The End of Sovereignty, in North Africa, in the World

Spare a thought for Alain Badiou. He must be busy tend­ing to the sens­it­ive instru­ments of his evento-​graph. As with the seis­mo­graphs of late – all ‘revolu­tion­ary event’ detect­ors have had a busy time. The anti­cip­a­tion must also be dif­fi­cult to bear. Syria is unrav­el­ing. The Road to Dam­as­cus might soon yield another Paul, or indeed a Muhammad, and prefer­ably a Leila, as long as she is hold­ing aloft a ban­ner to which the European philo­sopher can show fidelity.

In this blog and else­where the philo­soph­ers of Europe are hav­ing a fraternal spat. What is to be done, they won­der, in this mul­ti­polar world in dis­ar­ray about how to respond to ‘events’ that might become ‘ours’? They spec­u­late earn­estly about whether Arab states are truly sov­er­eign or not (Badiou)? Shall ‘we’ inter­vene or leave it to those sov­er­eign peoples to sort out (provid­ing there are enough women at their protests, and if our trans­lat­ors approve of their ban­ners) (Badiou and Vat­timo)? Or does the beast and the sov­er­eign always roam at once, together – a with­er­ing sov­er­eignty amidst a glob­al­ised eco­nomic, tech­no­lo­gical, and cap­it­al­ist empire (as Jean-​Luc Nancy and Jacques Der­rida taught many times over).

The more legal and polit­ical con­cern is the ‘sense’ (of law, value, decision, judg­ment) of an ‘inter­ven­tion’ seem­ingly sanc­tioned by a UN Secur­ity Coun­cil Res­ol­u­tion (1973). Is this an instance of that other beast – rare, con­tra­dict­ory, hypo­crit­ical, the plaything of major powers – called a ‘respons­ib­il­ity to pro­tect’ (‘R2P’ for those in the know)? Anne Orford has writ­ten a schol­arly and timely book, Inter­na­tional Author­ity and the Respons­ib­il­ity to Pro­tect (Cam­bridge, 2011) that gives the his­tor­ical back­ground to the emer­gence of a global appar­atus for exer­cising an inter­na­tional exec­ut­ive police power. As she has recently explained with ref­er­ence to con­tem­por­ary events – the ‘respons­ib­il­ity to pro­tect’ and other inter­na­tional police actions serve the interests of the major powers:

It seems almost banal to point out that since 1945 inter­na­tional inter­ven­tion has never been car­ried out against a West­ern European or North Amer­ican state. Sim­il­arly, the ‘respons­ib­il­ity to pro­tect’ is unlikely ever to be invoked to author­ise meas­ures against an ally of the West. Many gov­ern­ments have attacked civil­ian pro­test­ers over recent months, but there has been no inter­na­tional response to the declar­a­tion of mar­tial law, the killing of civil­ians by gov­ern­ment forces and the deten­tion of pro­test­ers in Bahrain, the home of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet; the killing of more than 60 pro­test­ers in Syria; the arrest, deten­tion and alleged tor­ture of scores of pro­test­ers in Egypt, whose new mil­it­ary cab­inet passed a law on 24 March ban­ning strikes and demon­stra­tions”. (LRB Blog, 29^th March, 2011)

The gist of what Orford is arguing is that inter­na­tional law has lost its claim to being uni­ver­sal – as if it ever was! But we must not loose sight of the power of the ‘as if’ whilst it is able to cir­cu­late (Kant and Der­rida would insist on this).

Badiou, Nancy, and Vat­timo would prob­ably agree about one thing — the North African insur­gen­cies and upris­ings make con­tact with the ques­tion of the effic­acy of sov­er­eignty in a glob­al­ised world. At the heart of their dis­agree­ment is whether it makes any sense now, as if it ever did, to speak of sov­er­eign inde­pend­ent peoples (and their sin­gu­lar­ity) in a ‘world’ that is already sat­ur­ated with glob­al­ised imper­ial power. This is a ques­tion many post­co­lo­nial peoples (if they are per­mit­ted that appel­la­tion) have faced. Is sov­er­eignty a response to empire – or have they not both been the authors of the worst? One need only recall the rel­at­ively recent carnage in Sri Lanka – the killing of thou­sands of civil­ians and intern­ment in camps of tens of thou­sands in the name of defeat­ing ter­ror­ism. The French and Brit­ish were thor­oughly wrong-​footed there as China bank­rolled and equipped a bel­li­ger­ent state to defeat its enemy whatever the cost in human life. National sov­er­eignty and a new imper­ial hege­mon com­bined to demon­strate once again that mil­it­ar­ism and racist nation­al­ism are entirely con­sist­ent with democracy.

