Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed?

Catherine Malabou

In "Truth and Power," an interview from 1977, Michel Foucault declares: "What we need ... is a political philosophy that isn't erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the King's head: in political theory that has still to be done."

Why does Foucault affirm this persistence of kingship in contemporary political theory? Hasn't the passage from royal to democratic or popular sovereignty already been accomplished for a long time in the West? According to Foucault, this passage hasn't changed the very structure of sovereignty, which is always attached—whatever the polity it characterizes—to monarchy—that is, with a system of power having a single center and in which the law is the only expression of authority. This model is, according to Foucault, that of Hobbes's Leviathan. To cut off the king's head means that we "abandon the model of Leviathan, that model of artificial man who is at once an automaton, a fabricated man, but also a unitary man who contains all real individuals, whose body is made up of citizens but whose soul is sovereignty. We have to study power outside the model of Leviathan, outside the field delineated by juridical sovereignty and the institution of the State."

Western democracies are, according to Foucault, still dependent upon this model because of their juridical structure. They are, then, secretly inhabited by the remnant figure of the sovereign; that is, of the king.

It thus seems that no form of sovereignty can exist independently of the figure of the sovereign. No sovereignty without the sovereign. No sovereignty without a king. This explains why the very notion of sovereignty has to be criticized or, as Derrida declares in his seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, why it has to be deconstructed.

Is such a deconstruction on its way? Does it have any chance to attain its goal? To be accomplished? Have we, after Foucault, after Derrida—and I add, after Agamben—cut off the king's head? My answer, here, is no.

How can I justify such a position? In order to develop my argument, I first turn toward the concept of biopolitics, forged by Foucault and re-elaborated by Agamben and Derrida in two different ways. According to Foucault, sovereignty, as both a structure of power and a polity, has disappeared from the West with the emergence of modernity. A new form of organization, which has nothing to do with sovereignty, substitutes for it. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the pyramidal model of the Leviathan, described in political philosophy, appears as what it is in reality: the ideological mask that hides a disappearance or a void—precisely, the void of sovereignty. Foucault declares that from that time through the eighteenth century, a new form of power emerges that is "absolutely incompatible with relations of sovereignty" and is occulted by the persistent ideological affirmation of sovereignty. This new form of power is constituted by the paradoxical dissemination of power, the existence of multiple networks, sites of control, the supremacy of the norm over the law, of discipline and technologies of conditioning over repression. "One must keep in view the fact that, along with all the fundamental technical inventions and discoveries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a new technology of the exercise of power also emerged which was probably even more important than the constitutional reforms and new forms of government established at the end of the eighteenth century."

This new exercise of power is by no means reducible to the structure of sovereignty: "Power had to be able to gain access to the bodies of individuals, to their acts, attitudes and modes of everyday behaviour.... Hence there arise the problems of demography, public health, hygiene, housing conditions, longevity and fertility. And I believe that the political significance of the problem of sex is due to the fact that sex is located at the point of intersection of the discipline of the body and the control of the population." The intersection of the discipline of the body and the control of population is constitutive of what Foucault calls, for the first time in 1974, "biopolitics."

Later, in History of Sexuality, volume 1, he writes: "For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question." Further, he wrote,

Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner. For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention.

Biopolitics plays a double role. Because it inaugurates a new form of political authority made of micropowers that produce a "subjugation of bodies and control of populations," biopolitics is already, in itself, a deconstructive tool of sovereignty. It challenges its structure. At the same time, biopolitics covers its own deconstructive power to the extent that it hides itself behind the traditional ideological mask of sovereignty. If the emergence of biopower inaugurates the reign of the norm, it conceals the operation of normalization itself behind the old figure of the law. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life. "We have entered a phase of juridical regression in comparison with the pre-seventeenth-century societies we are acquainted with; we should not be deceived by all the Constitutions framed throughout the world since the French Revolution, the Codes written and revised, a whole continual and clamorous legislative activity: these were the forms that made an essentially normalizing power acceptable." The "right" to life becomes the biopolitical mask that dissimulates the normalization of life.

What, then, does the philosopher's task consist in? The philosopher has to deconstruct biopolitical deconstruction, that is, to unveil it and resist its ideological tendency. Such a task requires that we situate the point where biology and history, the living subject and the political subject, meet or touch.

The issue I am raising here appears precisely at that intersection. It concerns the philosophical discourse, more precisely, the structure of the philosophical critique of biopolitics. How do contemporary philosophers characterize the convergence of biology and history?

As Foucault affirms in several texts, the emergence of biopolitics is inseparable from the emergence of biology as a science. It is only at the turn of the seventeenth century, when biology is constituted as a science replacing natural history, that biopolitics becomes possible. The political subject becomes henceforth the living subject, the individual as it is determined by biology.

The problem is the following: for Foucault, as for Agamben or Derrida, even in different ways, biology is always presented as intimately linked with sovereignty in its traditional figure. Biology is always depicted as a science that transgresses its limits to repress, domesticate, instrumentalize life; that is, as a power of normalization, but a power that precisely occults its essential relationship to the norm and appears as what inscribes law within organisms. Function, program, teleology, organism: these are some examples of how biology conceptually and practically imprints the figure of law and of the sovereign at the heart of biopolitics, which is also at the heart of life. An organism always has the form of a micro–Leviathan. This explains why a thinker like Deleuze says that we have to think of bodies outside organisms. Biology plays the part of the sovereign, Derrida says, of the king. This also explains why biology always appears, for philosophers, as an instrument of power, never as an emancipatory field or tool.

