Drawing Imperial Lines: Sovereignty and Tacitus’ Germanicus

This essay focuses on Germanicus’ performance of sovereign power in Tacitus’ Annales 1-2. That power is seen in the differentiation of citizen from non-citizen and Roman territory from non-Roman territory. Roman violence in Germany contrasts with Germanicus in the East. There he recognised a shared history and community. Sovereign power required a recognition of the sovereign by the citizen and of the citizen by the sovereign. An individual’s membership and a territory’s place within the Roman Empire depended not on innate characteristics but political negotiation. Ancient political geographies gave primacy to the political rather than the territorial in determining citizenship.

Witnessing Violence, Witnessing as Violence: Police Torture and Power in Twentieth-Century India

Police custodial violence was a normal occurrence in the southern Indian province of Madras through the twentieth century, across the colonial and postcolonial periods alike. While governmental authorities attributed torture to individual deviants and the press attributed the practice to a lack of government will in punishing offenders, this article locates police impunity in broader structures of power that permeated society. Specifically, it shows how the deployment of seemingly objective forms of evidence in adjudicating cases of torture—the testimony of respectable persons, medical expertise, and police writing—discounted the voices of victims of violence, reaffirming instead policing’s alignment with class, caste, and gendered authority. Equally, the very act of witnessing produced some subjects as socially privileged by virtue of their respectable status, their expertise, or their literacy, further separating them from bodies that were vulnerable to state violence. Police sovereign power within the station was thus constituted in conjunction with disciplinary power across society.

“Sovereignty, territory, and the legitimacy of the international order”

In The Shifting Border, Ayelet Shachar (2020) argues that the exercise of sovereign power through border regimes no longer tracks territorial boundaries. In my commentary, I first argue that Shachar’s analysis implicitly calls into question the legitimacy of the international order. I then raise the worry that the logic which severs the link between the exercise of sovereignty and territory is the same logic that can be used to justify injustice and atrocity such as ethnic cleansing. Shachar’s normative proposals do not sufficiently recognize or guard against this risk.

Dematerializing Sovereignties in The Character of Holland and The Loyal Scot

This paper argues that in The Character of Holland and The Loyal Scot, Marvell consistently meditates on the nature of political sovereignty, especially regarding its perils and shortcomings. By ventriloquizing republican propaganda and monarchical ideology in these poems, Marvell creates a space where he can stage and then dematerialize these absolutist forms of power. Marvell demonstrates how the debate regarding union and division in each poem is really an argument about the nature and potential excesses of sovereign power. He does this by constructing a poetics in which his delineations of the political, as well as his own provisional status as an author, call into question the various formations of national identity put forward in these early and late satires. By entangling the political and the aesthetic, Marvell is able to imagine deeper, more abiding kinds of human attachment that transcend national boundaries and limit the exercise of sovereign power.

Sovereign Power, Government and Global Liberalism’s Crisis

Abstract: For some time now a leading cause of debate among IR scholars has been the so-called Liberal International Order (LIO) and its assumed crisis. This article pierces this debate from a critical perspective asserting that different conceptions and analytics of power allow diverse questions on and diagnoses of liberalism in the global realm. With this objective, it confronts Ikenberry’s conception of LIO with the Foucauldian notion of liberalism. This is done by identifying the conception of power that underlies each notion of liberalism, assuming the former as performative. This way, it first defines two different conceptions of power: sovereign and governmental. Second, it links Ikenberry’s conception of LIO with the sovereign conception of power and points out the political and analytical effects of this relation, mainly, the hierarchical character of LIO and the consequent desire for a West-led world. Third, it develops Foucault’s conception of liberalism linked to governmental power and establishes some of its political and analytical effects: the importance of a heterarchical notion of power focused on the dimension of subject and subjectivity for the analysis of the present, and the political need to reflect on our practices of freedom.

The Hidden Law of Selfhood: Reading Heidegger's Ipseity after Derrida's Hospitality

Despite his wide-ranging and incisive engagement with Heidegger's thought across his career, Derrida seems to have written very little about Heidegger's Ereignis manuscripts, which, according to many commentators, constitute the place where Heidegger's thinking comes closest to Derridean deconstruction. Taking up Derrida's comments in Hospitality 1 on the figure of ‘selfhood’ ( Selbstheit) in Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, this essay argues that this dense but important moment of engagement with the Ereignis manuscripts reveals the extent to which Heidegger's thinking of selfhood, in spite of its fundamentally relational character, remains thoroughly determined by ipseity, the philosopheme that links selfhood, possibility, and sovereignty within the metaphysics of presence. Beginning with a reconstruction of the link between power and selfhood in Derrida's thinking of ipseity and a close-reading of the key passage in Hospitality 1, the essay then turns to Heidegger's engagement with Hölderlin to show both the depth of Heidegger's commitment to a relational thinking of selfhood and the philosophical and rhetorical safeguards by which he ensures that the relations of difference that constitute the self continue to function in the name of the ipseity, understood as the very Ur-form of sovereign power.

