Sovereignty, Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment (original) (raw)
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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.
Cultural Anthropology, 2017
, the day of Donald J. Trump's inauguration as president, anthropologists across the United States organized a series of read-ins. The chosen text? One of Michel Foucault's lectures from Society Must Be Defended (see Jaschik 2017). Paige West and J. C. Salyer (2017), who initiated the effort, explained that they had decided on this text because "it demands we simultaneously consider the interplay of sovereign power, discipline, biopolitics and concepts of security, and race." The popular anthropology blog Savage Minds, as well as the journals American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, and Environment and Society, gave positive coverage to the event and, implicitly, to West's and Salyer's chosen text. Clearly, Foucault's work on sovereignty has made a lasting imprint on the field of cultural anthropology. His theorization of sovereignty in the context of a transformation in the exercise of power in the eighteenth century-when "biopower," focused on the life of individual bodies and populations, became distinct from the legal and political mechanisms of sovereign power-has proven critical to the field. Furthering Foucault's concept of biopower, Giorgio Agamben (1998,
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/
Annual Review of Anthropology, 2006
Sovereignty has returned as a central concern in anthropology. This reinvention seeks to explore de facto sovereignty, i.e., the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity. The central proposition is a call to abandon sovereignty as an ontological ground of power and order in favor of a view of sovereignty as a tentative and always emergent form of authority grounded in violence. After a brief account of why the classical work on kingship failed to provide an adequate matrix for understanding the political imaginations of a world after colonialism, three theses on sovereignty-modern and premodern-are developed. We argue that although effective legal sovereignty is always an unattainable ideal, it is particularly tenuous in many postcolonial societies where sovereign power historically was distributed among many forms of local authority. The last section discusses the rich new field of studies of informal sovereignties: vigilante groups, strongmen, insurgents, and illegal networks. Finally, the relationship between market forces, outsourcing, and new configurations of sovereign power are explored.
On the Elusive Subject of Sovereignty
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Sovereignty'' confounds, and the fate of the ''subject'' thus appears uncertain. Thus, sovereignty is perpetually rethought by critical philosophers, borders perpetually reconceptualized, and the ''political subject'' perpetually resurrected from abandonment. In this essay, I present a different, decolonial, view of sovereignty as a philosophical invention. I begin by identifying three incommensurable conditions of subject-beingness: the precarious citizen-subject, the abject subject of ''exceptional'' bans, and the trans-territorial subject of ''exemptional'' license. Rather than aberrations, these are co-constitutively regulated and enforced by the invention of sovereignty that constructs the materialities of differentiated subject-beingness within a global biopolitical regime of (b)ordered bodies-within(/out)-territory based on the incommensurable rationalities of license, containments, and bans. The aim of this correction to the philosophy of sovereignty is to further the tasks of denormalizing the coloniality of (b)ordering that has captured, emplaced, and banned imaginations of being(-otherwise). Conversely, a decolonial philosophy normalizes the oppositions to sovereign presents and naturalizes the many witnessed refusals and rejections of the present normalities of violence and dispossession. To deinvent sovereignty is to therefore re-invent philosophy as decolonial praxes.
Law and sovereignty are equivocal terms with competing definitions. Sovereignty can refer to coercive state power or a human being's right to self-determination. In international law sovereignty usually means legalized state autonomy, but that definition is misleading, as state power relies either on domination or cooperation in order to "feel" like sovereignty. Agamben's analysis of sovereignty as the "nomos of the west" gives us the hard case against saying sovereignty can stand also for human self-determination. But his definitions of law and sovereignty are too narrow to sustain his theory. Constable's meditation on the silence of justice in modern law counters Agamben, and demonstrates why sovereignty, despite its ties to coercive state power, still holds out resources of freedom and selfdetermination that no one can afford to forego.