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Sovereignty as its Own Question: Derrida's Rogues

Article  in  Contemporary Political Theory · November 2008

DOI: 10.1057/cpt.2008.24 · Source: OAI

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 Contemporary Political Theory, 2008, 7, (361–375)
r 2008 Palgrave Macmillan 1470-8914/08
www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt

Sovereignty as its Own Question: Derrida’s

Rogues
Nick Mansfield
Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia.
E-mail: nick.mansfield@scmp.mq.edu.au

This paper attempts to provide, through a reading of Derrida’s Rogues, an account

of the political phenomenon where regimes of sovereignty are resisted in the name
of the very values — freedom, democracy and human rights, for example — they
purport to stand for. To Derrida, sovereignty must simultaneously conform to a
logic of both self-identity and of unconditionality. However, the unconditionality
that makes sovereignty possible will always threaten and exceed it, something that
other accounts like Agamben’s try implicitly to deny. In the end, for Derrida, our
present political challenge is to recognize, and even affirm, the way the
unconditionality of sovereignty is turned against itself. Sovereignty, then, is most
effectively dealt with not by imagining a world in which it will no longer occur, nor
by simple opposition, but by committing to the very logic of sovereignty itself.
Contemporary Political Theory (2008) 7, 361–375. doi:10.1057/cpt.2008.24

Keywords: Derrida; Agamben; sovereignty; post-structuralism; power

By now, we all know how it goes: sovereignty is the power to decide on the
state of exception, ‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault,
1980, 138), to include the soft body in the hazardous fury of unquestionable
rule by excluding the subject from the protections of civic identity. Sovereignty
is the unaccountable power of someone to decide who lives and who dies
(Mbembe, 2003) where and when, the mentally ill, the racially other, the
subaltern, the asylum seeker, the illegal combatant. Power pathologizes the
vulnerable, annihilates the undefended, vilifies the angry and discontent and
ridicules dissent. Given all this, who will speak today in defence of sovereign
power, or power at all, someone who wants to know the possibility, even the
necessity of power, yet does not want to protect it from critique or rationalize
away its crimes? Who will concede power’s criminality, yet still see in it a
vehicle of political movement? Who could do such a thing, when power is only
known as what fills the camp, divides the settlement, justifies the occupation,
terrorizes the community, derides the race, takes away, holds still, carves out,
tunnels through, papers over and walls in? Critical thinking has a dream of a
life beyond sovereignty, where it will be an object of mere amusement ‘just as
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children play with disused objects’ (Agamben, 2005, 64), but not a plan for
embracing power. This paper will analyse Derrida’s account of sovereignty in
Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, in order to argue that it is only through, and by
embracing, sovereign power itself that sovereignty can be questioned
effectively, and question it we must. What will emerge is not a clean
uncompromised sovereignty to which we should commit, but a model not only
of a sovereignty whose very constitution requires it to be challenged, but also
one that only arises in the service of values that themselves exceed and ruin it.
The challenge to power then must pursue sovereignty’s own legitimation to its
end, and assume sovereignty’s own power in order to deal with it. We live in an
era when wars fought on behalf of democracy and human rights are opposed in
the name of democracy and human rights, where only the fight for freedom
obstructs civic freedoms. This should not be seen necessarily as a confrontation
between false and legitimate renditions of iconic concepts, or even the cynical
spin of power against the persistent rigour of dissent. Instead, what is revealed
is the complex dynamic of sovereign power itself, whose very processes of
legitimation are the path it pursues to its ruin.