Is sov­er­eignty a bul­wark against empire? The answer to this ques­tion might explain – to European philo­soph­ers and oth­ers – why it makes no sense to speak of a dis­crete entity called the ‘west’ dis­tinct from the rest; or in laud­able terms about a ‘people’ with a proper flag, slo­gan, and ban­ner as Badiou and Vat­timo have naively sug­ges­ted. This is not to say that empire today is One jur­idical form­a­tion (as Hardt and Negri envis­aged in Empire). Empire today is the pro­jec­tion of the desire of a par­tic­u­lar techno-​capitalist appar­atus that is every­where, and to which sov­er­eignty is not an answer. The philo­sopher who has explained this most clearly over sev­eral dec­ades is Jean-​Luc Nancy. Sov­er­eignty is not a prob­lem for a par­tic­u­lar people, but of a ‘world’ that can­not be par­ti­tioned or immun­ised from empire. To under­stand this we must begin with the prob­lem of democracy.

In mod­ern accounts of demo­cracy the indi­vidual autonom­ous being becomes one with a ‘people’/nation, author­ises sub­jec­tion to a sov­er­eign, or holds sov­er­eignty as one-​of-​the-​many. As Jacques Der­rida explained, demo­cracy is a force in the form of a sov­er­eign author­ity (as reason and decis­ive­ness), and rep­res­ent­a­tion of the power and ipseity of a people. It is in this sense that Derrida’s trope of the ‘wheel’, at once viol­ence, tor­ture, and return, applies to demo­cracy (Der­rida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, 2004). In demo­cracy power is not held by any one per­son, it is held by ‘every­one and no one’ (as Claude Lefort also elab­or­ated). But this ‘every­one’ can­not be ‘any­one’. Recall the cal­cu­la­tions, the ‘who counts?’ in all forms of friend­ship and demo­cracy. This demand for open­ness to ‘every­one’ will come to undo demo­cracy (as with democracy’s many auto-​immunities which I will not pur­sue here). The author­isa­tion of the exer­cise of power in mod­ern demo­cracy must con­stantly return to its source, its author­isa­tion. While the axio­matic of demo­cracy as circle, sphere, ipseity, autos of autonomy, sym­metry, homo­gen­eity, semb­lance and sim­il­ar­ity, and God which is the ana­logy in the Amer­ican Declar­a­tion, are all ways of express­ing the autonomy of the polit­ical, Der­rida iden­ti­fies the double bind within this tra­di­tion of demo­cracy. Each of these ele­ments are incom­pat­ible with, and clash with, the ‘truth of the demo­cratic’, namely the other, het­ero­gen­eity, dis­sym­metry, mul­ti­pli­city, the anonym­ous ‘any­one’, the ‘each one’ (Rogues, 14). Sov­er­eignty as the ipseity at the heart of demo­cracy rep­res­ents a stilling of an infin­ite order of time (even as patri­cide, regi­cide (Rogues, 17)). But this ipso–cent­ric order, this autonomy of the polit­ical as demo­cracy or other form­a­tion of com­munity, undoes itself. The double bind of ipseity is the clash of the ‘I can’ with the autonomy of ‘every­one’. In other words this is a prob­lem of a singular-​plural sov­er­eign being — a prob­lem taken up by J-​L Nancy.

Nancy has developed a thought of the ‘empty place’ of sov­er­eignty in rela­tion to the prob­lem of sov­er­eignty as a form of ‘world­wide’ author­ity (Nancy, The Sense of the World, 1997). There are a pleth­ora of claims that sov­er­eign author­ity is becom­ing ‘world­wide’ (Hardt and Negri’s Empire, 2000; and Mul­ti­tude, 2004, being the key ones). Accord­ing to these pro­nounce­ments sov­er­eignty is now ‘without limit’. Is this the arrival of the ‘empty place’ of sov­er­eignty, where an amorph­ous sov­er­eignty is now without ‘limit’? Has a new form of sov­er­eignty encom­passed the ‘world’?

Nancy con­fronts the prob­lem of ‘world­wide’ author­ity by examin­ing the notions of ‘sense’ (value) and ‘world’ (Nancy, 1997, 54 – 7). The prob­lem of the ‘sense of the world’ matches the prob­lem of the pos­sib­il­ity of ‘world­wide’ author­ity in the fol­low­ing way. The ques­tion of author­ity in its mod­ern ‘theo­lo­gi­co­pol­it­ical’ mani­fest­a­tion has always been a ques­tion of the ‘source’ of value. Mod­ern accounts of author­ity placed the ‘West’ as the source of ‘civil­isa­tion’. The ‘his­tory’ of the ‘West’, its ‘reason’ and ‘human­ity’, were the source of the ‘sense’ of the ‘world’. How­ever, this cent­ral­ity, this finitude of the West, is no longer sus­tain­able. Glob­al­isa­tion is the becom­ing ‘infin­ite’ of a ‘finitude’ – that is, the dis­persal of sov­er­eignty, iden­tity, com­munity and so on. The source of the ‘sense of the world’ is no longer a tran­scend­ent Chris­tian God or west­ern civil­isa­tion (Nancy, 1997, 54 – 5). The ‘spa­cing of the ‘world’ is thus not meas­ured or arranged by ref­er­ence to a ‘tran­scend­ent’ source of author­ity. This is what drives the now press­ing ques­tion of ‘world­wide’ author­ity. World­wide author­ity is a mani­fest­a­tion of “sov­er­eignty without sov­er­eignty” (Nancy, “War, Right, Sov­er­eignty — Techne”, in Jean-​Luc Nancy, Being Sin­gu­lar Plural. 2000, pp. 101 – 143 at 134, and gen­er­ally 136 – 140).

