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A D EDICATION TO J ACQUES D ERRIDA - T HEORY

Derrida and Foucault On Sovereignty

By Friedrich Balke *

A. A “Certain Sovereignty”

In his final publication Derrida argues for a rather wide notion of the concept of

sovereignty. Sovereigns are not only public officers and dignitaries, or those who

invest them with sovereign power – we all are sovereigns, without exception,

insofar the sovereign function is nothing but the rationale of all metaphysics,

anchored in a certain capability, in the ability to do something, in a power or

potency that transfers and realizes itself, that shows itself in possession, property,

the power or authority of the master, be it the master of the house or in the city or

state, despot , be it the master over himself, and thus master over his passions which

have to be mastered just like the many-headed mass in the political arena. Derrida

thinks the sovereign with Aristotle: the prima causa , the unmoved mover. It has

been often remarked that philosophy here openly reveals itself as political theology.

Derrida thus refers to the famous lines of the Iliad 1 , where Ulysses warns of the

sovereignty of the many: “it is not well that there should be many masters; one man

must be supreme – one king to whom the son of scheming Saturn has given the

scepter of sovereignty over you all.” 2

This means that all metaphysics is grounded on a political imperative that prohibits

the sovereignty of the many in favor of the one cause, the one being, the arche (both

cause and sovereignty), the one principle and princeps , of the One in the first place.

The cause and the principle are representations of the function of the King in the

discourse of metaphysics. Derrida, however, does not only describe the

* Teacher of Philosophy and German Literature at the University of Cologne and Bochum; Executive

Director of the Research Center "Media and Cultural Communication" at the University of Cologne. He

has published on political philosophy, social and cultural theory and contemporary French philosophy.

He is the author of: D ER S TAAT NACH SEINEM E NDE . D IE V ERSUCHUNG C ARL S CHMITTS (1996); and G ILLES

D ELEUZE (1998).

1 Quoted by Aristotle at the end of book 12 of his M ETAPHYSICS (1076a).

2 J ACQUES D ERRIDA . S CHURKEN [Rogues] 34-35 (2003) [not yet translated into English].

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G ERMAN L AW J OURNAL

metaphysical overstepping of the boundaries of a political category; as a

metaphysical category, sovereignty encroaches on ‘life,’ insofar it nominates a

power, potency or capability that is found “in every ‘I can’ – the pse of the ipse

( ipsissimus )" 3 . This power does not only refer to individuals, insofar they are

politically active, i.e. as public active agencies or as sovereign pouvoir constituant ,

but also refers to all which individuals can actually do, without being forced ‘from

the outside.’ A soon as they are not only subjected to a causality, but on their part

turn into a spontaneous cause of subsequent actions, they exhibit a ‘certain

sovereignty.’ Thus understood, sovereignty is mere liberty, that is, “the authority or

power, to do as one pleases: to decide, to choose, to determine oneself , to decide on

oneself, to be master, and in particular master of oneself ( autos , ipse ). […] No liberty

without selfhood, and no selfhood without liberty, vice versa . And thus a certain

sovereignty.” 4

Nothing and nobody can escape a sovereignty thus understood, not even

deconstruction, the unending challenge of which, as Derrida once again makes

unmistakably clear, was to disassociate itself time and again from a sovereignty

with which in the last resort it was to inevitably coincide. Even there, where it

seems to be impossible, deconstruction has to distinguish between “on the one

hand, the compulsion or self-implementation of sovereignty (which is also and no

less the one of selfhood itself, of the same, the self that one is […], the selfhood,

which comprises – as etymology would affirm – the androcentric power position of

the landlord, the sovereign power of master, father, or husband […]) and on the

other hand the posit of unconditionality, which one can find in the critical and

(please permit me the word) deconstructive claim for reason alike.” Insofar

deconstruction claims to be “an unconditional rationalism,” it is thus being haunted

by what Derrida has called the “sovereignty drive.” 5

B. Sovereignty and Democracy

I would like to pose an objection here. The rather limited political value of Derrida’s

theory of sovereignty for me seems to lie in its hasty generalization. There is in

Derrida no real history of sovereignty, but merely an initial ‘onto-theological’

determination which cannot be modified or thwarted by a historical event, since

historical differences can play themselves out only in the framework opened up by

the initial metaphysical determination. Derrida defines sovereignty as metaphysical

3 Id . at 28.

4 Id . at 42.

5 Id . at 190-191.

2005] 73

Derrida and Foucault On Sovereignty

and is thus able to carry out its critique as another variant of the deconstruction of

the metaphysical heritage. All the historical analyses which Derrida also

commences, can thus only confirm what was certain from the very beginning.

However, thus they turn out to be mere illustrations of a particular definition,

which on its part is not accessible to a historical relativization. All that can happen

to sovereignty in the narrower political sense is, according to such a metaphysical

analysis, to be transferred and, in the case of democracy, to possibly return to its

origin after the expiration of a time limit, only to be transferred anew. Thus,

Derrida can claim that “sovereignty is circular, round, it is a rounding,” insofar as it

rotates according to the conditions of Greek democracy, as it can take “the

alternating form of succession, of the one-after-the-other:” today’s rulers will be

tomorrow’s ruled. Such a model of “spheric rotation,” 6 however, does not

necessarily have to take the form of an effective return of sovereign power to its

point of origin. Instead of a sovereignty that is transferred to and fro between

governors and governed, one can think of a speculative variant, according to which

the sovereign is envisioned as being endowed with power once and for all by an act

of originary authorization. Instead of an alternating rotation of rulers and ruled, we

would have the case of a transfer of sovereignty without the possibility of

revocation.

Yet, Derrida emphasizes the fact that the interrelation of democracy and

sovereignty remains problematic, since philosophic discourses never succeed in

abolishing “the semantic indeterminacy at the center of demokratia .” 7 There seems to

be a limit to sovereignty’s capability of effectively coding society in its entirety.

Repudiations of democracy in Classic Greek Philosophy, accusing it of a lack of

identity and determination with regard to constitutional law, testify to that. Too

much “free-wheeling” in democracy, regarded as the most beautiful political order

only by those who are, according to Plato, “womanish and childish.” 8 Either

democracy spins around, following the circle defined by sovereignty, or it loses

track, develops without plan and aim, erratically, an “essence without essence,” 9

which can “comprise all kinds of constitutions, constitutional schemes, and thus

interpretations.” 10 But, it should be asked, is such a democracy a viable alternative

to sovereignty, does the ‘force’ of a différance manifest itself in it, which

6 Id . at 30.

7 Id . at 64.

8 Id . at 47.

9 Id . at 53.

10 Id . at 60.

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differentiates it time and again from all that seeks to identify itself with it? Or is it

merely a piece of a philosophical fantasy the function of which is to intervene in a

particular war (with democracy, with the assemblies, with rhetoric, with the

Sophists), one that is about to invade the polis and to confirm once again (in the

name of the kingship of philosophers, or of true monarchy) a model of sovereignty

in crisis? Plato’s image of democracy parallels his image of art: the insubstantiality

and mere mimetic character of both serves their political disqualification.

Democracy for Plato is the negative utopia of the politeia , of the politeia in the state

of dissolution, guidelessness, and a-nomy.

C. Tyrants

Up to this point one cannot clearly see the connection between sovereignty and the

subject of “rogues” ( voyou, rogue ), which has given its title to Derrida’s last

publication. Neither its metaphysical determination, nor its political articulation

within the frame of a philosophical theory of democracy open up a dimension of

“roguishness” within sovereignty. On the contrary, philosophical discourses treat

the absence of sovereignty as an almost unbearable state of unseemly mixtures and

deviations from the ideal standard of the politeia , which could be connected to the

subject of a-nomy and an-archy – that is: roguishness. A democracy without a

sovereign head (Plato) or sovereign cycle (Aristotle), proves to pave the way for

tyranny, differing from rightful ‘monarchy’ insofar as it is a liminal case of a

dissociation of sovereignty and rights, or law. Greek political theory as well as

political praxis knows the problem of tyranny as a liminal case of sovereign

dominance, transforming the sovereign into an outlaw , with no contractual

connection to the citizens, so that they can deal with him like a tyrant. 11 On the

other hand, Hieron shows, that philosophers should also be prepared to

communicate with tyrants, in order to conjointly search for possibilities of a more

‘just’ or measured exertion of his authority. A tyrant does not necessarily have to be

killed, he can also be educated. Yet, despite this intensive concern for the

phenomenon of tyrannical hubris, a suspicion that sovereignty might be of a

fundamental roguish nature is nowhere voiced. Derrida allows for this fact in that

he does not touch the subject of tyranny in his study of “rogues.”

D. Silently and Secretly

Derrida’s engagement with the “rogues” is motivated by the use of that term in the

official statements of the US diplomacy and geopolitics after the end of the Cold

11 Nino Luraghi, Sterben wie ein Tyrann [Die like a Tyrant], in T YRANNIS UND V ERFÜHRUNG [T YRANNIS

AND S EDUCTION ] 91-114 (Wolfgang Pircher and Martin Treml. eds. 2000).

2005] 75

War. His text centers on the question of the existence of so-called “rogue states.”

Derrida asks for the conditions of possibility for such a diagnosis. Who has the right

and the possibility to identify certain states as rogue states, and to threaten them

with measures that include military force – and this even, as is explicitly stated, in

the case that these states have not yet been guilty of a prior violation of

International Law, but the willingness for such a violation in the (near) future is

only assumed? The identification of states outside the law leads to the paradoxical

consequence that those states that feel called to combat, or that let themselves be

formally empowered (e.g. by the UN Security Council) to combat, on their part

claim the ‘sovereign’ right to take measures, even if these measures violate

established law. In the ‘exceptional case,’ one has to be prepared to violate law in

order to restore it. The state strong enough to define and combat rogue states has to

be a rogue state itself, insofar he claims the ‘sovereign’ right to deviate from the law

under particular circumstances (that is, for a certain period of time that seems to be

favorable to the cause), to suspend the law, to annul it. The rhetorics of rogue states

suggest that it is always only a handful of ‘rotten apples’ that violate law and order;

fact is: “There are only rogue states, in potentia , or in actu . The state itself is roguish.

There are always more rogue states than one thinks.” 12 The moment a strategy of

foreign policy commits itself to the combat of rogue states, one finds that the term

has already “come up against its limits,” that its time is already used up, since it

promises to localize a threat coming from uncontrollable and widespread weapons

of mass destruction, whereas the dynamics of dissemination, and thus: the failure

of all those efforts to reserve the atomic privilege to the ‘club’ of hegemonic

industrial states, has long become visible. The preliminary result of the Iraq War

shows, that such weapons are never located on the territory of the state against one

is at war with.

In connection with his diagnosis of current politics Derrida sets out anew to a

fundamental determination of political sovereignty, which I would like to quote,

since it, I think, all too hastily presents itself as a theory of the ‘nature’ of the

sovereignty, whereas it in fact accommodates a historically datable shift in the

relation of sovereignty to other powers and forces. “Silently and secretly, like

sovereignty itself,” Derrida states the bottom line of his theory of political

sovereignty, even though the ‘holder’ of sovereignty originally was the one who

could achieve his power – a collective “binding” – only by speaking in public , instead

of trusting in the silent right of the strongest. The sovereign wards off everything

that is reminiscent of death, his office is not to unleash the violence of war, but to

found peace by way of a mutual agreement, thus, a contract . The matter-of-factness

of Derrida’s equalization of sovereignty and violence has to be opposed by the

12 Id . at 144.

Derrida and Foucault On Sovereignty

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