AUTONOMY 2
on sovereignty
This is not a matter of thinking the annihilation of sovereignty. It is a matter of thinking through the following question: If sovereignty is the grand, political term for defining community (its leader or its essence) that has nothing beyond itself, with no foundation or end but itself, what becomes of sovereignty when it is revealed that it is nothing but a singularly plural spacing? How is one to think sovereignty as the ‘nothing’ of the ‘with’ that is laid bare?
J-L N BSP 36
It was not a question of substituting the rule of these people for the rule of those people, substituting the domination of the ‘masses’ for that of their masters. It was a question of substituting a shared sovereignty for domination in general, a sovereignty of everyone and of each one, but a sovereignty understood not as the exercise of power and domination but as a praxis of meaning. The traditional sovereignties (the theologico-political order) did not lose power (which only ever shifts from place to place), but lost the possibility of making sense. As a result, meaning itself – that is, the ‘we’ – demanded its due, if one can talk in these ways. BSP 42
[…]
So it is not so much a question of denying law itself, it is more a question of ‘doing right’ by the singular plural of the origin. As a result, it is a matter of questioning law about what we might call its ‘originary anarchy’ or the very origin of the law in what is ‘by all rights without any right’: exzistence unjustifiable as such. BSP 48