Sovereignty and political modernity: A genealogy of Agamben’s critique of sovereignty

This essay is an examination of the implications of the largely uncritical taking up of the ascendant Agambenian paradigm in recent scholarship. Following Arendt, it is argued that the most important reason for the success of the polemical redefinition of political community as subjecthood by those who elaborated the project of political modernity (esp. Bodin and Hobbes) has been its success at getting its opponents (e.g. Locke, Bentham, Austin, Rousseau, Weber, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida, and Agamben) to accept this definition of sovereignty as both an empirical reality and as the critical object against and through which future politics must be defined. As a result, the project of naming the sovereign — however rhetorically satisfying — has never failed to be deeply disabling for both scholarship and politics, as scholars accept its radical modern naturalization, rationalization, and unification of power as the basic concept of political organization and as the possibilities of political life come to be defined by the impossible task of deriving freedom from the concept of sovereignty. The most important recent example of this is Agamben’s work which, because it is based on Benjamin’s early writings in which this modern imbrication of sovereignty and political life is viewed as complete and irreversible, requires — if we are to get out of sovereignty — nothing less than that we reject every possibility of future political community and make a complete ontological break from political forms. This, it is argued here, is much too much to ask of either scholarship or of our political present.