1.
Let us start with an account of Derrida’s argument in Rogues. Rogues is a
discussion of the identity of reason. In Derrida’s account, there is in reason’s
ideology — the identity it projects of itself — an impulse towards
homogenization. This drive to unity in reason follows what Kant has named
reason’s implicitly architectonic nature. Kant used this implicit homogeniza-
tion to adjudicate the antinomies of reason in the first Critique, preferring
thesis to antithesis because it preserved reason’s architectonic priority. Yet,
according to Derrida, to insist now on this drive to the rationalization of
reason would be at the expense of what has been revealed by the historical
development of thought, which has allowed ‘plural rationalities. Each of these
has its own ontological ‘‘region,’’ its own necessity, style, axiomatics,
institutions, community, and historicity’, which therefore ‘resist, in the name
of their very rationality, any architectonic organisation’ (Derrida, 2005, 120).
To homogenize these various rationalities, in the name of Kant’s intuition of
the unity of the world as a regulative idea of reason, would be to do them
‘violence by bending their untranslatable heterogeneity’ (120–121), to betray
the very particularity of their rationality, and thus their very ‘enlightenment’
(121). What is at issue in the insistence on the pluralisation of reason, then, is a
certain regulative idea of the world as a unity, one that feeds the development
of the thinking of globalization. It is this idea that must come into question,
and doubt.
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The thinking of the unity of reason also identifies a telos that prohibits
or is at least incapable of recognizing the singular event that interrupts or
defies the logical unfolding of necessary and inevitable directedness. Derrida
writes:
Whenever a telos or teleology comes to orient, order and make possible a
historicity, it annuls that historicity by the same token and neutralises the
unforeseeable and incalculable irruption, the singular and exceptional
alterity of what y comes, or indeed of whoy comes, that without which, or
the one without whom, nothing happens or arrives. (p. 128)
History identified as a coherent and knowable patterning directed at an end
that both fulfils and terminates it, precludes the specificity and irregularity of
the events that make history possible in the first place. Teleological history
does not allow for that which makes history happen. Teleology then aligns
itself with the architectonics of reason underpropped by the regulative idea of
the world. A single world, a knowable end and a unified reason: this complex
defines that which is challenged by the plurality of reasons. The plurality of
reasons in turn has been the result of a certain history that has allowed
different constructions of reason, different zones and paradigms to proliferate.
So, what challenges the complex of one-world teleological reason is the
singularity of the event.
This confrontation gets to the very heart of the logic of reason itself, and not
in a simple dichotomous fashion. Derrida asks himself:
It will be a matter for me of asking whether, in thinking the event, in
thinking the coming [venir], the to-come [avenir] and the becoming
[devenir] of the event, it is possible and in truth necessary to distinguish
the experience of the unconditional, the desire and the thought, the exigency
of unconditionality, the very reason and the justice of unconditionality,
from everything that is ordered into a system according to this
transcendental idealism and its teleology. In other words, whether there is
a chance to think or to grant the thought of the unconditional event to a
reason that is other than y the classical reason of what presents itself or
announces its presentation according to the eidos, the idea,% the ideal, the
regulative Idea or, something else that here amounts to the same, the telos.
(p. 135)
Thinking beyond the unity of the regulative and teleological world-idea opens
a reason that accommodates the unconditional event, because it is a thinking of
unconditionality.
This thinking of a reason beyond reason, a reason of the unconditional event
over and above a reason of the regulative idea, invokes a reason beyond the
conditionality of the hypothetical. The original meaning of the hypothetical
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was as the foundation or principle in question, the very conditions and logic by
way of which something could be reasoned. Derrida writes:
The rationality of reason is forever destined, and universally so, for every
possible future and development, every possible to-come and becoming, to
contend between, on the one hand, all these figures and conditions of
the hypothetical and, on the other hand, the absolute sovereignty of the
an-hypothetical, of the unconditional or absolute principle. (p. 136)
The introduction of the word ‘sovereignty’ here raises the stakes of the
discussion, and radically complicates them. The linking of the unconditional
with sovereignty ‘recall[s’ (p. 136) a ‘quasi-inaugural’ (p. 137) moment in Plato,
the moment when the question is posed or a demand made to take ‘knowledge
as power’ (p. 137). Behind local or conditional reason lies an unconditional
super-reason, therefore, one that bequeaths all our reasons to us, but is itself
beyond reason, looming in and as a sovereignty that
is the superpowerful origin of a reason that gives reason or proves right
[donne raison], that wins out over [a raison de] everything, that knows
everything and lets everything be known, that produces becoming or genesis
but does not itself become, remaining withdrawn in an exemplary,
hyperbolic fashion from becoming or from genesis. It engenders like a
generative principle of life, like a father, but it is not itself subject to history.
(p. 138)
The consequence of this understanding is that there is an irreducible
alliance between sovereignty and unconditionality, one that is not restricted
to the theory of reason, but is part of the logic of sovereignty in general. In
the most important political formulations of sovereignty, Derrida argues,
especially those like Schmitt’s that identify sovereignty with the power
of exceptionality, sovereignty is understood in terms of an inalienable
unconditionality.

