Narrative Negotiations of Sovereign Power in ‘King Rother’

2019 ◽  
pp. 299-312
Author(s):  
Seraina Plotke
Keyword(s):  
Sovereign Power

Simone Weil

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrice Marovich
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Intellectual Curiosity ◽  
Creation Theology ◽  
Simone Weil

Few of Giorgio Agamben’s works are as mysterious as his unpublished dissertation, reportedly on the political thought of the French philosopher Simone Weil. If Weil was an early subject of Agamben’s intellectual curiosity, it would appear – judging from his published works – that her influence upon him has been neither central nor lasting.1 Leland de la Durantaye argues that Weil’s work has left a mark on Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality, largely in his discussion of the concept of decreation; but de la Durantaye does not make much of Weil’s influence here, determining that her theory of decreation is ‘essentially dialectical’ and still too bound up with creation theology. 2 Alessia Ricciardi, however, argues that de la Durantaye’s dismissal of Weil’s influence is hasty.3 Ricciardi analyses deeper resonances between Weil’s and Agamben’s philosophies, ultimately claiming that Agamben ‘seems to extend many of the implications and claims of Weil’s idea of force’,4 arguably spreading Weil’s influence into Agamben’s reflections on sovereign power and bare life.

Foucault as Superauthor

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-125
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Main Motivation ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Phase ◽  
Lecture Courses

Three phases in Foucault’s examination of authorship and free speech were essential to him throughout his life. They can be linked to such texts as the three lectures “What is an Author?” (first phase), “What is Critique?,” and “What is Revolution?” (second phase), and the two lecture courses, “Fearless Speech,” and “The Courage of Truth” (third phase). Initially, Foucault merely describes the founders of discursivity (hence, “superauthors”), among whom he reckoned only Marx and Freud, as the sole alternative to his own conceptualization of the author function, which is exhibited en masse in contemporary society. He then modifies his views on superauthorship by making Kant the paradigm and by linking his own concept of free speech to a Kan-tian critical attitude. However, Foucault claims only the half of Kant’s philosophical legacy that is related to the study of the ontology of the self.The article advances the hypothesis that the sovereign power of speech, which can be found in Marx and Heidegger and in generally in the concept of “superauthorship,” becomes unacceptable for Foucault. During the third phase, the danger of a tyrannical use of free speech compels Foucault to make a number of fruitful but questionable choices in his work. He focuses on a single aspect of free speech in which a speaker is in a weaker position and therefore has to overcome his fear in order to tell the truth. Foucault associates this kind of free speech with the ancient Greek notion of parrhesia, which according to his interpretation means “fearless speech”; however, this reading is not always supported by the ancient Greek sources. Foucault’s deliberations bring him to the radical conclusion that free speech transforms into performative “aesthetics of existence.” Foucault’s main motivation for pursuing this line of thought all through his life was to investigate his own abilities and powers as an author

The Proper Order of Things

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather L. Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
General Practice ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Power ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Regional Power ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Administrative Practices ◽  
Proper Order ◽  
Textual Authority ◽  
Territorial Control

The Proper Order of Things demonstrates how early modern Ottoman territorial control, both in general practice and in the specific contexts of Greater Syria and occupied Hungary, was enabled through the creation of a particular web of textual authority. The book therefore focuses attention on an Ottoman paper trail of legal edicts, administrative reports, and reflective treatises that extended the jurisdiction of sovereign power through an evolving textual corpus. This corpus sublimated anxieties of fragmented regional power to assertions of imperial universalism. Formalized registers and circulated protocols fostered the development of a trifecta of imperial order: the emergence of an elite administrative class defined in and through an emerging court bureaucracy; the circulation of a documentary corpus of edicts that promulgated and registered imperial supremacy via a specific idiom of power; and the establishment of a dynastic linguistic and legal medium that defined the shape, even if it did not control the content, of intellectual activity, speculative inquiry, and literary stylizations. The Proper Order of Things thus argues that a link between territorial and textual authority also formalized a particular discourse that became the means by which the Ottoman establishment managed distance and organized diversity into an ordered system of state power. This discourse created a particular orientation to authoritative texts and bridged the divide between conceptual or ideological frameworks and administrative practices.

