[D66] The Beast & the Sovereign

[R.O.]

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Derrida: "There are only rogue states"


https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/waiting-justice-benjamin-and-derrida-sovereignty-and-immanence


  Waiting for Justice: Benjamin and Derrida on Sovereignty and Immanence

James Martel
Volume 2, Issue 2 <https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/issues/volume-2-issue-2>

[...]


In moving toward a conclusion, let us focus on a key facet of the 
production of law and justice—namely the concept of sovereignty. In our 
expectation of a perfect and pure justice, what we get instead is 
sovereignty, a network of mythologies that has come to define politics 
in our own time. Consistent with his straddling stance, Derrida is 
ambivalent about sovereignty as well. On the one hand, in /Rogues /he 
famously tells us: “As soon as there is sovereignty, there is abuse of 
power and a rogue state. Abuse is the law of use; it is the law itself. 
. . . There are thus only rogue states. Potentially or actually.”[28] 
Sovereignty partakes of the same mythology, the “ipsocentricism” that 
Derrida assails in so much of his work. He tells us that it attacks 
democracy “from the very outset, in an autoimmune fashion.”[29] But at 
the same time, Derrida fears that sovereignty is necessary for any 
functioning of government, even (especially?) democracy: “For democracy 
to be effective, for it to give rise to a system of law that can carry 
the day, which is to say, for it to give rise to an effective power, the 
/cracy/ of the /demos /. . . is required. What is required is thus a 
sovereignty, a force that is stronger than all the other forces in the 
world.”[30] Derrida’s work is marked by a wish for some other form of 
politics. He speaks in /Rogues /of the possibility of a “vulnerable 
non-sovereignty.”[31] But such a wish is thwarted, limited by a fear 
that any effort to instantiate such a form of politics would be, once 
again, monstrous, unaccountable, and dangerous. In /Rogues,/ Derrida 
considers the end of sovereignty—as with the question of the ruination 
of the law that it serves—with a combination of fear and hopefulness.

Are we thus forced to choose sovereignty despite its destructiveness, 
its elimination and replacement of democracy? Must we remain mired in 
mythology to avoid something that is potentially even worse? Surely this 
is not Derrida’s choice, but his ambivalence does not seem to allow him 
to consider the possibility of a democracy that is already here. To be 
fair, his notion of “democracy to-come” is, in its own way, “already 
here,” but it is not here in the same tangible sense as sovereignty and 
nondemocracy are; its “hereness” is not of that kind.[32]

Once again we can see the political valence of Benjamin’s insistence on 
an active, messianic force in the world. Benjamin’s messiah does not 
undo sovereignty so much as it displaces sovereign power.[33] At the 
very end of the “Critique of Violence,”//Benjamin writes of an 
alternative to mythical violence that “may be called sovereign violence” 
(300). This is not a perfect translation from the German, which says 
“/mag die waltende heißen/.” /Waltende/ does not mean exactly the same 
thing as “sovereign” (the German language, after all, possesses the 
Latinate cognate /souveranität/ to express that concept). /Waltende/ has 
connotations of ruling and order as well, but it also suggests—by virtue 
of the fact that it is /not/ identical to “sovereignty”—a form of rule 
that is not exactly the same as the mythological structures that form 
our current conceptions of politics. The alternative thus may have some 
features in common with sovereignty as we understand it, but it is of a 
different order, a different form of representation.

If we take Benjamin’s opposition to idolatry as a political question, we 
can see that we do have an alternative to sovereignty taken in the sense 
of a mythical system of rule. When an act of divine violence actively 
interferes with the would-be sovereigns (the Korahs) of our world, it 
becomes possible to think of politics differently. From this 
perspective, politics is what happens in the face of the spectacle of 
sovereignty; it can be found in the small niceties that pass between the 
man from the country and the gatekeeper, in the boiling of cabbages and 
typing that go on at all hours in the courts of law in /The Trial, /in 
the passions and rejections that take place in the face of the central 
mysteries of /The Castle. /To disrupt the central narrative of sovereign 
authority, even if temporarily, is to return our focus to this 
peripheral but vital form of mutual engagement.

Kafka teaches us (and, perhaps more to the point, teaches Benjamin) that 
the presence of mythology does not prevent us from forming alliances, 
connections, relationships with one another. It does, however, override 
and usurp these relationships, making them seem as if they can exist 
only through more idolatry. When such myths are disrupted, we find that 
our own political practices do not disappear but become increasingly 
legible to us. Imagine the moment just before his death when the man 
from the country finally realized that he would never have entry to the 
law, that the justice that he expected was not coming. Such a moment 
exposes not only the mythologies that organize life but also the life 
that was actually lived. What, Benjamin and Kafka seem to ask us, would 
we do if we knew such things not only at the moment of death (when it is 
too late) but all along? What kind of life, what kind of politics, would 
we pursue in the face of such a realization?


[...]


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