There can't be any biological resistance to biopower.

This means that biology—the biological determination of life—has to be transgressed. As if there were always two concepts of life in life. For the philosophers I am talking about here, there exists a nonbiological definition of life that transgresses or exceeds the scientific, objective one. This surplus of life is symbolic life. Symbolic life as opposed to biological life. This symbolic life appears as the resource or the potentiality of resistance.

This double-sided concept of life is easily noticeable in Foucault's discourse on the body, in Agamben's analyses of bare life, and in Derrida's elaboration of the notion of the animal.

In the History of Sexuality, Foucault declares: "Hence I do not envisage a 'history of mentalities' that would take account of bodies only through the matter in which they have been perceived and given meaning and value; but a 'history of bodies' and the manner in which the most material and most vital in them has been invested." If biology invests what is the "most material" and the "most vital" in bodies, it means that there is a less material and less vital dimension. What can it be outside the symbolic body? The flesh?

In Homo Sacer, Agamben writes: "Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being." It means that bare life is not reducible to the biological. It is the symbolic part of life that dwells within the biological body. A body within the body.

In the Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida characterizes the animal as a poem. The poem is irreducible to an organism. The poetic dimension of the animal is what forever escapes biopower and the instrumentalization of life. This poetic essence constitutes the sacred part of life. In a previous text, "Faith and Knowledge," Derrida had already declared that "life has absolute value only if it is worth more than life." More than the "natural" and the "bio-zoological." "Th[e] dignity of life can only subsist beyond the present living being." Life is "open to something and something more than itself."

A border remains then, in these approaches, between two notions of life, between two lives. Deconstruction or critique of biopolitics maintains the old relationship between the biological and the symbolic, the discrepancy, the separation that exists between them. This is what prevents such a deconstruction or such a critique from superseding the traditional or metaphysical approaches to life. What do I mean by the "old relationship"? I refer here to Ernst Kantorowicz's famous book The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. The king has two bodies: a natural body and a nonmaterial one.

Let me recall the definition of the two bodies: "For the King has in him two bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident [...]. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government [...]" Eric Santner, in his beautiful book The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, calls these two bodies the biological one and the symbolic one. It is then striking to notice that the critique or deconstruction of sovereignty is structured as the very entity it tends to critique or deconstruct. By distinguishing two lives and two bodies, contemporary philosophers reaffirm the theory of sovereignty, that is, the split between the symbolic and the biological.

Of course, for Foucault, Derrida, and Agamben "symbolic" does not mean immortal or infinite as opposed to biological (understood as finite and destructible). Yet the partition remains—and it is, in effect, a "royal remain"—between the empirical and the symbolic, between the natural and something that is irreducible to it, whatever its definition. In criticizing sovereignty, philosophy reveals its own sovereignty, that is, the two bodies of its discourse.

It has become urgent to deconstruct this deconstructive discourse, to put an end to the split between the two bodies. It has become of primary importance to stress the political force of resistance inscribed in most recent biological concepts. It is time to affirm that biology can play a part other than that of a royal remain. The time has come to free Continental philosophy from the rigid separation it has always maintained between the biological, hence the material, and the symbolic, that is, the nonmaterial or the transcendental.

Recent biological discoveries reveal the plasticity of difference: that is, the plasticity of the genome, of cells, of brain development—all elements that challenge the idea of a strict genetic determinism and allow us to go beyond the classical distinction between body and flesh, between a material, obscure, mechanically determined organism, on the one hand, and a spiritual body or incarnated spirit, on the other. What appeared, until recently, as irreversible or unchangeable—the genetic code, cellular differentiation, the phenotype, in general—is currently described as plastic, that is, mutable and reversible. Until recently, Continental philosophers have articulated the notion of difference. We now have to elaborate a theory of what changing difference may mean. The reversibility of difference, brought to light by current biology, opens a new perspective on the relationship between the symbolic and the biological. Their dialectical interplay is inscribed within the body, not outside of it, putting an end to the logic of the two bodies but consequently also challenging the structure of sovereignty inherent in this philosophical discourse. One of the most important of all current biological concepts, that of epigenetics, is a privileged factor in this total change of orientation.

What I develop here concerning philosophy is valid for any other discourse (political science, anthropology, law, etc.) where a fixed and rigid meaning of the symbolic that undermines the deconstruction of the Leviathan still prevails. The symbolic still colonizes all discourses in human sciences. It is as if we still need to affirm the existence of a beyond or an outside of the real to confer meaning to reality, as if a prior structure, necessarily nonmaterial, was requested to give sense to materiality itself. As if we need the two bodies to kill the king ...

What does "symbolic" here mean? The contemporary signification of this term, as we know it, which is different from "symbolism," has been brought to light by Lévi-Strauss, mainly in his introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss. The symbolic designates the structural spacing of the different entities that compose a language, a political community, or the ethical values of a society.

According to Lévi-Strauss, such spacing has to do with the existence of what he calls the floating signifier, able "to represent an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning." It is "a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified." As such, a "floating signifier" may "mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean." This floating signifier, which maintains the correspondence between signifiers and signifieds, is said to possess a "value zero," a symbolic value.

Here, as we see, the symbolic means this empty space that gives language its mobility. It is because our language is full of these little nonsensical words, like "hau," "mana," and all the ones quoted from Lewis Carroll by Deleuze, that it can function. So the symbolic here designates the empty boxes or places or spaces, the value zero which determines the arrangement of any group of significant elements. What Derrida calls the supplement. An excess.