Homo homini tigris: Thomas Hobbes and the global images of sovereignty

2021 ◽  
pp. 019145372110330
Author(s):  
Sandro Chignola
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Logical Framework ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Global Space ◽  
Lines Of Force

This article addresses the modern concept of sovereignty as a multivocal and conflictual semantic field, arguing for the necessity to trace its genealogy based on the structural tensions that haunt its logical framework – as well as its representations – rather than on a linear historiographic reconstruction. In particular, the scrutiny I propose aims to examine a series of exchanges that have been characterizing this concept since the beginning: the global and the European, the maritime and the territorial, the colony and the state, the imperial and the proprietary. The problematic balance between ‘imperium’ and ‘dominium’ is indeed assumed here as the turning point of the rise of a sovereign power that appears to be originally rooted in the very production and governance of the global space, thus giving up all possible Eurocentric narratives of modernity. To illustrate my argument, I focus on the frontispieces to three of Thomas Hobbes’s most important books, that is, his translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, De Cive and Leviathan. A thorough analysis of these images enables us to understand how these lines of force traverse the very heart of modern European political concepts, along with the mirroring effects that constantly bounce their normative construction of subjectivity back and forth from the periphery to the centre and, ultimately, from the market to the state.

scholarly journals (In)coherent subjects? The politics of conceptualising resistance in the UK asylum system

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
Sarah M Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Grounding Resistance ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
The Uk

Many accounts of resistance within systems of migration control pivot upon a coherent migrant subject, one that is imbued with political agency and posited as oppositional to particular forms of sovereign power. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the role of creativity within the UK asylum system, I argue that grounding resistance with a stable, coherent and agentic subject, aligns with oppositional narratives (of power vs resistance), and thereby risks negating the entangled politics of the (in)coherence of subject formation, and how this can contain the potential to disrupt, disturb or interrupt the practices and premise of the UK asylum system. I suggest that charity groups and subjects should not be written out of narratives of resistance apriori because they engage with ‘the state’: firstly, because to argue that there is a particular form that resistance should take is to place limits around what counts as the political; and secondly, because to ‘remain oppositional’ is at odds with an (in)coherent subject. I show how accounts which highlight a messy and ambiguous subjectivity, could be bought into understandings of resistance. This is important because as academics, we too participate in the delineation of the political and what counts as resistance. In predetermining what subjects, and forms of political action count as resistance we risk denying recognition to those within this system.

Believe in the Border, or, How to Make Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century Maghrib

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 83-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brock Cutler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Levels Of Abstraction ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Territorial Claims ◽  
Frontier Zone ◽  
Environmental Relations

The Algerian-Tunisian frontier zone was much contested in the late nineteenth century, defying the logic of modernity that sought to establish territoriality. This modernity appeared only through an imbrication of raids, warfare, environmental shifts, and competing territorial claims. The violence of the territorial process, the changing geography of sovereignty, and uncertain frontier delimitation: these and other elements challenge the image of modernity arising in a fixed territory according to a linear chronology. This article argues that modernity in the Maghrib, seen through the lens of territory, is a temporally and spatially variable process: “modern” sovereign power existed only at certain levels of abstraction and within certain environmental relations. To consider modernity in the Maghrib, we will have to see how claims of sovereignty and the process of territorialization were understood by actors operating on local, regional, and imperial scales.

scholarly journals Xenophobia and Collective Violence in South Africa: A Note of Skepticism About the Scapegoat

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 119-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonny Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
Foreign Nationals ◽  
The Us

Abstract:This article examines differing explanations for violence against foreign nationals in post-apartheid South Africa. It argues that the most compelling analyses in the scholarship draw from a family of arguments in the global literature that locates popular violence against outsiders within the context of declining sovereign power, explaining theatrical displays of force against enemies within as attempts at the retrieval of that power. To the extent that these arguments rely on the concept of a scapegoat, they are inadequate. More analytical attention needs to be paid to the scene of the encounters between the “us” and the “them” of collective violence.

scholarly journals The Revenge of Sovereignty on Government? The Release of Neoliberal Politics from Economics Post-2008

2021 ◽  
pp. 026327642199945
Author(s):  
William Davies
Keyword(s):  
17Th Century ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Liberal Societies ◽  
Liberal Government ◽  
The Relationship

Liberal government, as analysed by Foucault, is a project of measured, utilitarian political activity, that takes ‘population’ as its object, dating back to the late 17th century. The rise of nationalism, authoritarianism and populism directly challenges this project, by seeking to re-introduce excessive, gratuitous and performative modes of power back into liberal societies. This article examines the relationship and tensions between government and sovereignty, so as to make sense of this apparent ‘revenge of sovereignty on government’. It argues that neoliberalism has been a crucial factor in the return of sovereignty as a ‘problem’ of contemporary societies. Neoliberalism tacitly generates new centres of sovereign power, which have become publicly visible since 2008, leading to a dramatic resurgence of discourses and claims to ‘sovereignty’.

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