality: Vol. 1,
150. See also my A Retroversion of Power? Foucault and Agamben on Sovereignty.
4. Though he never footnotes her work, it seems to me that Foucault was
undoubtedly a reader of Arendt. (Admittedly, this may be a typical symptom of a writer
taking up two different authors in the same workto find connections that are not
252
otherwise apparent and draw dubious conclusions from there.) This is most clear in
his lecture courses after 1974, in which he covers many of the same textual sources as
Arendt. His Society Must Be Defended lectures, which I will revisit below, map well
in its history of racethinking and nationalism, along with the rise of the nationstate,
onto Arendts Origins of Totalitarianism. Foucault and Arendt are not discussing the
same forms of power, the same conceptualization of sovereignty, and we are all too
aware, as is often said, that most philosophical arguments are based on the use of the
same words with different conceptual bases. Nevertheless, when it comes to Foucaults
discussion of resistances to sovereignty in his later workswe will, unfortunately, have
to leave aside Foucaults return to the Greeks in the early 1980s in order to think earlier
formations of powerit is often on a quasiArendtian formulation of resistance that
he stands. While just as skeptical of the notion of rights, recognizing its troubling
history, Foucault articulates something like the right to have rights, the right to resist
concatenations of power on the flip side of another thinking of action, an action that
too often in his later work turns back to the self as the locus of selfcreation.
5.Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 23, 31.
6.In his January 18, 1978, lecture, collected in Security, Territory, Power,
Foucault himself marks out what he takes to be the difference between archaeology and
genealogy. He turns to the discourses of LouisPaul Abeille, which he says exemplifies
a whole series of other texts (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 35). Foucault
asks of this particular text: What does it do? Foucault differentiates two potential
readings: [W]e could consider Abeilles text within an analysis of a theoretical field
by trying to discover its guiding principles, the rules of formation of its concepts, its
theoretical elements, and so on....But I do not want to look at it this way, and instead
consider it from the perspective of a genealogy of technologies of power. I think we
could reconstruct the function of the text, not according to its rules of formation of its
concepts, but according to its objectives, the strategies that govern it, the program of political
action it proposes, in short, how it arrives at a given apparatus (dispositif) for arranging
things (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 3435, 36, my emphasis). We have
here in Foucault what we could call the parallax relation between archaeology and
genealogy: the former discusses the formation of concepts and the conditions of pos
sibility for a given text, while the latter takes this text up within a given field of praxis
where its concepts are viewed not along a plane of discursivity, but as a text that acts
and intervenes in a given field.
8. Foucault defines this crucial term, dispositif, in the following way: What Im
trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost, a thoroughly homogeneous set
consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws,
administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic
propositionsin short, the said as much as the unsaid....The apparatus (dispositif)
itself is the network that can be established between these elements (Foucault, Power/
Knowledge, 194). A dispositif is always inscribed into a play of power, and arises at a
given moment as a response to an urgency for which is it is a set of strategies sup
posed and supported by certain types of knowledge (Ibid., 195, 194, 196).
9.Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 34.
253
10. This problem follows from Foucaults utter immanentism: One is always
in the interior ( lintrieur). The margin is a myth. Talk of the outside is a dream
that one doesnt cease to renew (Lextension sociale de la norme, Dits et crits, III,
173).
11. Gutting, Michel Foucault, 2, my emphasis.
13.Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 40, my emphasis.
15. Foucault, Governmentality, 219; Foucault, Security, Territory, Population,
100; Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 25560.
16. See, for example, Saids, Walzers, Habermass, and Taylors essays collected
in Hoy 2006.
17.Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 36.
18. See Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179.
19. Ibid., 179.
21. Ibid., 42.
22. Le jeu de Michel Foucault, Dits et crits, III, 206.
23. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 257.
24. Cited in Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 20. Pinels study of the case in his Trait
medicophilosophique sur lalination mentale, ou la Manie differs from other less human
istic depictions of the monarchs treatment (with its use of Spanish flies, straightjack
ets tied to iron chairs, and so on). In addition, Willis was not necessarily the heroic
doctor as in Pinels rendering (or in the 1992 film The Madness of King George), but
perhaps the last in a series of doctors overseeing the kings treatment during the lat
ter part of 1788. See, for example, Christopher Hibert, George III: A Personal History,
397403. (The madness of King George is now believed to be the result of a heredi
tary blood disorder.) The history of this period will always be obscured in mystery since
all sovereignty is based on an element of secrecy that protects it from the secreting of
its own powerlessness. This is not to call into question Foucaults larger point, since
it is Pinels case study and its influence over the developing science of psychiatry that
confronts sovereign with disciplinary power.
25.Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 21.
26.Ibid.
27. Ibid., 27.
28.Ibid.
31. Ibid., 43.
32. Ibid., my emphasis.
34.Ibid.
35. Ibid., 44.
36.Ibid.
254
38. As is well known, Foucault argues throughout his later writings that power
and knowledge are coextensive. [P]ower and knowledge directly imply one anoth
er...there is no power without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge,
nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power
relations....In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a
corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but powerknowledge, the processes
and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and
possible domains of knowledge (Foucault, Displine and Punish, 2728).
40. Kantorowicz borrows the phrase the kings two bodies from a case cited in
Blackstone, in which a monetary dispute between lords was settled in Willon v. Berkley,
in part, on the continuance of the corpus regni in this hiatus, despite the somatic death
of the king (Kantorowicz, Kings Two Bodies, 13; see also 33642).
43. Ibid., 102.
45.Ibid.
47.Foucault, Abnormal, 5051.
49. Ibid., 187.
50.Foucault, History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, 94; Foucault, Society Must Be
Defended, 32.
53. Ibid., 201.
55. Ibid., 51.
56. Ibid., 49.
57. Ibid., 53.
58. Ibid., 54.
59.Foucault, Abnormal, 50.
60.Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 55, my emphasis.
61. Ibid., 55.
63. Ibid., 95.
64. Ibid., 94.
67.Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9.
68. Ibid., 56.
69.Benjamin, Illuminations, 141.
71. Ibid., 7.
72.See, for example, Mark Kellys Racism, Nationalism, and Biopolitics:
Foucaults Society Must Be Defended, Simon Enochs The Contagion of Difference:
255
Identity, BioPolitics, and National Socialism, and Todd Mays The Philosophy of
Foucault, among others. These texts are quite good at establishing Foucaults depictions
of state racism, with a focus on the last chapters of both Society Must Be Defended and
La Volont de savoir. My task here is slightly different: to think the how of this power
as it arose and concatenated in the rise of the modern administrative states.
73.See Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 25.
74.Ibid., 30.
75.Ibid., 43.
76.Ibid., 50.
77.Ibid., 5056.
78.Ibid., 175.
79.Ibid., 66.
80.Ibid., 67.
81.Ibid., 171.
82.Ibid., 168.
83.Ibid., 16869.
84.Ibid., 180.
85.Ibid., 181.
86.Ibid., 172.
87.Ibid., 196.
88.As Sieys notes in Questce que le tiers tat? Prior to everything, the
nation exists; it is the origin of everything. Its will is always legal, it is the law itself.
This echoes Boulainvilliers at the same time as Sieys will ask, Why not send them all
back to the forests of Franconia, all these families that still make the insane claim that
they are descended from a race of conquerors, and that they have inherited the right of
conquest (cited in Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 211).
89.Ibid., 222.
90.Ibid., 223.
91. Cited in Elden, The War of Races and the Constitution of the State,
143.
93. See Elden, Terror and Territory.
95.Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 216, my emphasis.
96.Ibid.
97.Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 56, 57.
98.Ibid., 57.
99.Foucault, Dits et crits, III, 195.
101. Ibid., 283.
102.Ibid.
103. Ibid., 37.
104. Ibid., 67.
105. Ibid., 20, 67.
106. Ibid., 37.
107. Ibid., 66.
256

