Disrupting Sovereignty: Deleuze and Guattari on the War Machine

This chapter engages with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s analysis of the war machine, suggesting that it contradicts Arendt’s analysis and offers the most radical critique within the radical-juridical paradigm. Premised on the notion that we must rethink sovereignty from ontological difference rather than unity, Deleuze and Guattari radically undermine the indivisibility that defines the classic-juridical conception. Far from being located in one individual or point, sovereignty is always tied to the State, which is a multiplicity that expresses the constantly moving, fluid, and dynamic field of difference. By thinking the social world in terms of heterogeneity, Deleuze and Guattari undermine the hierarchical conception of sovereignty underpinning the classic-juridical model, but continue to implicitly insist that State sovereignty is tied to the maintenance of juridical order; an order that is always threatened by or in conflict with the war machine that disrupts it. As a consequence, they conclude that sovereign order is always far more unstable and disordered than it appears to be.

Violence and Power: Arendt on the Logic of Totalitarianism

This chapter focuses on Hannah Arendt’s claim that sovereignty is not based, as Carl Schmitt maintains, on a collective decision but on collective agreement. The chapter outlines her critique of Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s theory of sovereignty to show how she departs from the classic-juridical model, before setting out to reconstruct her own revised version of sovereignty based on an analysis of violence. Noting an ambiguity in the relationship between her earlier writings—notably a number published during the Second World War that hold violence to be an inherently political action and the Human Condition that sees violence, in the form of fabrication, as being constitutive of human action—and her later On Violence in which violence is understood to be instrumental to rather than constitutive of politics, the chapter explains the apparent contradiction through her claim that contemporary society has increasingly fetishized the means of fabrication over the end, a logic that sees all things (including humans) as pure means. To prevent this, Arendt advocates that power and violence be radically opposed. In so doing, however, she insists on an undifferentiated opposition between violence and power that was undermined by her own examples and much later thought.

Critiquing Violence: Benjamin on Law and the Divine

Focusing on Walter Benjamin’s famous critique of violence in his 1921 essay of the same title, this chapter argues that Benjamin’s distinction between divine and legal violence also points to two distinct forms of sovereignty, one internal to law and one external to it. With this, he disrupts the classic notion that sovereignty is indivisible. Tracing the relationship between the two forms demonstrates that Benjamin develops a sophisticated account of the relationship between law and violence, undermines the classic notion that violence is instrumental to (legal) sovereignty, and shows that divine sovereign violence can justifiably usurp legal sovereign violence, thereby offering the possibility of a fresh start. However, the chapter also notes the ambiguity in Benjamin’s account regarding whether divine violence can take on (non-divine) political significance to suggest that his appeal to divine violence is an attempt to develop a just order based on an ethics of responsibility, whereby he allows that we can confront legal sovereignty in the name of create a more just legal framework, but insists that we cannot ground that decision on a transcendent principle. It concludes that Benjamin’s point is that any challenge to legal sovereign violence must emanate from a pure decision that we take responsibility for.

Life Excluded from Law: Agamben, Biopolitics, and Civil War

This chapter focuses on Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopolitical sovereignty. It focuses on Homo Sacer and State of Exception to show that Agamben links sovereign violence to the establishment of a state of exception, wherein life is controlled through its exclusion from the juridical order. With this, Agamben continues the biopolitical line that sovereignty is orientated towards the regulation of life rather than the establishment of juridical order. The second part of the chapter ties this to Agamben’s discussion of civil war to argue that, contra Foucault, Agamben holds that the fundamental division marking Western politics is not a racial one, but one between oikos and polis, private and public. From this, Agamben argues that this political division makes possible and so subtends the sovereign decision to exclude individuals from law by establishing a state of exception. The key point is that Agamben links sovereign violence to life by excluding the latter from the juridical order. The chapter concludes by critically evaluating Agamben’s proposals to overcome this.

Conclusion

This chapter provides an overview of the trajectory of the argument developed throughout the book and identifies what is insightful and innovative about the bio-juridical model; namely, that it challenges the binary ‘logic of versus’ underpinning the juridical and biopolitical models to instead propose a logic of contamination wherein apparently opposing concepts and ends meld into one another. In this respect, sovereign violence is no longer tied to a singular end, pre-defined purpose, and/or means-end logic, but is rather caught between multiple ends, none of which are clear-cut or predetermined.

From Law to Life: Foucault, Sovereignty, and Biopolitical Racism

The chapter argues that Michel Foucault introduces a fundamental rupture from the classical and radical-juridical conceptions of sovereign violence by claiming that it is no longer orientated towards the establishment, preservation, or maintenance of juridical order, but is, first and foremost, orientated towards the regulation of life. In turn, this regulation depends upon the introduction of a division, which, in the 1976 lecture course Society must be Defended, Foucault identifies as a racist one that divides those deemed to be biologically acceptable from those deemed to be unacceptable. Violence is needed to save the former from the alter, with the consequence that Foucault points to a hygiene function for sovereign violence that is fundamentally different to the purpose afforded violence in juridical models.

Life and Law: Derrida on the Bio-Juridicalism of Sovereign Violence

This chapter moves from the second to third part of the book and from the biopolitical model to the bio-juridical one. The fundamental problem with the two paradigms outlined up to this point is that they set up a binary opposition between those thinkers that affirm the relationship between sovereign violence and the juridical order and those that affirm its relationship to life. The chapter focuses on Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the sovereign violence inherent in the death penalty to show that he claims that sovereign violence is not simply orientated to juridical legal order or the regulation of life through the creation of social norms, but simultaneously expresses itself through two faces—the juridical and biopolitical, or law and life—wherein the one demands and expresses the other: the juridical expression of sovereignty regulates life, whereas the sovereign’s regulation of life (and death) always takes a juridical form.

Divinity within the Law: Schmitt on the Violence of Sovereignty

This chapter examines Carl Schmitt’s claim that sovereignty is not divided between a legal and divine sovereign as maintained by Walter Benjamin; law is defined by a division between its explicit, statute form and the subtending power supporting and generating it. At the latter level, sovereignty is defined by the populace, who, living in a state of chaos, make a spontaneous and normless decision regarding its constitutional norms. At the former, constitutional level, Schmitt claims that there must always be an individual who makes the ultimate political decision regarding how to interpret and/or apply those norms. Famously, this requires that a decision be made regarding who is a friend and who is an enemy. Importantly, the constituting-power always subtends the constitution, making it possible that the populace will always usurp the constitutional sovereign. Schmitt’s point is that sovereignty is divisible, with the consequence that deposing constitutional sovereignty does not rely on divine action; it arises when the constituting-power subtending the constitutional sovereign demands an alternative juridical order.

The Classic-Juridical Model

This chapter introduces the problematic governing the book, outlines a brief history of the concept of sovereignty from the Middle Ages up to the eighteenth century to develop the basic co-ordinates of the classic-juridical conception that forms the basis from which the three models engaged within in the book are developed against, and provides an overview of the argument and structure of the book.