2.
Architectonic, one-world thinking of reason, therefore, is only made possible
by a sovereign unconditionality that exceeds it. ‘Calculative reason (ratio,
intellect, understanding) would thus have to ally itself and submit itself to the
principle of unconditionality that tends to exceed the calculation it founds.
This inseparability or this alliance between sovereignty and unconditionality
appears forever irreducible’ (p. 141). Yet, a problem emerges here. Sovereignty
is being aligned with unconditionality, yet sovereignty is also a figure of
identity, of self-same-ness. Earlier in Rogues, Derrida has presented the logic of
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sovereignty in relation to circularity. Sovereignty is imagined as a turning, and

a return to the self-same point. It emerges in the return of the self-same to itself,
as the pure fundamental logic of ipseity:
The turn, the turn around the self — and the turn is always the possibility of
turning round the self, of returning to the self or turning back on the self, the
possibility of turning on oneself around oneself — the turn turns out to be it.
The turn makes up the whole and makes a whole with itself; it consists in
totalising, in totalising itself, and thus in gathering itself by turning towards
simultaneity; and it is thus that the turn, as a whole, is one with itself,
together with itself. (p. 12)
The selfsame is what it is because it arrives at itself, at its very point of
departure. After going out, it comes back, and here it is! It is this logic that
underwrites the self-sameness of the sovereign, which is this same circle of
ipseity. Democracy is a form of sovereignty relying on the ipseity, the self-
sameness of the people:
This sovereignty is a circularity, indeed a sphericity. Sovereignty is round; it
is a rounding off. This circular or spherical rotation, the turn of the re-turn
upon the self, can take either the alternating form of the by turns, the in turn,
the each in turn y or else the form of an identity between the origin and the
conclusion, the cause and the end or aim, the driving cause and the final
cause. (p. 13)
Sovereignty then is both a logic of the selfsame and of unconditionality. Its
complex claim to absolute authority resides in its ability to combine in an
aporetic manner, on the one hand, the logic of incalculability and
unconditionality, which lies beyond measurable identity and denotable activity
with, on the other, the stability of revealed and resolute self-identity. In fact, its
authority lies in this very ability to intervene in the world as a logic of stable
law while seeming to withdraw from it into an immeasurability beyond
interrogation, a state of exception.
Unconditionality thus collaborates with the logic of self-sameness of ipseity
that defines sovereignty, making reason possible, as the contingent and
conditional mechanism through which sovereignty becomes operable. The
problem for sovereignty nevertheless is that this impossible identity between
sovereignty and unconditionality will always remain unstable. The very logic of
unconditionality cannot tolerate self-sameness, and will always be impelled
towards whatever undoes or exceeds it. Excess, in other words, cannot be
anything less than excessive — it cannot not exceed — and it will always reveal
what is beyond any denomination of unconditionality. In other words, if and
as unconditionality enacts itself in a regime of sovereignty, however withdrawn
and abstract, or however material and violent, there will always be
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reintroducing itself simultaneously, beyond and within the sovereign, that

