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<address><br>
Derrida: "There are only rogue states"<br>
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<address><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/waiting-justice-benjamin-and-derrida-sovereignty-and-immanence">https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/waiting-justice-benjamin-and-derrida-sovereignty-and-immanence</a><br>
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<h1>Waiting for Justice: Benjamin and Derrida on Sovereignty and
Immanence</h1>
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<div class="views-field views-field-field-rofl-article-author">
<div class="field-content">James Martel</div>
</div>
<div class="views-field views-field-field-rofl-article-issue">
<div class="field-content"><a
href="https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/issues/volume-2-issue-2">Volume
2, Issue 2</a></div>
</div>
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<p>[...]</p>
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<p class="ROFLbodyTextafterHeading">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 <i>Rogues </i>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.”<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span
class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">[28]</span></span></span>
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.”<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span
class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">[29]</span></span></span>
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 <i>cracy</i> of the <i>demos </i>. .
. is required. What is required is thus a sovereignty, a force
that is stronger than all the other forces in the world.”<span
class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span
style="font-size:11.0pt">[30]</span></span></span> Derrida’s
work is marked by a wish for some other form of politics. He
speaks in <i>Rogues </i>of the possibility of a “vulnerable
non-sovereignty.”<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span
class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">[31]</span></span></span>
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 <i>Rogues,</i>
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.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span
class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">[32]</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span
class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">[33]</span></span></span>
At the very end of the “Critique of Violence,”<i> </i>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 “<i>mag die waltende heißen</i>.” <i>Waltende</i>
does not mean exactly the same thing as “sovereign” (the German
language, after all, possesses the Latinate cognate <i>souveranität</i>
to express that concept). <i>Waltende</i> has connotations of
ruling and order as well, but it also suggests—by virtue of the
fact that it is <i>not</i> 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.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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 <i>The
Trial, </i>in the passions and rejections that take place in
the face of the central mysteries of <i>The Castle. </i>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.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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?</p>
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<p class="MsoBodyText">[...]<br>
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