Sovereignty, Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment (original) (raw)
Sovereignty Between Law, Politics, Aesthetics
For the last three years I have taught a course called “Sovereignty in Law, Theory and Culture” for final year undergraduate students, cross listed for both law and arts students. The course takes a transdisciplinary approach and has drawn on a variety of literary and theoretical materials in an effort to unpack sovereignty. I have experimented with different “primer” texts for the first session of the semester – including essays by Wendy Brown, Dieter Grimm and Martin Loughlin – but have generally found that they enter into a discussion about sovereignty at a level of detail that students tend to find off-putting; especially those with no prior experience of law or political theory. Moreover, I couldn’t find any accessible text that introduces the concept by reference to its legal, political and aesthetic aspects; the latter, in particular, being something that the course examines. Instead of using a stand-alone academic article or book chapter, this year I decided to write an extended introduction to the course. This is it.
Sovereignty continues to be a significant issue for political theorisation. In particular, the question of sovereignty's adherence to and resistance against specific ideological forms and interventions remains debated. Many of these political deliberations assume the constitution and contours of sovereignty to be a sovereign moment. However, in retrospect, there appears to be an act of sovereignty by the subject as part of a wider collective movement. Although Agamben and Santner seek ways to escape the idea of sovereignty being framed as necessarily oppressive, there are moments in which sovereignty still appears as desirable. This article considers this conundrum through two scenarios: the exposition of smoking as a mundane, individual sovereign pleasure, and the recent #metoo movement as collective sovereign suffering. In order to situate a discussion of sovereignty that departs from complete resistance to or escape from it, a recourse to Lacan's concept of extimacy informed by Schmitt's public interest as rule of law is vital. Sovereignty then reveals itself as a concept and practice caught up with jouissance of the foreignness of extimacy which itself relies on the invisible Other for cogency. Both upon recognition of sovereignty and in anticipation of it, jouissance and anxiety are harnessed in a process that demands acting against the law. Sovereignty is thus necessarily grounded in extimacy, a principle which although separating the subject from its context also apprehends it as obedient to the law. In staging the sovereign moment as one of anxiety and joussiance this article argues that although the concept of sovereignty may today be little more than an illusion, we nevertheless continue to pursue it.
Sovereignty Inalienable and intimate
Sovereignty , 2016
A curatorial essay for the Sovereignty catalogue that accompanied the exhibition Sovereignty held at ACCA-Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2016-2017. A major survey exhibition focusing upon contemporary art of First Nations people of South East Australia. Sovereignty: Max Delany 'ACCA is proud to present Sovereignty, a major exhibition focussing upon contemporary art of First Nations peoples of South East Australia, alongside keynote historical works, to explore culturally and linguistically diverse narratives of selfdetermination, identity, sovereignty and resistance. Taking the example of Ngurungaeta (Elder) and Wurundjeri leader William Barak (c.1824–1903) as a model – in particular Barak’s role as an artist, activist, leader, diplomat and translator – the exhibition presents the vibrant and diverse visual art and culture of the continuous and distinct nations, language groups and communities of Victoria’s sovereign, Indigenous peoples. Sovereignty brings together new commissions, recent and historical works by over thirty artists, celebrating the continuing vitality, resilience and ingenuity of Indigenous communities and their cultural practices. Developed in collaboration with Paola Balla, a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara artist, writer and curator, Sovereignty is based on a consultative, collaborative curatorial model, and draws upon the knowledge and expertise of an advisory group encompassing elders, artists and community representatives, to assist our aims for the curatorial process to be informed by First Nations communities, knowledge and cultural protocols. In this sense, Sovereignty is conceived as a platform for Indigenous community expression, and is accompanied by an extensive program of talks, forums, screenings, performances, workshops, education programs and events. Sovereignty is structured around a set of practices and relationships in which art and society, community and family, history and politics are inextricably connected. A diverse range of discursive and thematic contexts are elaborated: the celebration and assertion of cultural identity and resistance; the significance and inter-connectedness of Country, people and place; the renewal and reinscription of cultural languages and practices; the importance of matriarchal culture and wisdom; the dynamic relations between activism and aesthetics; and a playfulness with language and signs in contemporary society. Balla, Paola (2016) Sovereignty: Inalienable and intimate. In: Sovereignty : 17 December 2016-26 March 2017. Balla, Paola and Delany, Max, eds. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, pp. 13-17 Curators:Paola Balla & Max Delany. ISBN-13 9780994347244 https://content.acca.melbourne/uploads/2017/03/Sovereignty-Catalogue.pdf https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/sovereignty/
Conventional modernist thinking about sovereignty in the academic fields of political theory and international relations sees the world as divided into neat blocs of space or territories over which states exercise mutually exclusive control and authority. Within this broad conception of sovereignty, two more specific understandings can be distinguished: a Hobbesian account, that defines a state by its borders and the obligations of its subjects to it because of the protection it affords them, and a Lockean account, that gives a state's citizens a stronger role in terms of the state's obligations to them, particularly with respect to the provision and
Sovereignty as magnanimous agency
Jurisprudence, 2025
The aim of this paper is to explore the notion of collective agency entailed by the theory of popular sovereignty. After examining criticisms of its classical formulation and critiquing Habermas's interpretation, the article argues that modern conceptions of agency restrict our ability to recognise a form of collective action capable of sustaining the theory. Responsibility is often limited to individual attitudes, leading to alienation from our actions and weakening the collective dimension essential to sovereignty. To address this, the article draws on Robert Brandom's proposal of a postmodern, magnanimous form of agency, where the intelligibility of actions depends on shared responsibility, extending beyond individual purposes to socially and retrospectively determined governing intentions. This approach introduces a norm-instituting, law-authorising form of collective agency that preserves the radically democratic essence of classical sovereignty theory and defends against the criticisms directed at it.
Sovereignty, Affect and Being-Bound
If ever it left us, sovereignty has returned. The protectionist and nativist instincts that helped propel Donald Trump into office have been felt throughout the Western world as new nationalisms have forced themselves into the political mainstream. The promise of post-national identities, global flows of people and capital, and the weakening of the 'bright lines' of state control have been met by a forceful resistance that foregrounds local interests and concerns, often depends on ethnically defined notions of identity and clings fervently to nationalistic histories and modes of belonging. Whilst we might dismiss some of these movements as being motivated by atavistic fears of difference, there is a powerful sense that the events of 2016 represent the high watermark for the form of turbo-charged globalisation let loose as the Berlin Wall fell and the 'new world order' took hold in the early 1990s. As Kyle McGee argues, the West is suffering from a loss of both 'place' and 'land' as the dual forces of globalisation and global warming put extant forms of attachment to locale and community under erasure (McGee 2017). In such conditions, the allure of sovereignty with its promise to 'take back control', as the Brexit campaign had it, is quite understandable. If 'waning sovereignty' (Brown 2014) has accompanied these 'twin vertigos of placelessness and landlessness' (McGee 2017), its recent revival offers – some would believe – a line of defence against the forces of globalisation and increasing precarity. Against this background we engage with the theme of obligation in two ways. Firstly, we explore the ways in the which juridically enforceable obligations installed and defended by modern constitutional sovereignty are crucial to giving shape to the affective life of a community. We approach sovereignty through the sentiments that it produces – or claims to produce – and the particular effect that it has in enframing the world and giving scope to a sense of our political attachments and modes of belonging. We dwell on the sensibilities associated with sovereignty and on how the mobilisation of the rights and duties associated with the protection of sovereignty affectively enframes the way a political community attaches to place, past and an imagined future. Published text available in Law, Obligation, Community (Routledge, 2018).