which defies it.
Derrida’s discussion here can be compared to Giorgio Agamben’s work on
sovereignty. I would like now to turn briefly to Peter Fitzpatrick’s article ‘Bare
Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law’ from Andrew Norris’s
collection of essays on Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Agamben’s argument is well
known and I will only briefly rehearse it here. Agamben (Agamben, 1998)
draws on the Roman legal figure of the ‘homo sacer’ in order to generalize
about the nature of Western political power. Homo sacer was a figure that,
according to Agamben, suffered a double exclusion; the term identified a
person whose life could be taken by anyone without this homicide amounting
to sacrifice. The homo sacer was thus excluded from both law and the sacred,
yet paradoxically this double exclusion included it in the ruthless logic of law.
Homo sacer is a figure of included exclusion, therefore.
Agamben connects this figure with Foucault’s account of modern biopower,
wherein corporeal, natural or ‘bare’ life becomes subject to an administration
beyond the logic of civil and legal personhood. In Foucault, this orientation of
power towards the administration of bare life is the definitive development of
modern politics, one that he argues in, for example, Society Must be Defended,
outpaces, supplants or at least supplements traditional, legal and legitimated
sovereign power. Agamben develops Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty as the
power that operates by suspending law or exempting itself from law.
Agamben’s sovereignty is the power to decide who, like the homo sacer, will
be excluded from the protection of the law, who will have their civic identity
erased, and be reduced to the status of ‘bare life’, who, in short, will be the
exception. Those reduced to bare life are trapped within the logic of social
power by being excluded from its protections.
This sovereign power then is paradoxical. Its law most effectively operates in
the de-subjectivized zones of bare life. In other words, the law operates most
effectively where it is suspended. Yet, although this sovereign power is
paradoxical, it is not deconstructive. Its paradox is contained at the level of its
techniques. In itself, the paradox only confirms sovereignty as self-identical.
Fitzpatrick discusses how Agamben seeks to make sovereignty into a stable
quiddity that structures Western politics. ‘For Agamben sovereignty does seem
to be ‘‘[s]omething’’y structured, stable, a ‘‘materialisation’’’ (p. 64).
Yet, in its separation from accountability and law, and its claim to
exceptionality, sovereignty withdraws into an unconditioned and unaccoun-
table space before and beyond legality. By definition, it refuses all
accountability and thus any reduction to a determining pretext to which it
would remain answerable, and which would endure as its master. It must
therefore refer to what exceeds self-identity in order to be grounded. A self-
identical sovereignty, therefore, grounds its self-surety and ipseity in what is
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exempt from the logic of determination. It is this that gives it the dazzling force
that defines it. Fitzpatrick puts it this way:
[T]his revivified sovereignty can marvellously combine being determinate
with an unconstrained efficacy y it can do this without recourse to a
transcendental reference fusing these two contrary dimensions. Rather, this
sovereign power can enclose itself yet extend indefinitely, subsist finitely yet
encompass what is ever beyond it. (Fitzpatrick, 2005, 49–50)
Agamben’s sovereignty has to be both exact and wild. It is a thick and
complete instantiation, but it can only be this by evoking an unconstrainable
absolute, something exempt from its materialization’s will-to-convergence on
itself. If it did not stage this evocation, it would be merely a simple thing. Its
only authority would be the immediacy of its own force. It can only be
sovereignty by its citation of the possibility of the absolute that nothing can
simply be. Yet, because it must command a political structure, sovereignty
needs to be able to stabilize and formalize itself. It must both activate and
refuse unconditionality, even though unconditionality cannot be simply
refused.
In other words, the ipseity of sovereignty, its ability to be a self-contained
circle that is also paradoxically exempt from conditionality requires an
impossibility: an insistence on arresting the unfolding of unconditionality itself,
a suppression of the supersession necessary and inevitable in the unconditional.
Agamben’s sovereignty comes apart then: the very excess that allows and
sustains it undermines its ability to become the stable thing it needs to be in
order to be the model of Western politics. To Fitzpatrick, it is the law’s need to
be ‘responsive to what [is] beyond its determinate content’ (p. 62), to justice, in
other words, and the ‘ineradicable openness of the political, [that is] always
putting position in question’ (p. 59), where unconditionality’s challenge to
sovereignty’s will to self-identity is most manifest. It is this problem — how
sovereignty attempts to deny and foreclose the very unconditionality it depends
on — that Derrida engages with.