110. The phrase is borrowed from Jan Zamoyski (15421605), a Polish general
and member of the Sejm (Polish Diet) in the late sixteenth century. Earlier, Zamoyski
had been a royalist, but he later argued for noble sovereignty after the king, Sigismund,
plotted to exchange the Polish crown with the Hapsburgs for their support in his quest
to take the Swedish throne. Zamoyskis declaration, rex regnat sed non gubernat was
both an attack on the traitorous king and a mark of the ascendancy of his administra
tion, which included Zamoyski, who would gain a free hand as general in military
adventures in Moldavia and elsewhere.
112. Ibid., 234.
113.Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria, 15.
117. Ibid., 23637.
118. Ibid., 211; Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 98.
119. Foucault, Governmentality, 211.
120. Ibid., 212; Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 98102.
122. Ibid., 217.
123. Ibid., 220.
124. Ibid., 221.
125. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 37.
126. Ibid., 3.
127. Foucault, The Subject and Power, 221.
128. Foucault, Omnes et Singulatim, 303.
130. As weve noted, Agamben faults Foucault for dismissing the early theo
logical provenance of oikonomia, which will become the technique of governmentality.
What is notable in Agambens conception, however, is that he proceeds in his geneal
ogy from the Greek conception of oikos to Christian pastorship as well as the oikonomia
between God and creation, leaving aside, except as it was theorized later from within
the Christian tradition, the Hebraic sources for pastoral care noted by Foucault.
131. Foucault, Omnes et Singulatim, 310, my emphasis.
132.Ibid.
133.Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 169. This threshold is not given
a precise date, and elsewhere, notably in the last chapter of History of Sexuality, Vol. 1,
is linked to other concepts, such that its better to see this threshold less as specific
point in time than a mark of a specific difference of modern states taking on the prob
lems of the king who rules but does not govern.
136. Ibid., 416, trans. mod.
138. Foucault, Omnes et Singulatim, 311.
257
140.Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, 31215.

141. Ibid., 314.
142.Schmitt, Die Diktatur, 5.
143. Ibid., 57.
144.Ibid.
146. Cited in Grofteld et al., Westfalische Jurisprudenz, 259.
148.See my discussion of Michael Naass Comme si, comme a: Following
Derrida on the Phantasms of the Self, the State, and a Sovereign God, in the
Introduction.
149. Ibid., 58.
151. Ibid., 219.
152. See, for example, Derrida, La bte et la souverain, Vol. 1, 44042.
153.Ibid., 441.
154.Agamben, Signatura Rerum, 32.
158.Ibid., 7275.
161.Ibid.
163.Ibid.
164.Ibid.
165. Ibid., 241.
166.Ibid.
168. Ibid., 143.
169. See, for example, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. note 28, 489. Also,
see chapter 2, n. 29, for my discussion of my doubts about such a distinction between
bios and zo e in ancient Greek thought.
170. See, for example, ibid., 48587.
171. Instead, Foucaults analysis takes him to a shift from the relation of techne
and bios to a conceptualization of the knowledge of the self that has its apotheosis in
Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit (ibid., 48788).
173. Ibid., 246.
174. Ibid., 254.
175. Ibid., 255.
176. Ibid., 8789.
177. Ibid., 6162.
178. Ibid., 62.
179. Ibid., 255.
180. Ibid., 256.
258
NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE
181. Ibid., 25657.

183.Ibid.
184. Ibid., 259.
187.Ibid.
188. Ibid., 259.
189. Falguni Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race, 49.
190. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 287, 257.
191. Benjamin, Critique of Violence, 287.
193. Ibid., 22122.
194. Ibid., 222, trans. mod.
195.Ibid.
196.Foucault, Dits et crits, IV, 414.
197. Foucault, Polemics, politics and problemizations, 388.
198.Paras, Foucault 2.0, 158.
199. Ibid., 147.
200. Cited in ibid.
201.Prozorov, Foucault, Freedom, and Sovereignty, 101.
202. Foucault, Truth, Power, Self, 15.
203.Rose, Powers of Freedom, 6566.
205. Ibid., 2, 3.
206. Foucault, What is Enlightenment? 317.
207.See Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 40; Foucault, The Subject and
Power, 211.
CHAPTER FIVE. What More Is There to Say?

