Sovereignty, power and resistance

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 231-252

  Voruz, Véronique ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 52649174252     PISSN: 09528059     EISSN: 15728722     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1016593216440     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. The terms of constituted, constituent and constituting power are used by Negri in his Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
2. A possibility supported by J. Derrida in his recent address to a conference of analysts organised by Elisabeth Roudinesco and René Major in Paris in July 2000 (published as Les états d'âme de la psychanalyse, Paris: Galilée, 2000,
3. as yet unavailable in English) and Jean-Euc Nancy, "Guerre, droit, souveraineté - techné", Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996);
4. Being Singular Plural, trans. R. Richardson and A. O'Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
5. For a cogent challenge of the supposed decline of national sovereignty, see P. Fitzpatrick, Modernism and the Grounds of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and his article also in this issue.
6. Leclercq, Claude, Droit constitutionnel et institutions politiques (Paris: Litec, 1999, 10th ed.), at 28, my translation.
7. See for example the seminal work of Pierre Legendre on the religious subtext which subtends today's institutional discourse (L'amour du censeur: essai sur l'ordre dogmatique, Paris: Seuil, 1974).
8. Supra n. 4, at 29.
9. A condition much deplored in Legendre's recent work (see for example La fabrique de l'homme occidental, Paris: Arthème Fayard, 2001).
10. One only has to consider the extremely high levels of abstention in recent elections in the west (48,8% in the last presidential elections in the US for example), coupled with the growing governmental concern to increase electoral participation, to be convinced of the ongoing crisis of legitimacy faced by western democracies.
11. Hardt, M. and Negri, A., Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)
12. Ibid., original emphasis, at xi.
13. Ibid.
14. This explicit interpolation of the social contract is made by Bull, M., in his acute critique of Empire, "You can't build a new society with a Stanley knife" (London Review of Books, vol. 23-19, 4 October 2001), although Hardt and Negri do refer to the "Rousseauian general will", supra n. 9, at 96.
15. Supra n. 9, at 103.
16. Supra n. 9, at xii.
17. Supra n. 9, at 66.
18. Including the now de rigueur suspension of the Schengen agreement (which suppressed border controls within the European Union) and the use of force by European police forces.
19. In this respect, see Bull, M., supra n. 12.
20. See Empire, supra n. 9, at 336.
21. Nancy, J.-L., The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), at 2.
22. Ibid. at 3.
23. I will not engage here with Nancy's further problematisation of the community, which he poses to be, in its traditional definition at least, impossible, insofar as 'immanentism' is, precisely, impossible.
24. For the idea of resistance as that which 'feeds' power, see Foucault, M., The Will to Knowledge, The History of Sexuality: 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998). See also supra n. 9, 22-25.
25. See B. Collins' article in this issue for an analysis of the function of the signifier 'the nation' as promise in the Irish Peace Process.
26. In his "Force of Law" ("Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority'", Deconstruct ion and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld & David Gray Carlson, New York & London: Routledge, 1992), Derrida argues that it is justice which deconstructs the law. The above assimilation of sovereignty as empty place with justice is justified insofar as it is the empty place at the heart of law which both accounts for the "incalculability" or "deconstructability" of law and the imperative that it nonetheless calculate.
27. See for examples Freud's totemic father (Totem and Taboo, PFL 12), Lacan's Name-of-the-Father (Ecrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966)
28. or again Claude Lefort's Democracy and Political Theory (London: Blackwell, 1988).
29. Nancy, J.-L., supra n. 2, at 160.
30. See for example the inflation of repressive measures in the field of criminal justice, leading to the spiralling out of control of the prison population in both the US and the UK, aptly documented and analysed by David Garland, The Culture of Control (Oxford: OUP, 2001).
31. Nancy, J.L., supra n. 2.
32. It is maybe in that sense that one can begin to approach Bataille's notorious assertion that "sovereignty is nothing", quoted by Nancy, supra n. 2, at 164.
33. Hegel, G.W.F, Phenomenology of Spirit, Irans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), chap. IV;
34. Kojève, A., Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1969/1996), chap. I.
35. See Kojève, ibid., at 15. Note that Bataille attended Kojève's lectures on Hegel in Paris in the 1930s.
36. See in this respect Lacan's rejection of the Hegelian dialectic which he claims presupposes the absolute necessity of mastery and thus of the subjection of man to man (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
37. Nancy, J.L., supra n. 2, at 146.
38. Suffice it to recall the amazing coalescence of the British nation around Margaret Thatcher at the time of the Falklands War.
39. Supra n. 2, at 157.
40. Supra n. 2, respectively at 65 and 13. Quotes from this essay will henceforth be indicated as bracketed page numbers in the text for the sake of legibility. Translations are my own.
41. Note that Nancy also mentions the desirability for psychoanalysis to think community away from the sovereign scheme (supra n. 2, at 154).
42. PFL 11, at 329.
43. Ibid., at 331, original emphasis.
44. Why War? (PFL 12), at 357.
45. Ibid., at 359.
46. On the two axes of identification, see further S. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, PFL 12.
47. On the transformation of the drive, see further S. Freud, Instincts and their vicissitudes, PFL 11.
48. See "Editor's introduction" to Why War?, supra n. 40.
49. See S. Freud, The Ego and the Id, PFL 11, at 369.
50. See Lacan, J.: "Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu. Essai d'analyse d'une fonction en psychologie", in Autres Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001).
51. "Note that the tendency to union - Eros tends to unite - is only ever apprehended in its relation to the contrary tendency, which leads to division, to rupture, to a redispersion, most especially of inanimate matter. These two tendencies are strictly inseparable. No notion is less unitary" (Lacan, J., Seminar II, supra n. 32 at 79).
52. See Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, Love and Knowledge 1972-1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York & London: Norton, 1998).