3.
Sovereignty can only lay claim to exceptionality by including in it that which
goes beyond it and thus turns against it. The challenge then as Derrida
identifies it is to recognize and perhaps even affirm this unconditionality turned
against sovereignty, in the name of ‘the deconstructive exigency of reason’
(Derrida, 2005, 142). In other words, if it is unconditional incalculability that
makes conditional calculability possible in the name of a sovereign self-
sameness, what is necessary is to think the thing within the unconditional that
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remains in excess of the sovereign. If unconditionality exceeds everything that

is put in place in the name of sovereignty, it must exceed sovereignty itself, even
the sovereignty with which unconditionality itself is inseparably allied. It is, as
we have seen, the unconditionality of the event-to-come that represents an
aspect of unconditionality that defies the self-sameness of sovereignty, and thus
produces an unconditionality in excess of sovereignty. Derrida writes:
It is a matter of thinking reason, of thinking the coming of its future, of its
to-come, and of its becoming, as the experience of what and who comes, of
what happens or who arrives — obviously as other, as the absolute
exception or singularity of an alterity that is not reappropriable by the
ipseity of a sovereign power and a calculable knowledge. (p. 148)
The singular event introduces into reason an alterity that always defies the
conformity of sovereignty to itself, its insistence on the authority of its own
circularity, in fact, its own circularity as authority. This would then be the
deconstructive rationalism that puts sovereignty at stake within the uncondi-
tional itself, a rationalism that has to be ‘recognised, thought, reasoned
through, however difficult or improbable, im-possible even, it might seem’
(p. 143). Sovereign unconditionality acts by subordinating any apparent
singularity to the architectonic reason of the global calculable that it licenses
and makes possible. Sovereignty is thus that within the unconditional that
forecloses unconditionality in the opening of conditionality and calculability.
The inseparable relationship between unconditionality and sovereignty then is
troubled by sovereignty’s need to make the unconditional conditional. Yet this
will-to-conditionality in sovereignty can never totally reduce the unconditional.
How could it be unconditional if this were the case? It might mutilate the
unconditional as and when the conditional opens within it, but the
unconditional cannot but remain in excess of conditionality and thus always
threatening to the sovereignty to which it is yoked. The singular event that
cannot be accommodated by the conditional re-opens the disjunction between
sovereignty and unconditionality, the impossibility in this relationship. It
cannot be reduced to the calculable and therefore defies the sovereign. It
cannot become self-identical or encourage self-identity anywhere because in its
singularity it is irreducibly other to the teleological, global and architectonic. It
pits the unconditional then against the sovereign. In short, it pits the sovereign
against itself.
What is needed to fulfil the logic of sovereignty in the name of the reason it
underwrites but that must subvert it are those circularities that do not become
circles. The two examples that Derrida provides are the gift and hospitality.
The gift, according to the argument proposed in Given Time, opens as the
alternative to the economy. Where the economy is the principle of the
accountable and knowable logic of quantifiable identification, meaningful
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exchange and self-sameness, the gift always opens in the economy the
possibility of a non-return to self. Derrida defines the economy in these terms:
Besides the values of law and home, of distribution and partition, economy
implies the idea of exchange, of circulation, of return. The figure of the circle
is obviously at the centre, if that can still be said of a circle. It stands at the
centre of any problematic of oikonomia, as it does of any economic field:
circular exchange, circulation of goods, products, monetary signs or
merchandise, amortization of expenditures, revenues, substitution of use
values and exchange values. This motif of circulation can lead one to think
that the law of economy is the — circular — return to the point of
departure, to the origin, also to the home. (Derrida, 1992, 6–7)
The economy, therefore, enacts a logic of the equal return to the same, of the
arrival at the point of departure, and of the zero-sum game. Here, identity is
measured by the security of the confirmation of what is already known. I do
not invent, encounter or overcome myself as much as I know, confirm or re-
assure myself. Yet, if the purpose of the economy is merely to re-acquaint
yourself with what you already know, what explains movement? Why go away
if all you are going to do is come back? The circularity of the economy then
must include some logic of movement that explains, perhaps even justifies, why
I simply have not stayed in the same place in the first place. Of course, if there
were no movement, there would be no circle or economy, even if the economy
only delivers us to the point where we began. There would be no circle,
there would simply be a point, and then indeed, without a zone in which
movement could be inscribed, the point itself would be meaningless. In other
words, the circle requires something that motivates movement. This is the gift,
which allows movement to arise, but only by exposure to the risk of non-arrival
at the point of departure. In other words, the opening of the possibility of
movement that allows the economy to begin the journey that will complete the
circle only occurs by exposure to the possibility that the circle will not be
completed:
One cannot treat the gift, this goes without saying, without treating this
relation to economy, even to the money economy. But is not the gift, if there
is any, also that which interrupts economy? That which, in suspending
economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange? That which opens
the circle so as to defy reciprocity or symmetry, the common measure, and
so as to turn aside the return in view of the no-return? (p. 7)
The gift then is that which opens the possibility of circularity — a circularity
identified with calculability — while including in that circularity the possibility
of its failure. The gift is a figure of unconditionality whose event the economy
seeks to annihilate (Rogues, 149).
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Similarly, there is an absolute or asymptotic hospitality that precedes and

