The Place of Sovereignty

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between sovereignty, biopolitics and governmentality in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault. By unpacking Foucault’s genealogy of modern governmentality, it responds to a criticism leveled against Foucauldian accounts of power for their alleged abandonment of the traditional model of power in juridico-institutional terms in favor of an understanding of power as purely productive. This claim has most significantly been developed by Agamben in “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”. I argue that Judith Butler’s analysis of power, in particular in her essay “Indefinite Detention”, presents a more differentiated account of power that registers the significance of practices of sovereignty and resonates with Foucault’s lectures on “Security, Territory, Population”.     

Feminist thought and the totalitarian interloper: on rhetoric and the fear of ‘dangerous thinking’

Starting from the premise that thinking in itself cannot be dangerous, but that the presentation of thought as public communication can be an occasion to debate the potentialities of an intervention, this article addresses feminist theoretical disputes as rhetorical exchange. The focus is the now well-known critique that Martha Nussbaum made of Judith Butler’s work, a critique to which some have responded by questioning in turn Nussbaum’s certainties regarding what feminism is and should be. This article addresses the highly inflammatory terms and frames of reference of these exchanges. It asks: how is that those who are understood as leading feminist theorists can be read as dangerous collaborators with evil and those who defend normative theories of social justice can be read as fascistic? The article explores these questions by relating them to the ‘dangerous’ accusation that has been levied elsewhere (that is, in relation to the utilization of post-structuralist theory) and notices as crucial the terms of reference and versions of historical memory that are evoked, in particular those that evoke the history of totalitarianism and the figure of the fascist. The article argues that there are many routes by which to ‘explain’ the appearance of these contexts and figures but advocates a genealogical approach to understand how these contexts, fears and forms of rhetoric emerged. Concluding, the article suggests – rhetorically – that there is little comfort or gain to be had through a pretence that evil will attach itself to a particular theoretical style as if to a magnet, and little credibility to be given to one who claims the ability to see, to foresee and to comprehend the constitution of all the battles that face feminists and women, let alone democratic norms.     

The honour of Georges Canguihem

The sense of intellectual rigour that attacted so many readers to the work of Georges Canguihen in the 1960s goes hand in hand with a deep sense of personal honour. He at times hints that there is a direct and necessary connection between the two, and that connection is best illustrated by his comments on the life and work of Jean Cavailles. For Canguilhem, the implacable logic that Cavailles found at work in the history of mathematics provided the ispiration that led him to take up arms in the Resistance. Cavailles exampplifies the extreme point where rigorous philosophy and political action merge in an undertaking against death.     

The politics of flatland

A version of the median-voter theorem holds for two-dimensional spatial models in which voters regard the two dimensions as economic goods or goodlike activities and in which the set of feasible outcomes is constrained by budget or technology. Although mathematically trivial, this fact has widespread analytical uses. After arguing that our two-dimensional model, with its stability property, fits a number of important and general policy areas, we use our analysis to address some prominent theoretical issues.     

The politics of desire

This paper examines the relevance of the ‘particularity of the place where discourse is produced’ in two literary histories to discover if de Certeau's distinction, in Heterologies, between historiography and psychoanalysis, helps to determine if and how a work written by a white writer who writes about Aboriginal literature differs from the work of a black writer who does the same thing. It concludes that the status of the author is not a matter of indifference, neither is it simply a matter of personal experience. It ushers in the need to differentiate subject positions in relation to incremental moments of the past and in relation to constructs of the ‘other’.     

The politics of other citizens

In all kinds of political action, citizens are confronted with the performances of other citizens. An important guide to political behaviour is therefore likely to be the assumptions people make concerning how others can be expected to behave. This article explores common sense ideas about other citizens as potential political participants, drawing on a series of group interviews conducted with taxi-drivers in Britain, Germany and the Czech Republic. I argue the expectations voiced of other citizens tend to be pessimistic in nature, casting them as ill-informed, apathetic, passive and unduly self-interested, notwithstanding the appearance of a more optimistic view which holds they can be expected to follow the lead of those who ‘take a stand’. These empirical observations lead to a discussion of the theoretical issues they raise, notably where to locate the origins of such views, and how to appraise their implications for democracy.     

The politics of minority statistics

Harold Orlans, of Chevy Chase, Maryland, was formerly on the staff of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. His books include The Nonprofit Research Institute, Contracting for Knowledge, Private Accreditation and Public Eligibility,and Nonprofit Organizations.Philip Lyons helped to gather the information in this article.     

The fragile politics of addiction

Suppose the optimizing consumer only has local information, then what? Obviously, there will be a random element of consumption. The link between the frequency distribution of consumption by person and preference surface is worked out. Under convex preferences there will be a unimodal distribution and conversely. A local optimizing theory of addictive behavior is developed from nonconvex preferences. The resulting bimodal distribution of consumption implies a nonrobust outcome for median voter politics. Such a local optimizing model of addiction is compared with globally optimizing models of addiction.