1. The volumes thus far published are Homo Sacer I: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life (1995), Homo Sacer II.i: States of Exception (2003), Homo Sacer II.ii: Il Regno e la
Gloria (2007), Homo Sacer II.iii: Il sacramento del linguaggio. Archeologia del giuramento
(2009), Homo Sacer II.iv: Opus Dei Opus Dei. Archeologia dellufficio (2012), Homo
Sacer III: Remnants of Auschwitz (1994), Homo Sacer IV: Altissima Poverta (2011).
2.Agamben, Une biopolitique mineure, 18, my emphasis.
4. Michel Foucault, Habermas, et al., Critique and Power, 126.
5. Heidegger The Nature of Language, 107108.
6.Agamben, Language and Death, 64.
7.Ibid.
9. Norris, The Exemplary Exception, 277.
10. As Norris puts it, Agambens sovereign decision over the tradition and in
particular over the Muselmann is not a return to the things themselves, that is, to the
259
events he describes as they were, but rather the very naming of bare life constitute[s]
them (Ibid.).
11.Agamben, Infancy and History, 156.
12. It is because Jacques Derrida prominently takes on exactly this logic that
Agamben will confine deconstruction to the era of a sacrificial metaphysics. Languages
sovereign claim, Agamben writes in Homo Sacer, thus consists in the attempt to make
sense coincide with denotation, to stabilize a zone of indistinction between the two in
which language can maintain itself in relation to its denotata by abandoning them and
withdrawing from them into a pure langue (the linguistic state of exception). This is
what deconstruction does, positing undecidables that are infinitely in excess of every
possibility of signification (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 21). What Agamben claims is that
deconstruction offers nothing but the closed door of the end of metaphysics, leaving us
only with the play of language and no meaningful way to trespass to a profane existence
beyond it. For Derrida, there are no closed structures and no closed traditions, and
thus, however we might take on a tradition, one could never repeat it robotically;
this is the chance for the future, as he argued in Of Grammatology and as we touched
upon in our chapter on Rousseau. That is to say, for Derrida language is intrinsically
open, and in this way, it is also open to its other; there is thus no concept that is
not contaminated. For Agamben, it is this contamination that marks languages
relationism, and as such, deconstructions endless workingthrough of supplementarity
marks it as a petrified or paralyzed messianism, as he puts in Potentialities, existing in
a perpetual and interminable state of exception (Agamben, Potentialities, 171).
13.Agamben, Means without End, 114, trans. mod.
15.Agamben, Signatura Rerum, 34.
16. Ibid., 33.
18. Ibid., 8.
19.Ibid.
20. Ibid., 8, 6.
21. Ibid., 83.
22.Ibid.
23. Ibid., 88.
24. Ibid., 81.
25. Not only horrific but also much more common than the sentence of homo
sacer in ancient Rome, both during the era of the Republic and later during the Roman
imperium. Most often a punishment for parricide, the poena cullei lastedwhether by
custom or by direct knowledge of Roman antecedents is a matter of controversyup
until the eighteenth century in Germany, and is mentioned often in Roman literature,
including the works of Seneca and Cicero. However, the history of this custom is con
trapuntal, since it seems to have dropped from memory at various points, only to be
revived during the time of Hadrian and later by Constantine. The Lex Pompeia, circa
the first century BCE, describes the punishment as being drowned in a leather sack
(later adjusted to wolfs skin) together with a dog, a cock, a monkey, and a snake. The
four animals were there to deprive the condemned of all the natural elements, since
a parricide was seen to act against nature and thus unworthy of its gifts. For a concise
260
history of the practice as well as a summary of the giveandtake among historians over
its practice, see Florike Egmonds The Cock, the Dog, the Serpent, and the Monkey.
28. Ibid., 7.
29. Ibid., 88, emphasis in original.
30. Ibid., 8485.
31. Ibid., 84.
32.Ibid.
33. Ibid., 181.
34.Ibid.
35. Ibid., 106.
36. Ibid., 8.
39. Aston, Problems of Roman Criminal Law, 214.
41. Agamben translates parracida with the Italian omicidio, which obviates a
discussion over just what counted in early ancient Rome as parricide. Various etymolo
gies have been suggested, as well as possible copying errors from earlier sources (for
example, the word for patricide instead of paracide). The question is whether paracide
counted simply for fathers, for the head of the family (patria potestas), or for a given
patron. The latter is likely, given the division in early Rome between the propertied
and nonpropertied classes. The split in Roman society may have been less between two
types of living than between those deaths that counted, that is, those deaths (parracid
ae) that called for the pentalty of sacer esto, and those that didnt (StrachanDavidson,
Problems of Roman Criminal Law, 317).
42. Radin, The Lex Pompeia and the Poena Cullei, 122.
43.Kyle, The Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome, 96.
44. See Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome.
45.Fowler, Roman Essays and Interpretation, 18.
46.Fugier, Recherches sur lexpression du sacr dans la langue latine, 172.
47.StrachanDavidson, Problems of Roman Criminal Law, 317.
48. Radin, The Lex Pompeia and the Poena Cullei, 121.
49. This power, vitae necisque potestas, its usually argued, was rarely, if ever used.
By the late Empire the power had devolved to a mere memory and referred to the
power of the father to choose to have children. See William V. Harris, The Roman
Fathers Power of Life and Death.
50. The penalty of the homo sacer has also been noted for hemaphrodites, par
ricides, and tyrants (Dupont, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, 143). We must leave aside, for
the moment, the literal patriarchy that such a sacralization of the hemaphrodite, for
example, entailed, though it is not a minor part of the story of homo sacer and gendered
zones of indistinction left undescribed in Agambens account.
51. Cited at Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome, 59.
52. Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 139.
53. Ibid., 146.
261
54. Ibid., 146, 154.