"Practical Dialectics", or the Laws of History and the Sovereign Power of the Paradox

Статья посвящена анализу предложенного А.Л. Юргановым генезиса сталинской «практической диалектики». Отталкиваясь от полемики «механистов» и «диалектиков», Юрганов прослеживает становление такой диалектической структуры, где решающее значение имеет суверенная воля модератора. «Борьба на два фронта» – это логическая машина, которая всегда обеспечивает выигрыш тому, кто ее запускает. В статье эта «машина модерации» сопоставляется, с одной стороны, с размышлениями Карла Шмитта и Джорджо Агамбена о суверенитете и чрезвычайном положении, а с другой – с идеей Бориса Гройса о советской власти как о торжестве «медиума языка» над «медиумом денег». В финале намечается дальнейшая перспектива исследования роли этой машины в позднесоветских условиях. The article is devoted to the analysis of the conception of the genesis of Stalin's "practical dialectics" proposed by A.L. Yurganov. Starting from the polemics of "mechanists" and "dialecticians", Yurganov traces the formation of such a dialectical structure, where the sovereign will of the moderator is of decisive importance. A “fight on two fronts” is a logical machine that always wins for the one who launches it. The article compares this "moderation machine", on the one hand, with the thoughts of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben about sovereignty and a state of emergency, and on the other, with Boris Groys's idea of Soviet power as the triumph of the "medium of language" over the "medium of money." In the finale, a further perspective is outlined for researching the role of this machine in late Soviet conditions.

A Farewell to Homo Sacer? Sovereign Power and Bare Life in Agamben’s Coronavirus Commentary

The article addresses Giorgio Agamben’s critical commentary on the global governance of the Covid-19 pandemic as a paradigm of his political thought. While Agamben’s comments have been criticized as exaggerated and conspiratorial, they arise from the conceptual constellation that he has developed starting from the first volume of his Homo Sacer series. At the centre of this constellation is the relation between the concepts of sovereign power and bare life, whose articulation in the figure of homo sacer Agamben traces from the Antiquity to the present. We shall demonstrate that any such articulation is impossible due to the belonging of these concepts to different planes, respectively empirical and transcendental, which Agamben brings together in a problematic fashion. His account of the sovereign state of exception collapses a plurality of empirical states of exception into a zone of indistinction between different exceptional states and the normal state and then elevates this very indistinction to the transcendental condition of intelligibility of politics as such. Conversely, the notion of bare life, originally posited as the transcendental condition of possibility of positive forms of life, is recast as an empirical figure, whose sole form is the absence of form. We conclude that this problematic articulation should be abandoned for a theory that rather highlights the non-relation between sovereign power and bare life, which conditions the possibility of resistance and transformation that remains obscure in Agamben’s thought.

Modular sovereignty and infrastructural power: The elusive materiality of international statebuilding

This article uses the example of the Mogadishu International Airport zone and takes a spatio-temporal lens to explore how (sovereign) power unfolds in international interventions that aim at building a sovereign state. I show that the Mogadishu International Airport zone emerges as an elastic frontier zone that contradicts the sovereign imaginary intervenors aim to project and undermines many of the taken-for-granted boundaries that states tend to produce. The Mogadishu International Airport and similar zones emphasize the centrality of logistics and circulation in interventions, but also point towards their temporal and liminal character. Modularity became the material answer to the demand to secure circulation while adapting to the rapid rhythm and short timeframes of statebuilding. Modular designs enable the constant adaptation of the intervention terrain, allow intervenors to deny their power and imprint and facilitate the commercialization of supply chains and intervention materials. Sovereign power that operates through such zones becomes modular itself. It is exercised as an adaptable, in parts exchangeable, and highly mobile form of power that operates through crises and emergencies. The spaces and materials created by modular forms of sovereign power remain elusive, but nonetheless stratify experiences of power and security.

Biopolitical turn in the Law: from the legal and institutional model to the biolaw

Relevance. Since the XVIII century, there has been a gradual qualitative transformation of sovereign power in the course of the formation of a biopower based on the regulation of natural processes inherent in the population. At the turn of the XX–XXI centuries, biopolitics as an authoritative organization of the life of the population became the dominant management model. At present, numerous biopolitical tools carry out the construction of the social. Objectives. The purpose of the article is to explicate the process of transformation of the legal and institutional model of regulation of public relations inherent in sovereign power into biolaw as a tool for regulating public relations carried out by biopower. Results. In the course of the study, the process of the formation of biolaw, which arises on the basis of the already established system of legal and political regulation due to its modification by biopolitical means of medicalization, normalization, identification, criminal biopolitics, is considered. As a result of the steady biopolitical intervention in the regulation of the life of the population, the lex-law as a system of legal norms expands to nomos-law focused on a sample of the natural order, correlative to the constructed norms of human life as a biosocial being. Conclusions. Biopolitics in the process of formation radically transforms the social, including legal relations. Biolaw is a system of flexible tools for regulating social relations, tending to the model of the natural order. Biopolitical regulation is steadily replacing the traditional legal and political management model.