This ‘non­sov­er­eign sov­er­eignty’ is, of course, not a thing or place to be named or iden­ti­fied but a con­di­tion that is to be approached through a cri­tique of finitude. That is, ‘non­sov­er­eign sov­er­eignty’ is to be under­stood through the im-​possibility of a mon­istic con­cep­tion of sov­er­eignty, the expos­ure to ‘being in com­mon’, and the absence of an ‘essence’ or dis­crete unity that pur­ports to occupy a ‘sov­er­eign place’ (Nancy, 2000, 138 – 9). The approach offered by Nancy for seek­ing the extreme limit of the ‘end of sov­er­eignty’ is pro­posed through a ques­tion – “the ques­tion of a non­sov­er­eign mean­ing as the very sense of the human­ity of humans and the glob­al­ness of the world” (ibid, 138, ori­ginal emphasis). The “rela­tion of non­sov­er­eign mean­ing” is to be ‘inven­ted’, it is to come (ibid). Draw­ing on Bataille’s vis­ion that ‘sov­er­eignty is NOTHING’, Nancy offers the fol­low­ing attrib­utes that an end to the archa­ism of sov­er­eignty must involve: there should be noth­ing to “attain”, no “accom­plish­ment”, “achieve­ment”, or “fin­ish­ing” (ibid, 139). In con­trast, sov­er­eignty as an ‘event’ involves these char­ac­ter­ist­ics of ‘attain­ment’, ‘accom­plish­ment’, or ‘achieve­ment’ of a ‘new order’, ‘soci­ety’ and so on. This is what the pun­dits and com­ment­at­ors of the North African rebel­lions are look­ing for. While finitude, the ‘pres­ence’ of sov­er­eignty, is a spa­cing that is always already a ‘sharing’ – one that Nancy treats as a con­di­tion of the “global world” – what is cent­ral to an account of ‘non­sov­er­eign sov­er­eignty’ is that the mean­ing of sov­er­eignty should no longer occur “in a total­iz­a­tion and present­a­tion (of a finite and accom­plished infin­ite)” (ibid). What kind of world might present or be presen­ted by such a sovereignty?

The term ‘world’ indic­ates a “gath­er­ing or being-​together that arises from an art – a techne” (Nancy, 1997, 41). ‘Techne’ indic­ates that the ‘world’ is always a ‘cre­ation’ (ibid). The world has no prin­ciple, end, or mater­ial other than itself (ibid). Nancy is expli­cit that as ‘techne’, eco­tech­nics is yet to be lib­er­ated from tech­no­logy, eco­nomy and sov­er­eignty (Nancy, 2000, 140). What would this lib­er­a­tion entail? It would, in brief, entail “sov­er­eignty as noth­ing” (ibid, 141). ‘Sov­er­eignty as noth­ing’ involves jet­tis­on­ing mod­ern sym­bol­iz­a­tions of sov­er­eignty in “people” – the demand, for instance, of a “sov­er­eign dis­tinc­tion” for every­one (ibid). The ‘noth­ing of sov­er­eignty’ would involve law without found­a­tion – think­ing and act­ing without a model. Nancy acknow­ledges that all of this is not eas­ily conceived:

It is not for us, nor for our think­ing, modeled as it is on the sov­er­eign model; it is not for our war­like think­ing. But this is cer­tain: there is noth­ing on the hori­zon except for an unheard-​of, incon­ceiv­able task – or war. All think­ing that still wants to con­ceive of an “order”, a “world”, a “com­mu­nic­a­tion”, a “peace” is abso­lutely naïve – when it is not simply hypo­crit­ical. … But every­one can clearly see that it is time: the dis­aster of sov­er­eignty is suf­fi­ciently spread out, and suf­fi­ciently com­mon, to steal everyone’s inno­cence. (ibid, 141 – 2)

To open a think­ing of what it would mean for sov­er­eignty to be ‘noth­ing’ mani­fests the outer lim­its of think­ing on sov­er­eignty, world, and glob­al­isa­tion. In Nancy’s thought on the ‘sense of the world’ there is clearly a call to think bey­ond the model of sov­er­eignty – and indeed bey­ond the author­ity of law that is modeled on the finitude of such sovereignties.

It is for all of these rather elab­or­ate reas­ons that Nancy recently poin­ted out that there is no immunity from the inter­ven­tions and non-​interventions in North Africa. There is no such pure place to inhabit. The world is truly and dis­astrously a world. Sov­er­eignty can­not replen­ish it.

Dr Stew­art Motha is Senior Lec­turer at Kent Law School

Tags: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, North African

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