55.Agamben, What is a Contemporary?, 51.
57. Ibid., 103.
58. Ibid., 8990. The period following the publication of the XII tables was
one of strife in which plebeians struck back against the patricians ruling over them. In
a sense, as W. K. Lacey notes, the publication of the law actually detracted from the
patricians power, since the plebeians could now understand just how little power they
enjoyed. More pertinently, though, the paterfamilias was not simply the father of a fam
ily, or even the head of the family. Rather, the paterfamilias was traditionally a patrician
who had potestas over a family unit and a group of plebeians, akin to later feudalism. It
was the killing of the paterfamilias that is often believed to be a matter of the parricide
leading to sacer esto, since these landowners were faced with a homicide that could not
be assuaged with any other penalty, such as payment of money. For a full discussion of
this issue, see W. K. Lacey, Patria Potestas.
59. Cited in Agamben, Homo Sacer, 73.
60. Ibid., 5455.
61.Fugier, Recherches, 106; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 73.
62.Dupont, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, 24.
63. Livy, 10.17.
64.Kyle, Spectacles of Death, 97.
65. If I must wrap West in quotation marks, its also because Agamben, no
different than Heidegger and Arendt before him, treats the West as a heroic adventure
in which the most isolated texts of GrecoRoman history are more significant than
any other number of multiple civilizations deemed out of step to this march of his
tory, no matter the relatively late invention of such a Europe or indeed the West,
and no matter the confluences, influences, and fluencies quite important to what is
called Europe. No less an early thinker of nationalism than Boulainvilliers contested
the GrecoRoman mythos of Rome, pointing the history of thought to the socalled
barbarians of a previous era. There is indeed a Western tradition, but its one performed
through narratives and mythoi of its beginning, middle, and end, and suppositions
about this tradition provide a history that, like Boulainvilliers history of the Franks,
must stop at some point geographically and historically in order to dictate what the
narrative itself was only to describe.
67. Ibid., 111.
68. Ibid., 55.
69. Ibid., 176, 15.
70. Ibid., 188.
71. Ibid., 83.
73. Ibid., 1214.
74.Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 36265.
75. Ibid., 364.
76.Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria, 112, my emphasis.
77. Ibid., 12527.
262
78.Ibid., 128.
80.Derrida, La bte et le souverain, I, 139.
82.Ibid., 6.
83.Ibid., 20.
84.Ibid., 9.
87.Ibid., 22.
88.Ibid.
89.Ibid.
90.Ibid., 27.
91.Ibid.
92.Ibid., 32.
93.Ibid., 35.
94.Ibid., 53.
97.Ibid., 9.
98. Ibid., 122. He writes, Their argument went something like this: God,
insofar as his being and substance is concerned, is certainly one; but as to his oikono
miathat is to say the way in which he administers his home, his life, and the world
that he createdhe is, rather, triple. Just as a good father can entrust to his son the
execution of certain functions and duties without in so doing losing his power and his
unity, so God entrusts to Christ the economy, the administration and government of
human history (Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, 910).
100. Ibid., 13.
101. Ibid., 158.
102.Ibid.
103. Ibid., 10.
104. See, for example, Simonetta FalascaZamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 95100.
107. It is difficult to see if this claim is ontological, epistemological, or norma
tive. One could read Agamben as suggesting that these early theologians hit on an
essential mystical core at the heart of power. Or, one can suggest that Agamben has
found a frame for thinking the conditions of possibility for how power has come to be
formulated given these early sources. The problem arises since, while Foucault claimed
to find techniques of security linked to ideas of pastoral power, he does not stipulate
a causal relation between one and the other, and of course, this is what is potentially
most notable about Agambens method: the way in which philosophical and esoteric
discussions happening often far from power somehow have a hold over the history of
the West, which in turn makes the philosopher a key, powerful figure for confronting
what is embedded and originary in that history. Thus, our hope is less to be found in
263
any praxis than in theorizing correctly the origins in theological history of our com
mon lota lot circumscribed rather succinctly to a particular history of Western theo
logical and philosophical sources. This may indeed explain Agambens insistence on
Aristotles thought thinking itself in Il Regno e la Gloria (274).
108. Ibid., 3137.
109. Ibid., 275.
110. Ibid., 15556.
111. Ibid., 158.
112. Ibid., 159.
113.Ibid.
115.Agamben, Homo Sacer, 110. See, for example, Laclaus Bare Life or Social
Indeterminacy?, 1122, and Rancires Hatred of Democracy, 54.
116. Ziarek, Bare Life on Strike, 90.
120. Ibid., 11.
121.Agamben, The Coming Community, 101.
122. He writes in What Is the Contemporary?: The contemporary is he who
firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its
darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure. The con
temporary is precisely the person who knows how to see this obscurity, who is able
to write by dipping his pen in the obscurity of the present (Agamben, What is the
Contemporary?, 44). For these reasons, he continues a bit later, contemporaries are
rare. And for this reason, to be contemporary is, first and foremost, a question of cour
age, because it means being able not only to firmly fix your gaze on the darkness of
the epoch, but also to perceive in this darkness a light that, while directed toward us,
infinitely distances itself from us (Ibid., 46).
123. Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, 2324, my emphasis.
124. Profane objects, Agamben argues, were removed from free use and trade
among humans: they could neither be sold nor given as security, neither relinquished
for the enjoyment of others nor subjected to servitude (Agamben, What Is an
Apparatus?, 18).
127.Agamben, Profanations, 88.
128. Ibid., 88.
129.Agamben, Means without End, 114, trans. mod.
130.Ibid., 94, my emphasis.
132.Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, 22.
133. She argues, revolt...as return/turning back/displacement/change,
constitutes the profound logic of a certain culture I would like to revive, namely
European culture, and whose acuity seems quite threatened these days....The
future, if it exists, depends on it (Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 45). Lets be clear on the
264
stakes: In fact, if such a cultureagain, the European culture of revoltdid not

exist, life would become a life of death, that is, a life of physical and moral violence,
barbarity (Kristeva, Sense and NonSense of Revolt, 67). All this as we have become
wholly organic, an ensemble of organs as patrimonial subjects incapable of critical
thought (Ibid., 30). And thus we have here, in all its classical rigor, a functioning chain
of dualisms, Europe and barbarity, life and death, psyche and body, that would found, in
this noopolitics, a revolt that can revolt against anything but this cultural foundation.
134.He writes, Those acceding to irresponsibility cannot take its conse
quences seriously....They are stripped not merely of critical consciousness, but of
consciousness itself: they become nothing more than a brain, living in a structural
Idontgiveadamnism (Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and Generations, 43). Stieglers
book, needless to say, is a work of political pedagogy, one that champions processes of
individuation that produc[e] unity in the social body [his emphasis], at the national
(and perhapstomorrow, one might hopeEuropean) level (Ibid., 69).
135.Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and Generations, 53, his emphasis. See my
review of this work, which is cited in the bibliography.
136. Ibid., 35.
139. Ibid., 82.
141.Ibid.
145. For a discussion of this link, see Birmingham, On Violence, Politics, and
the Law.
146. See my Change We Cant Believe In, where I discuss recent consider
ations of the event in light of Adrian Johnstons contributions.
148.A full thinking of this passage would require a lengthy rereading of
Benjamin, especially his early work on messianism and violence. Christina Smerick
provides a succinct summary of Benjamins arguments about pure language and pure
violence: Human beings have claimed for themselves only a pale copy of powerbe
it linguistic, violent, or bothand then have quickly forgotten the source of this copy
[God]. Human beings take violence itself, even as a mere manifestation, and make it
about law again; they use their anger or their power, ultimately, to threaten others and
keep them under law. However, the force and power of God does not threaten. Like
his Word, it acts immediately. When God speaks, the act of creation occurs simulta
neously with his speaking. When God acts, there is no threat; there is only the act
itself, which immediately has its intended effect (Smerick, Between the Garden and the
Gathering, 82).
149.Agamben, State of Exception, 8788, my emphases.
152. Ibid., 92.
153.Agamben, The Time that Remains, 3641.
NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX
265