opens the possibility of welcoming and to which every act of generosity refers
and aspires, even without ever being able to match or fulfil it. This hospitality
both opens and exceeds every specific act of welcoming. Derrida writes of ‘the
law of absolute, unconditional, hyperbolical hospitality y Let us say yes to
who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before
any identification y to give the new arrival all of one’s home and oneself, to
give him or her one’s own, our own, without asking a name, or compensation,
or the fulfilment of even the smallest condition’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle,
2000, 75–77). He contrasts this absolute hospitality with the particular
protocols of hospitality specific to every culture, ‘those rights and duties that
are always conditioned and conditional’ (p. 77). These attempts to specify the
limits of hospitality will always be challenged by the unconditional hospitality
that always exceeds them, yet to which they always refer, and which alone
justifies them.
The gift and hospitality are both figures then of the very unconditionality
that must be that aspect of sovereignty that is turned against itself. In Rogues,
sovereignty is the circle of self-sameness, pitted against the sovereign
unconditional. Translated back into the terms made available by Given Time,
sovereignty then would be in the same relation to the unconditional as the
economy is to the gift. How can sovereignty be both that which instantiates
the most economic of things, the circle, and that which would be identified with
the unconditional that exceeds the economic, allows it to move and introduces
into it the possibility of failure? How, in other words, can the unconditional be
divided between a sovereign self-identity and an unconditionality that exceeds
it? How, in short, can the unconditional be divided?
The gift and the economy require one another. There can be no economy
without the gift. The gift is in fact not an ontology, but that within the
economy that sets it in motion, yet which always challenges it. In the case of
hospitality, the Absolute Law that demands we welcome whoever turns up is in
‘collision’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000, 77) with the specific and local
laws it makes possible. That which opens that-which-is is in collision with what
it makes possible, and thus with that which it has induced, what it justifies and
what instantiates it. This is the logic of autoimmunity that is a recurrent motif
throughout Rogues, and elsewhere in late Derrida from the paper ‘Faith and
Knowledge’ on. What opens, and allows, offers to ruin what it offers, and thus
what requires it. Sovereignty is a figure of this process. It is the unconditional
that opens and is the conditional, while defying it. It fulfils and defies itself
simultaneously, like the autoimmune condition where the very system that
protects an organism also threatens it. Unconditionality cannot be divided then
but nor can it be reduced to one. The unconditionality of sovereignty can never
settle into an identity that walls out the excessiveness and unpredictability that
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allows movement in the first place. In other words, the unconditionality that
underwrites sovereignty as the state of exception must in turn make sovereignty
vulnerable to another and yet another unconditionality. There can be no
reduction of the unconditional, even when unconditionality is enacted as the
logic of power. Sovereignty then is an unconditionality vulnerable to
unconditionality. Excess cannot be arrested at a specific point and declared
finished, even when it acts. In its acts, excess is always defied by itself. It cannot
be excess otherwise. Unconditionality, analogously, gives to sovereignty its
executive power as the giver of conditions, yet this giver must in turn always
have allowed itself to be given to and to be given. This is the logic of the gift/
economy nexus. As the gift opens the economy, it withdraws to remain always
in excess of its instantiation. The economy is the action of the gift that still and
always exceeds economics. How can excess not exceed and continue to exceed,
by definition? Sovereignty, therefore, is the conditioned unconditional which
unconditionality will always exceed. The gift is Derrida’s name for that which
always exceeds. Sovereignty cannot stop at itself. It thus cannot remain
sovereignty.
The gift is that which opens the economy and sets it in motion, but it is also
that which enlarges it, and by enlarging announces the possibility of the
