A Theory of the Drone by Chamayou Grgoire

Author:Chamayou, Grgoire [Chamayou, Grégoire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595589767
Publisher: New Press, The

V

Political Bodies

20

In War as in Peace

The sovereign thus provides for the preservation of man’s days when he declares war as soon as it becomes necessary for the safety of his people. He makes war! But how can one speak of preserving human life when one speaks of war,—war, the aim of which is to destroy life, or at least in which death is inevitable! How amazing and, at first sight, incomprehensible!

—Abbé Joly

The invention of the armed drone has revealed not only a redoubtable weapon but also, simultaneously, something else, but without our noticing it and almost by mistake: namely, a technical solution to a fundamental tension that has put a strain on the theory and practice of political sovereignty ever since the seventeenth century. This silent revolution is what I should now like to place in perspective. This involves considering not how the drone, as a new weapon, transforms the forms taken by armed violence or our relation to the enemy in these new circumstances, but rather how it tends to modify the state’s relations to its subjects. To this end, we must undertake a detour by way of the history of political philosophy.

According to social contract theories, men form political societies and set up a state for themselves primarily to preserve their lives. Nevertheless, the sovereign holds over them the power of death or life, by virtue of which he can expose their lives in war. The theoretical difficulty lies in the discrepancy between those two principles: the founding imperative to protect their lives and the overriding right to have them die.1 In consequence, sovereignty appears to be affected by a kind of multiple-personality disorder. In passing from a state of peace to a state of war, the relations between the sovereign and his subjects undergo a complete change.

There are two different schemas. The first seems to correspond to the state that we call “normal,” that of a protective or security-based sovereignty—what might be called the protectorate. In this case, political authority is structured by what Hobbes calls “the mutual relation between protection and obedience.”2 The sovereign protects me, and it is because he protects me that he has the right to force me to obey him. Schmitt condensed this into the formula “Protego ergo obligo”: I protect, so I am obliged.3 The power of protection is the basis for commanding. The political relationship is presented as an exchange: so long as protection descends from the sovereign to his subjects, obedience rises up from the subjects to the sovereign. It is this two-way arrow that characterizes legitimate political authority, unlike in other, unilateral relationships that insist upon obedience without supplying protection in return.

But what happens when the state goes to war? Then, according to Hobbes, “each man is bound by nature, as much as in him lieth, to protect in war, the authority, by which he is himself protected in time of peace.”4 The protective relationship is reversed. In peacetime, the sovereign protects me; in wartime, I protect the sovereign.

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