Thursday, March 10, 2005
(12:00 AM) | Anonymous:
The Remnants of Political Ontotheology: Sovereignty Week
I must preface this short fragment with a disclaimer: I know nothing of sovereignty. I must admit that I am unsure where one must stand so as to view the sovereign. That being said, my piece will not be as focused as the previous works. I wish I could respond to Doug's piece in detail here, but as I am unsure if his thought is able to conceive of a law separated from the sovereign that comes into being through war or if that is even a goal. So the words I offer are merely pointing-signs, the trails they point to may or may not lead to any fruitful place. Until I there is a map that guides me to a vantage point to view the sovereign, such wandering is my only recourse.Sovereignty has a history. As Adam's exposition of Schmitt shows, it is a history intimately tied to religion, or even completely religious. Beginning with the true father of political philosophy, Plato in his Republic, we are given a analogy of the sovereign as the Sun. The common conception concerning this analogy is that the sovereign is that which is highest, which means the sovereign is that which has the highest concentration of power. What this understanding fails to take into account is the function of power that the ontotheological conception of sovereignty carries with it.
In the Greek mythos the gods are sovereign because they have the power over one's life. This is not a merely legal function, it extends to all areas of life and thus to death. The lesson of Oedipus is not that law reigns, but that even the most powerful are subject to the supra-legal power of the gods that always works through laws and lacks. Those of us who would hope to find some other conception of ontotheological sovereignty within the God of Christianity seem destined for disappointment. Hans Walter Wolff explores the understanding of what it means to be a human body in his Anthropology of the Old Testament and there he explains the idea of ruah, or what is commonly translated as soul but literally means throat in Hebrew. He explains that, "Living creatures are in this way exactly defined in Hebrew as creatures that breathe." Thus when the Psalmist declares, "Let everything that breathes praise Yahweh," this is also to be understood that our life is to be used to praise Yahweh, because God as spirit is that same breath.
There is a positive way to understand this relationship between God and humanity, but not as sovereign. As sovereignty moves through cultures and time it adapts to the resistance against it. It retains its political ontotheology, but it takes a form that hides its religious nature. This new adaptation of sovereignty follows the Hardto-Negrian analysis of moving from State sovereignty to economic sovereignty, and in this way it sheds its former normative self. Law, of course, still forms part of this sovereignty but only as a tool not as its being, not can we conflate the two into a Heideggerian tool-being. This is because, without a sovereign state, the sovereign power must exercise its control in a more direct way over life itself.
This sovereign power is the power of spirit. The new economic model of speculative capital parallels the idea that God as spirit breaths God-self into humanity and humanity breathes God-self back out, and at some point God as spirit holds his spirit and humanity dies. Speculative capital, a counterfeit coin that will only be uncovered too late, has killed the sovereign without killing sovereignty.
There is, perhaps, a way out. Though I don't know that law holds the map to the outside, but perhaps it can be used as a tool to fashion such a map. Of this, I still fail to speak.