economy’s very limit and breakdown. Indeed it defines the logic of breakdown
as an inevitable part of the economy’s most sober operations. In Rogues,
Derrida outlines the largest version of these complex relationships by an
account of a sovereignty threatening itself in organizing its own possibility.
Derrida’s sovereignty underprops ipseity, and makes it possible, but in this
very act — because it is from an incalculable unconditionality without limit
that it descends in order to make self-sameness self-assured — it ruins ipseity.
The very thing that allows it to open ipseity will never leave ipseity unthreatened
and invulnerable.
If the sovereignty we abhor is to be undone, then, it will not be undone by
opposition, or by hope and patience, but by fuelling the logic of
unconditionality within it, that which licenses sovereignty, but remains
unstable within it. What does it mean to activate the unconditional in the
sovereign? It means always conceiving of sovereignty in relation to something
beyond it, which has brought it into being. Faithful to the indeterminacy of the
unconditional, Derrida usually gestures towards this anteriority in terms of
the aporetic logic of a democracy- or Enlightenment-to-come. Like justice in
the seminal article ‘Force of Law’, which orients law while always exceeding,
and thus eluding and threatening it, these ‘to-come’s’ demand our loyalty, and
loom as the things for whose coming we make decisions, even though we know
they will never arrive as livable historical epochs. Yet, reclaiming the legacy of
democracy and Enlightenment must always be done in full awareness that
democracy has been not only the pretext of great international crimes, but in
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some cases, even the means of them; and Enlightenment, among other things,
has done as much to license genocide, not only once, but several times, as it has
to encourage the harmonies of reason and the expanses of freedom. In other
words, commitment to an Enlightenment-to-come is commitment not to an
alternative to the rampages of power, but to that power’s very culture, as a way
of passing through it, to something better than it.
It would be naive, of course, to argue that the global sovereignty we are
imagining questioning here simply always knew itself only as the bearer of
Enlightenment and democracy. What is important, however, is not the content
of these names, but the function they perform as the meaning of the always
excessive object-of-motivation and aspiration of power. In other words,
sovereign power refers to something that is in excess of it, which it always
claims to be activating, but which it cannot contain. Any instance of the
operation of sovereign power always opens more than itself. The name given to
this undefined and excessive motivation varies: Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo
Bay operates in the name of a certain regime of law and democracy. The
Occupation of Palestinian land is done in the name of citizenship and the
defence of nationhood. Even murder in the camps was done in the name of life.
Each of these instances of sovereign power refers to something larger than
itself, perhaps unrealizable, even undefinable. What is crucial is that the
struggles against or refusal of these excesses of sovereign power are themselves
done in the name of the very thing that motivated sovereign power in the first
place. Contesting sovereignty in the name of democracy, Enlightenment values
or human rights is not then to contest sovereignty from its outside, or even to
ridicule it for its hypocrisy, but to identify that thing that has allowed
sovereignty to justify itself as the very thing that it cannot withstand. Nor is it
to identify a universal and transcendental value as the measure of human truth.
Behind these terms, and their other avatars, freedom, peace, hope, justice, life,
is not a meaning waiting to be animated, but an excess endlessly referred to and
named. In this naming is revealed the identity by which sovereignty establishes
itself in any particular instance. This identity functions not as the resting-
point of sovereignty, its justification and reason. The values it nominates are
not absolute objects of veneration, but the rhetoric by which it makes
its reference to unconditionality audible. These terms become the battleground,
not of sovereignty and that which refuses it — as refusing sovereignty is
impossible — but of sovereignty and counter-sovereignty, the possibility of
something better than present regimes.