155. Ibid., 25.
156. Ibid., 50, 58.
157. Ibid., 21, 26.
159. Ibid., 6.
160. Ibid., 10.
161. Ibid., 4.
165.Ibid.
168. Ibid., 79, trans. modified.
169.Agamben, Homo Sacer, 54, my emphasis.
171. Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: A Life, 30.
172. Ibid., 43.
173. Ibid., 129.
174. Ibid., 122.
176. Ibid., 121.
177. Ibid., 11821.
179. Ibid., 274; Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1074b35.
181.Derrida, Negotiations, 248.
183.Ibid.
184.Naas, Derrida from Now On, 60. See also, for the fullest development of
Derridas logic of survival, Martin Hgglunds Radical Atheism, especially chapter 1.
187.iek, The Universal Exception, 313.
188. Ibid., 313.
189. Ibid., 325.
191. Ibid., 14.
CHAPTER SIX. Derrida and the

Limits of Sovereigntys Reason
2.Ibid., 145.
3.Ibid., 142.
266

5.Derrida, La bte et la souverain, Vol. 1, 114.
6.Ibid.
7.Derrida, Paper Machine, 119; see also Derrida, For What Tomorrow..., 90.
The shape of Derridas particular readings of sovereignty take different shapes, and for
continuity with the earlier chapters of this book, I cannot reflect on what dominates
Derridas discussion in his last lecture courses, namely, on the one hand, the relation
between sovereignty and figures of animality (200102), and, on the other, the rela
tion between suppositions of sovereignty and the becomingworld of mondialisation
(200203).
9.Nancy, La cration du monde ou la mondialisation, 160.
10. Ibid., 156.
11. Ibid., 16061.
12. Ibid., 148.
13. Ibid., 149.
14. Ibid., 15253.
15. Ibid., 145.
17.Nancy, La cration du monde ou la mondialisation,168.
18. What will become clear as I review the recent work of Derrida, especially
Rogues, is that Derrida is not simply championing the rogue as a countersovereignty,
or even a democracy that would be nothing other than what he calls a voyoucracy,
a rule by rogues, since this too, as he makes clear, has its own law of force and force of
law that is the mark of sovereignty. I underline this because I fear that Derridas inter
est in Rogues may lead some to champion the rogue, when in fact Derrida valorizes the
rogue as part of a deconstructive maneuver that will turn the figure of the rogue, of
the voyou, back upon those who call all others a rogue, specifically the United States
and its proclamation of certain regimes as rogue states. For an excellent discussion of
this part of Rogues, see Bill Martins Are there Rogue Philosophers? Derrida, at Last.
19.Nancy, La cration du monde, 167, my emphasis.
20. Derrida, Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul, 276.
21.Derrida, Specters of Marx, 59.
22.Derrida, For What Tomorrow..., 5253.
23.Derrida, La bte et le souverain, I, 102.
24. Ibid., 113.
25. Ibid., 114.
26. Derrida, Force of Law, 248.
28. Ibid., 282.
29. Ibid., 257.
31.Naas, Taking on the Tradition, 165, my emphases.
32.Derrida, The Gift of Death, 66.
33. Ibid., 71.
34.Ibid.
267
35. Ibid., 67.

36. Ibid., 85.
37. Ibid., 70.
38.Derrida, The Gift of Death, 96.
41. Ibid., 22.
42. Ibid., 25.
43. Ibid., 40.
44. Ibid., 41.
45. Ibid., 38.
46.Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 105.
47.Derrida, The Other Heading, 41.
51. Ibid., 44.
52. Ibid., 23.
53.Derrida, La bte et la souverain, 402.
54.Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, 4, 66.
57.Ibid.
58. Cited at ibid., 90.
59.In The Sense of the World, for example, Nancy argues for a thinking of fra
ternity that would name the very relation, the spacing of the common, between liberty
and equality. A deconstructive politics, he says, requires an additional element beyond
justice, liberty, and equality. One could perhaps call this additional element fraterni
ty if it were possible to conceive of fraternity without father or mother, anterior rather
than posterior to all law and common substance. Or if it were possible to conceive of
fraternity as law and as substance: incommensurable, nonderivable...in the dissolu
tion of the Figure of the FatheralreadyDead and his Thanocracy (JeanLuc Nancy,
Sense of the World, 115).
61. Ibid., 4550.
62.Ibid., 114. Derrida had already expressed this concern in The Politics of
Friendship, 4648.
63.Nancy, Experience of Freedom, 16869.
65. Ibid., 58.
66. Ibid., 60.
67.Nancy, Experience of Freedom, 170.
69.Derrida, Paper Machine, 139.
70.Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 103.
71. Ibid., 105.
268
NOTES TO CONCLUSION
72.Ibid.
74. Ibid., 67.
75.Ibid.
77. Ibid., 97.
78. Martin, Are there Rogue Philosophers?, 154.
80. Derrida, For a Justice to Come, 268.
81.Derrida, Specters of Marx, 11112, my emphases.
84. Ibid., 83.
85.Derrida, The Other Heading, 80.
86. Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, 87.
CONCLUSION
1. Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, II, 30.
2. Ibid., II. 30.
3. Ibid., II, 31.
4.Ibid.
5.Ibid.
6. Hughes, Bandit.
7. Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, 632.
8. Macintyre, Why Clovis Still Divides France.
9.Le Monde, 1819 February 1996.
10. Le Monde, 5 April 1996. See also Susan Terrios Crucible of the Millenium?
The Clovis Affair in Contemporary France, especially 44954.
11. LExpress, 24 November 1994.
12. LExpress, 24 November 1994; also cited in Terrio, Crucible of the
Millenium?, 452.
13. Cited in Terrio, Crucible of the Millenium?, 453.
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Winwar, Frances. JeanJacques Rousseau: Conscience of an Era. New York: Random
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Martins, 1964.
Woodward, Bob. Bush at War. New York: Pocket Books, 2003.
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INDEX
Abeille, Louis-Paul, 252n6

