The State of Sovereignty

Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity

Peter Gratton

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781438437842
  9781438437859
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438437866
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Considers the problems of sovereignty through the work of Rousseau, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, and Derrida.

Following up on the fables and stories surrounding political sovereignty-once theological, now often nationalist-Peter Gratton's 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.

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 subject's 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 philosophy stands is that which has been laid, if at times less than carefully, by Jean-Jacques 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 Rousseau's thought is the basic question of the political: 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 oft-used in Rousseau's 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? Rousseau's Social Contract is a thorough and tightly argued set of answers to each of these questions, and one misses the systematic machinery operative in this argumentation—a rigor all the more remarkable given the sprawling nature of his other texts from this period—at the peril of leaving unthought what Rousseau has left to teach us regarding the state of sovereignty.

Rousseau's 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 others. 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 Rousseau's commitment to thinking another meaning to the question of living together. “If Rousseau's contract has a sense beyond the juridical and protective limits to which its now dated concept confines it,” Jean-Luc 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 communauté désoeuvrée), a community divided by its self-displacement, 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 engendered 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) intimacy—a 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 from them, was perhaps the first thinker of community, or more exactly, the first to experience the question of society as an uneasiness directed toward the community, and as the consciousness of a (perhaps irreparable) rupture in this community.⁵

Rousseau does not simply critique sovereignty's self-glorification 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 activity—in a word, its sovereignty—is 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 being-with not reducible to the political,⁷ it is on Rousseauistic ground that they stand. As such, writers following Schmitt in depicting Rousseau's work as a “secular theology” tout court should recognize that Schmitt's dictum offers little but a reductive truism concerning the trajectories of Rousseau and Rousseauism.

As we proceed, we will emphasize Rousseau's claim that sovereignty is always “active” and is thus a performance and practice of the very living and breathing of the body politic.⁸ Indeed, this activity, based on a “convention” of this “body with each of its members”⁹ is “absolute, sacred, and inviolable,”¹⁰ and cannot give itself over to representation. The activity 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 sovereignty's self-glorification, and the pure actuality of the sovereign, Rousseau demonstrates, necessitates a supplemental fiction uniting the very people whose sovereign activity ought to be already underway. It is this conceptualization of an already-united people that is the necessary fiction—theological in provenance, perhaps, but not reducible to it—that 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 genealogies 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 DeLillo's 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 Rousseau's 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 [entraîner] 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 Jean-Jacques, 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 activity, long after the masses of the imperial era and the mobs of the totalitarian twentieth century, to borrow the categories provided by Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, are viewed less as the liberating possibilities of the political 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 Aristotle viewed democracy as nothing but the rule of the mob, the rule of rogues), but nevertheless, despite the clichés and empires built around popular sovereignty and liberty—liberating others since they are unable to do it themselves, that is, forcing others to be free—it 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 Rousseau's 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 ready-made 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 impossibility of government by the people since “civil society is always too populous 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 commissions 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 governance, 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 govern...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Rousseau and the Right of Life and Death over the Body Politic
• Chapter Two: Arendt's Archaeology of Sovereignty
• Chapter Three: “The World is at Stake”: Sovereignty and the Right to Have Rights
• Chapter Four: Torturing Sovereignty: Foucault's Regicide in Theory
• Chapter Five: What More Is There to Say?: Agamben and the Hyperbole of Sovereignty
• Chapter Six: Derrida and the Limits of Sovereignty's Reason: Freedom, Equality, but Not Fraternity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography