david on sovereignty
via david graeber‘s divine kingship of shilluk:
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The question of governance, then, is not the same as the question of sovereignty. But what is sovereignty? Probably the most elegant definition is that recently proposed by Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2005, 2006): in its minimal sense, sovereignty is simply the recognition of the right to exercise violence with impunity. This is probably the reason why, as these same authors note, those arguing about the nature of sovereignty in the contemporary world—and particularly about the breakdown of states, the multiplication of new forms of semi-criminal sovereignty in the margins between them—rarely find the existing anthropological literature on sacred kingship particularly useful.[5]
endnote 5: I am simplifying their argument. Sovereign power for Hansen and Stepputat is marked not only by impunity but by a resultant transcendence—the “crucial marks of sovereign power” are “indivisibility, self-reference, and transcendence” (2005: 8), as well as a certain “excessive” quality. In many ways their argument, especially when it draws on that of Georges Bataille with his reflections on autonomy and violence, comes close to the one that I will be developing. But it is also exactly in this area that it deviates the most sharply, since Bataille’s position is ultimately profoundly reactionary, reading authoritarian political institutions back into the very nature of human desire. My position is more hopeful.
Starting instead from the principle of sovereignty means beginning instead from the idea of moral order, and realities of violence. It then follows from the understanding that the various “exploits” or acts of transgression by which a king marks his break with ordinary morality are not normally seen to make him immoral, but a creature beyond morality. As such he can be treated as the constituent principle of a system of justice or morality—since, logically, no creature capable of creating a system of justice can itself be already bound by the system he creates.
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Walter Benjamin posed the dilemma quite nicely in his famous distinction between “law-making” and “law-maintaining” violence. Really it is exactly the same paradox, cast in the new language that became necessary once the power of kings (“sovereignty”) had been transferred, at least in principle, to an entity referred to as “the people”—even though the exact way in which “the people” were to exercise sovereignty was never clear. No constitutional order can constitute itself. We like to say that “no one is above the law” but if this were really true laws would not exist to begin with: even the writers of the United State constitution or founders of the French Republic were, after all, guilty of treason according to the legal regimes under which they had been born. The legitimacy of any legal order therefore ultimately rests on illegal acts—usually, acts of illegal violence. Whether one embraces the Left solution (that “the people” periodically rise up to exercise their sovereignty through revolutions) or the Right solution (that heads of state can exercise sovereignty in their ability to set the legal order aside) the paradox itself remains. In practical terms, it translates into a constant political dilemma. How does one distinguish “the people” from a mere unruly mob? How does one know if the hand suspending habeas corpus is that of a contemporary Abraham Lincoln, or of a contemporary Mussolini?
Successful thugs do become sovereigns, even, creators of new legal and moral systems. And genuine “sovereignty” does always carry with it the potential for arbitrary violence. This is true even in contemporary welfare states: apparently this is the one aspect that, despite liberal hopes, can never be completely reformed away. It is precisely in this that sovereigns resemble gods and that kingship can properly be called “divine.
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be you. 