abjection, 121, 192, 278
Abraham, 212216, 227
absolutism, 12, 102, 183185
Aeneas, 5960, 68, 243, 281
Agamben, Giorgio, 3, 10, 14, 2425,
44, 51, 64, 7071, 81, 87, 91,
101, 106109, 113, 115, 128, 131,
142143, 150152, 161199, 202,
205206, 209, 228
Aguiliers, Raymond d, 4
alienation, 3738, 47, 75
altermondialistes, 92
Althusser, Louis, 3739, 195
anarchic/anarchism, 65, 75, 8182, 99,
8586, 112, 148, 185
Apollo, 8, 133
aporia, 48, 119, 214, 214220, 225
appositions, 92, 108, 110, 232
Aquinas, Thomas, 180, 183
archaeology, 24, 6465, 79, 81, 91,
114, 132, 140
archaic, 68, 97, 152, 164168, 172,
174, 179, 196
arche, 5355, 7881, 202
Aristotle, 3132, 36, 58, 73, 7680,
8384, 8788, 91, 137, 152,
168169, 181, 196, 198199, 202,
219, 228
auctoritas, 24, 98, 147
autarkeia, 71, 90, 91, 165, 196, 202
autoaffection, 71, 196
autoimmunity, 6, 19, 25, 71, 154, 203
204, 215216, 218219, 225226,
231232
banlieues, 231232
Baudelaire, Charles, 1, 3, 25, 237n58
Benjamin, Walter, 2, 119, 129,
156157, 168, 177, 182, 190191,
195
Bentham, Jeremy, 126
biopolitics, 132, 139, 142143,
169174, 181183
bios and zoe, 14, 69, 76, 83, 9192,
152, 165, 168169, 174, 180182,
188, 190, 196, 245n29
bios theoretikos, 69, 7677, 83
Birmingham, Peg, 6465, 243244n2
Bloch, Marc, 9
Bodin, Jean, 1112, 44, 82, 205, 235
Bossuet, Jacques-Bnigne, 12
Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 4, 6, 89,
1113, 1523, 131137, 142, 153,
228, 230231, 233n5
Badiou, Alain, 23, 29, 100, 198, 239n6

banausic, 74, 91
Dante (Durante degli Alighieri), 71,

8385, 183, 248n88
Caligula, 178
capitalism, 67, 8990, 99100,
102103, 141, 188, 190, 204205,
223, 232
Carroll, Lewis, 7
Celan, Paul, 274
Cicero, 171, 176
Clausewitz, Carl von, 137
Clovis, 48, 10, 1213, 1621, 34, 58,
227232
Connolly William, 3435
conquest, doctrine of, 1617, 2122
counternarratives, 132
countersignature, 5051
Critchley, Simon, 29, 100
283
284
INDEX
deconstruction, 25, 52, 54, 58, 187,

194195, 201, 206, 208209, 212,
217229
see also grammatology
Delamare, Nicolas, 146
DeLillo, Don, 3031
DeMan, Paul, 239n25
democracy, 6, 16, 23, 25, 3132, 36,
46, 50, 58, 78, 88, 92, 99, 194, 202,
206207, 216228
demos, 23, 36, 50, 71, 7778, 206, 217,
219222, 226
see also democracy
Demosthenes, 88
depoliticization, 91, 186, 208
Descartes, Ren, 109
determinism, 15, 89, 117, 156, 178,
186, 207
Diderot, Denis, 8, 233n5
diffrance, 5355, 5859, 198, 221, 225
dispositif, 115116, 118119, 138140,
144, 146, 150, 166, 180
divinity, 2, 6, 40, 71, 85, 122, 138,
159, 167, 169171, 173, 175177,
179, 182, 184, 190191, 196, 204,
215
Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, 19, 236n47
Durantaye, Leland de la, 179
Eichmann, Adolf, 107
Elden, Stuart, 137, 237n51
Enlightenment, 8, 11, 64, 114, 118,
160, 205
equality, 56, 21, 23, 29, 32, 41, 46,
63, 72, 7879, 86, 88, 110, 123,
147, 157, 201202, 205207, 211,
220222, 224, 232
Ereignis, 161
eschatological, 188, 224
exceptionalism, 23, 1315, 2122,
27, 32, 37, 40, 44, 4548, 108, 141,
164169, 171185, 195196, 203,
210
exousia, 1112, 219
see also freedom
fabulation, 12, 7, 9, 22, 30, 96, 134,

230232
faith, 213215, 228229
Fanon, Franz, 245n19
fas, 170, 176
fasces, 170, 172, 184
Festus, Sextus Pompeius, 170, 172173
fetishism, 33, 195
feudalism, 1819, 122, 124125, 144
finitude, 65, 92, 163165, 168, 177,
198, 205
Flaccus, Verrius, 172173
Flynn, Thomas, 234n10
Fontaine, Jean de La, 22, 96, 137,
237n55
foreign legislator, 29, 3941, 46, 76
forgiveness, 207
formalisms, 3, 22
Fowler, W. Ward, 171172
fraternity, 63, 206, 210, 215216,
220222, 225, 232
freedom, 6, 1112, 1617, 19, 21,
2325, 2830, 32, 4142, 4647, 51,
53, 64, 70, 7273, 7679, 8688,
9091, 93, 98, 104105, 111112,
117, 122, 135, 137, 140, 157160,
183, 190, 192, 201202, 206208,
211212, 214, 216221, 225226,
230232
see also exousia
Freud, Sigmund, 221
fhren, 147149
functionalization, 75, 92, 207, 212
futurity, 82, 85, 92, 230232
Garrard, Graeme, 238n3
Gaullists, 230
genealogy, 8, 18, 24, 5455, 64, 118,
131135, 140143, 146, 149, 159,
167, 173, 179180, 184, 186, 189,
201, 232
gerere, 8485
Gestell, 74
gift, logic of the, 22, 4344, 47, 6162,
103, 105, 151, 196, 199, 207, 214, 220
INDEX
gladiators, 177
globalization, 11, 89, 220, 232
glory (gloria), 22, 2930, 171, 180186,
188, 190, 196
governmentality, 108, 113114, 119,
131, 137, 139146, 156159, 180,
184
grammatology, 5154, 56, 224
see also deconstruction
Gregory of Tours, 34, 68, 227
habeas corpus, 181
Habermas, Jrgen, 11, 23
Hadot, Pierre, 71
Hebrews, the, 16, 145, 147, 215,
235n26, 256n30
hedonism, 174
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 10,
25, 51, 101, 181, 257n71
hegemony, 63, 209, 216, 224
Heidegger, Martin, 74, 161164, 189
Herodotus, 77, 79
heteronomy, 54, 201, 207, 221, 225
hierarchization, 5354, 70, 79, 89, 123,
147, 153, 205
see also arche
historicism, 136, 156
Hitler, Adolf, 63, 104, 147149
Hobbes, Thomas, 12, 15, 32, 41, 44,
108, 122, 205
homelessness (Heimatlose), 8892,
9597, 106
see also superfluidity
homo economicus, 141
homo faber, 23, 6971, 7375, 7779,
83, 8691, 98, 112, 140, 156
homo sacer, 24, 162, 165180, 184186
see also vir sacer
homophilia, 222
hospitality, 207211, 220, 224, 231
hubris, 88, 92
hyperbole, 161165, 185, 189, 194199
idiotes, the, 77
ignominia, 176
285
immanentism, 15, 23, 42, 48, 60, 127,