4.
What can these observations tell us about politics? Derridean philosophy has
more commonly been seen as offering something to political discourse — the
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analysis and critique of political identities and values — but not to the practice
of politics itself, the actual pragmatic organization and distribution of social
power. This hesitation is understandable given the disastrous contribution
made by many philosophers (from Heidegger to Sartre and beyond) to politics
in modernity. Deconstruction is not alone in being political while seemingly
lacking a politics. In historical terms, this separation has meant that
philosophy has been able to offer critique but not alternatives. The logic of a
sovereignty that is self-deconstructing, however, has significant and telling
consequences for this problem. The deconstruction of sovereignty is never
separable from sovereignty itself. This means that sovereignty will always
contain within it that which can be made to critique if not ruin it. But more
important is the inverse of this insight: that which counters sovereignty — by
excess, subversion or disruption — must itself be sovereign. It is not possible to
shelter in a kind of political Manicheanism, in which power is to be
anathematized as always and everywhere a disgrace and a degradation,
something to be critiqued but not assumed. Power can only be critiqued from
power, and this power is never not being exercised. In other words, power must
be recognized in its differences. It is only possible to practice politics by
recognizing, at some level, power as a good.
How does this way of viewing sovereign power make us reconsider
contemporary politics? I want to argue that it has significant consequences
for the way in which democracy and human rights are represented in
discussions of contemporary political value. These concepts are commonly
activated as a set of non-negotiable principles, which attain their absolute
authority by reference to some image of unconditionality, an ostensibly
previously existing, if not eternally enduring, aspect of the human. This
reference to the unconditional installs in the identity of democracy and human
rights a necessary inflexibility. This inflexibility is not the unshakeability of the
essence of the human, but the necessary consequence of the reference to the
unconditional, whatever that is seen to be. It embodies a commitment that
must at some point, at least hypothetically, be insisted upon by force.
Democracy and human rights in their absolute form are thus armed concepts,
and from the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the Blair doctrine and the
Iraq War, force has consistently, if hypocritically, been used to promote them.
No taxonomy of rights, however, can satisfy unconditionality, which always
haunts the fixed principle with the memory of the processes of speculation that
produced it. Unconditionality thus guarantees and licenses the violence of
democracy and human rights, on the one hand, and critiques them, by undoing
and renewing them, on the other. Unconditionality both explains and
questions the violence of democracy. The critique of the violence of democracy
is also democracy’s becoming-violence. Not only must the critique of
democracy’s violence be prepared to be fierce in itself (otherwise it would
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not be critique, only decoration), but it must also realize that it too will
produce formulations that will in turn be promoted by violence. Yet, this
awareness cannot lead to quietism, in which we recoil in horror from
engagement with this problem. There is no politics without the risk of violence,
firstly of enduring it, but also of giving rise to it. We cannot hide from the
danger of violence, whatever position we take in relation to democracy and
human rights. Democracy and human rights must be engaged with, not as
solutions to the problem of political violence, but as themselves a problem of
political violence. Locking democracy and human rights up in absolute
principles merely conceals the problem and delays our dealing with it. These
identities need to be repeatedly debated and renewed in order to show that we
are dealing with their problem. Democracy and human rights need not only to
be at stake in contemporary politics, but at issue.
Our contemporary political landscape is littered with the rubbish of the era
of ideology, whose ‘lefts’ and ‘rights’ have evolved from forms of political
programme into mere sub-cultural identities, endlessly locked in a vacuous
culture war of reducing consequence, and increasing ridicule and abuse. What
activism there is is animated by the most general and rhetorical concepts:
justice, human rights, democracy. Our political programme has become merely
the anxious but willing opening of our faces to whatever the future might bring.
The unknown consequences of climate change expose us to an unknowable
political future and, to that extent, we must remain open to the contingency of
the ‘event-to-come’. Yet, whatever the new political context is in which we find
ourselves, it will require more than simply a highly geared patience. It will
require a renewal of our thinking of what democracy is, and the possibilities of
sovereign power that go with it. From political parties and NGO’s to academic
conferences and the internet, there is no single pure context more appropriate
than any other for the simultaneous interrogation and activation of power.
As we have seen, our most privileged political values are intensely ambiguous,
and may both enact and resist violence. We have also seen in our own
time, how the protection, even enlargement of democracy can entail the
reduction of civic rights. In a future context of resource competition and
economic unpredictability, the risks of violent and increasingly authoritarian
government acting in the name of democracy will make the problem of armed
democracy all too real. Yet this problem will not be dealt with by pretending
that there is a pure or virginal democracy somewhere uncontaminated by this
complexity. All our democracies will risk being violent, and it is this
democracy, not an unrealizable and rhetorical one, that we must take charge
of and shape.

Date submitted: 20 September 2007

Date accepted: 21 December 2007
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