163164, 179, 183, 209, 218, 253n10
immunity, 137, 141, 153154, 196,
203, 225
see also autoimmunity
imperium, 12, 15, 20, 5960, 63, 71,
142, 172, 176178, 184
incalculable, the, 63, 8788, 98, 110,
209211, 220
indecidability, 10, 53, 182, 216218,
223, 225
inoperativity, 187188, 190, 194196
instrumentalization, 69, 7375, 144
ipseity, 55, 71, 208, 218219, 225
Islam, 2, 215, 230232
iteration, 117, 197, 228229
Janicaud, Dominique, 63
Johnston, Adrian, 264n146
jouissance, 58, 194, 196
Juridical power, 28, 113, 128129,
131135, 138, 147, 151, 155160,
169, 172, 196
Kafka, Franz, 194
kairos, 187
Kant, Immanuel, 1, 74, 103, 195, 198,
202
Kantorowicz, Ernst, 1, 3, 7, 25,
123124, 184, 205, 233n1, 254n40
Kelly, Christopher, 243n144
khra, 226
Kierkegaard, Sren, 67, 213215
kratos, 23, 36, 78, 220221, 226
Kristeva, Julia, 189, 263n133
kurios, 1112, 7677, 80
Kyle, Donald, 177
Laclau, Ernesto, 101, 186
Lacey, W. K., 261n58
Latinization, 8384
Latinus, King, 5960, 68
legitimation, 3334, 4748, 57, 82,
122, 129, 133, 202205
Leninism, 191
286
INDEX
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 5254

Lex Pompeia, 259n25
liberalism, 14, 19, 48, 75, 140, 144
Livy, 176
Locke, 6, 41, 140141
Louis le Grand, 13, 19, 122, 133,
235n18
Lycurgus, 39
Machiavelli, Niccol, 183
madness, 47, 116, 118121, 129130,
159160, 210, 213
Maistre, Joseph de, 35, 240n29
Markell, Patchen, 248n88
Martin, Bill, 223224, 266n18
Marx, Karl, 1, 67, 69, 75, 118, 191,
223224
Mercier, LouisSbastien, 238n3
messianism, 25, 165, 187, 190191,
194196, 224225
microphysics, 114
Miller, James, 238n3
Mohammed, 234
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, 4, 8, 33, 234
Moreno-Ocampo, Jos, 9596, 110
Moses, 212
Mount Moriah, 214215, 221
Mournier, Jean Joseph, 238n3
multitude, 42, 47, 75, 7778, 84, 103,
136137, 232
mysticism, 4, 6, 910, 40, 100, 104,
107, 154, 180, 185, 215
Naas, Michael, 910, 49, 197, 211
212, 234235
Nambikwara, 5354
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 23, 2829, 40,
100101, 141, 205206, 218221,
267n59
natalism, 18, 23, 202, 206, 232
natality, 2324, 65, 81, 83, 8586, 93,
96, 112, 208
nationalist/nationalism, 7, 1819, 21,
30, 33, 39, 100105, 135137, 142,
202, 206, 231232
Nazism, 147148, 155156, 175, 182, 222

Nealon, Jeffrey, 115
neoliberalism, 2, 139140, 159
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6667, 173, 234,
244, 260, 272, 275
nihilism, 87, 93, 178, 188189, 212
nominalism, 138, 163
nomos, 70, 78, 86, 92, 109
noopolitics, 186194, 196199, 242n92
normalization, 72, 114, 127, 135, 138,
148, 153
oikonomia, 24, 70, 77, 80, 91, 142,
179180, 182, 184187, 189, 204
omnipotence, 6465, 79, 8789, 9697,
103, 106, 111
ontotheology, 218
Owl of Minerva 2, 2526, 113
paideia, 67
panopticism, 127127, 138, 150
parousia, 198
parricide, 170171
partage, 8, 20, 203, 214
Pascale, Blaise, 40
Pateman, Carol, 241n75
pedagogy, 23, 1820, 23, 3941, 48,
59, 61, 114, 135, 138, 143, 183, 212
performative, 810, 39, 112, 204, 218
phantasm, 911
pharmakon, 40
Pindar, 169, 180181
Pinel, Philippe, 120, 126, 253n24
pity, 23, 101103
Plato, 11, 30, 40, 51, 56, 6768, 71,
7680, 98, 145, 147, 152, 184, 189,
202, 205, 216, 219
Plautus, 170, 172
polymorphism, 119, 124, 132
Popper, Karl, 30, 60, 243
potentiality, 8485, 136, 199
potestas, 60, 84, 147, 151, 171172,
175, 215
praxis, 12, 66, 69, 74, 76, 7982,
8487, 92, 103, 152, 158, 164166,
191, 195196
INDEX
Priam, 133
profananation, 167, 169, 171172,
175178, 182, 190, 193194
prosthesis, 16, 24, 134, 182, 185, 196,
202, 207208
psychoanalysis, 1, 71, 124125
Pufendorf, Samuel von, 143
quietism, 84, 109, 116, 165, 201, 226
racism, 8, 24, 100, 114, 131, 135, 141,
150, 153156, 223, 231
Rancire, Jacques, 18, 157, 186
refugees, 8890, 96, 99, 101, 104,
106107, 110
representationalism, 29, 5153, 55,
5759
republicanism, 30, 59
responsibility, 8, 73, 81, 93, 107, 109,
189, 207, 209, 211, 214, 217, 225
Ricoeur, Paul, 35, 103, 251n60
Robespierre, Maximilien, 101102
rogues, 31, 109, 216, 222, 231232
royal thesis (thse royale), 8, 13, 1922,
133134
sacratio, 172, 175
sacred, 4, 6, 10, 12, 29, 34, 4244,
4647, 57, 59, 67, 167170,
172173, 175176, 180, 182, 188,
215, 239
safety, 11, 14, 32, 4446, 57, 74, 101,
105, 141, 145146, 151
salut, 14, 41, 105, 108, 146, 148
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 223
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 5253, 56
Schmitt, Carl, 6, 11, 1315, 2122, 24,
29, 33, 36, 44, 108109, 142143,
146149, 151, 162, 167169, 179,
183184, 188, 193
secularization, 91, 147
security, 11, 4344, 46, 57, 70, 7374,
78, 99, 101, 105, 109, 117, 135, 137,
139141, 143146, 150152, 219
see also safety; salut
Sheth, Falguni, 156
287
Shklar, Judith, 32, 101

Sieys, Emmanuel Joseph, 136137,
148, 255n88
Simon, Rene, 233n5
Smerick, Christina, 264n148
Socrates, 23, 50, 71, 76, 152
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 63
souci de soi, 7172
Spinoza, Baruch, 1516, 32, 41, 233235
Stiegler, Bernard, 189, 239n32,
264n134
superfluidity, 65, 67, 7475, 9597,
102103, 109110, 190, 195
Tacitus, 165166, 176
thanatopolitics, 150, 155
thaumazein, 50
Thierry, Augustin, 4, 121, 142, 146
Thrasymachus, 23
torture, 130, 160
totalitarianism, 49, 51, 64, 6768, 88,
97, 100, 104, 156, 174, 186
undeconstructible, 207
utilitarianism, 95, 13940, 152
vase of Soissons, 37, 1718, 228, 231
Velasquez, Diego, 119
ventriloquism, 59
vir sacer, 176177
see also homo sacer
Virgil, 59, 243
Virno, Paul, 235n27
vita activa, 6669
vita contempliva, 66, 69, 80, 196
Voltaire (Franois-Marie Arouet), 8, 230
Westphalia, Treaty of, 3, 12, 237
Willis, Francis, 120122
Wright, J. K., 236n47
Yoo, John, 281
Zamoyski, Jan, 256n110
Ziarek, Ewa, 186
iek, Slavoj, 198
s e r i e s i n
F r e n c h
T h o u g h t
Philosophy
Following up on the fables and stories surrounding political sovereigntyonce

theological, now often nationalistPeter Grattons The State of Sovereignty takes aim at
the central concepts surrounding the post-9/11 political environment. Against those
content to conceptualize what has been called the sovereign exception, Gratton
argues that sovereignty underwent profound changes during modernity, changes
tracked by Rousseau, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, and Derrida. Each of these thinkers
investigated the fictions and illusions of claims to sovereign omnipotence, while
outlining what would become the preeminent problems of racism, nationalism, and
biopower. Gratton illustrates the principal claims that tie these philosophers together
and, more importantly, what lessons they offer, perhaps in spite of themselves, for those
thinking about the future of politics. His innovative readings will open new ground
for new and longtime readers of these philosophers alike, while confronting how their
critiques of sovereignty reshape our conceptions of identity, freedom, and selfhood. The
result not only fills a long-standing need for an up-to-date analysis of the concept of
sovereignty but is also a tour de force engaging readers in the most important political
and philosophical questions today.
Peter Gratton is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the coeditor (with John Panteleimon Manoussakis) of Traversing the
Imaginary: Richard Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge.
A volume in the SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought

David Pettigrew and Franois Raffoul, editors
SUNY
P R E S S
new york press
S U N Y
S U N Y
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T h o u g h t

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Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity

The State of Sovereignty

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought

David Pettigrew and Franois Raffoul, editors

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

State University of New York Press

State University of New York Press, Albany

For Brad, father and son

Arendts Archaeology of Sovereignty 63

The World is at Stake: Sovereignty and the Right to Have Rights 95

Torturing Sovereignty: Foucaults Regicide in Theory 113

What More Is There to Say?: Agamben and the Hyperbole

Derrida and the Limits of Sovereigntys Reason: Freedom, Equality,

on Foucault and biopower were published in Critical Review of International

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

Sovereignty has proved exceptional in the philosophical and political

The Vase of Soissons and the Lessons of Sovereignty

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

Image 1: A fourteenth-century depiction, from the Grandes Chroniques de France, of

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

messenger, but he cherished a hidden wound in his breast. [A]t

The Noble Thesis and the

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

More than a thousand years after Gregory of Tours recorded Clovis

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

not the enduring lesson, beyond Hegels masterslave dialectic, of Rousseaus

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

policy of calculated grandeur.19 The absolute sovereignty of Louis XIV

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

sovereigntys selfdefinition. Schmitt argued that the exception is related

the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

Returning to the scene of the sovereign imposition, Boulainvilliers remarks,

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

to whether Boulainvilliers was a liberal in the classical sense.42 While those

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

Boulainvilliers argument forms, as his contemporaries noted, a vicious circle

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

temporary occupation is a land appropriation that founds an order. In world

Where Sovereignty Lies Today

from Socrates questioning of Thrasymachus to Rousseaus discussions of the

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

us than Agambens paradigmatic method suggests. Moreover, Agambens

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

Rousseau and the Right of

It is always a danger for a writer on a particular figure to overemphasize his

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

ROUSSEAU AND THE RIGHT OF LIFE AND DEATH

from them, was perhaps the first thinker of community, or more

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

the very people whose sovereign activity ought to be already underway. It

The State of Sovereignty

ROUSSEAU AND THE RIGHT OF LIFE AND DEATH

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

moment of sovereignty as such, aside from the governmental form? Thats

ROUSSEAU AND THE RIGHT OF LIFE AND DEATH

Schmitts critique of Rousseau, since his popular sovereignty seemed to leave

Contracting the Sovereign

THE STATE OF SOVEREIGNTY

ROUSSEAU AND THE RIGHT OF LIFE AND DEATH

this paradox: the law of conquest, as such, is selflegitimizing, and doesnt