Liberal Terror by Brad Evans

Author:Brad Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2012-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Transcendental Principle

Ever since Hobbes wrote his Leviathan, the concept of sovereignty has been aligned with the unification of life. Wonderfully depicted in the famous illustration which accompanies his manifesto, the body of the sovereign always presumes the given unity of the body-politic. Security, then, if there is to be any, insists upon this imagined or transcendental figuration. What confirms political wholeness, the unity of the authentic political subjectivity, infers a completion in the order of things, so that oneness becomes the natural and intended condition proper to politically qualified life. While many contemporary theorists point to the sovereign contract as marking a distinct break with the Ancien Régime, the idea that the practice of sovereignty still reflects a powerful Christian eschatology is compelling. Schmitt is a key thinker here. As he explained, ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’.23 Hence, for James Martel,

Carl Schmitt articulates exactly how this notion of a break itself disguises the crucial (and theological) continuities with medieval and Christian notions of sovereignty. … In this way, modernity has a new ‘political theology’, one that serves to disguise both the more traditional Christian inheritance of the modern state as well as the fact that the modern sovereign, like the Christian God, continues to decide upon the exception.24

Derrida is famed in equal measure for expressing similar sentiments. Sovereignty, he argues, evidences a kind of ‘ipsocentric[ism]’ which points to a ‘long cycle of political theology that is at once paternalistic and patriarchal, and thus masculine, in the filiation of father–son–brother’. Such ipsocentricism is ‘revived or taken over’ by a newer version of itself, moving from the overtly religious and monarchic forms of sovereignty to ‘the unavowed political theology … of the sovereignty of the people, that is of democratic sovereignty’.25

While authors like Wendy Brown have rightly pointed out that the sovereign system which developed out of the Treaty of Westphalia (especially in its theological form) is facing lasting crises (hence its openly aggressive theological expressions) as it faces limitless and uncontrollable forces beyond any measure of control,26 it is arguable that these processes have been slowly unravelling for some considerable time. We could in fact argue that the sovereign project as invested in the absolute myth of the nation could not be resurrected out of the ashes of the Second World War. We are reminded here by Max Ernst’s surreal Europe after the Rain II, whose violent-scape brilliantly captures the scene of sovereign abandon. Nothing remains except the beastly figures who are haunted by the scars of war and the memories of a once distant past that is impossible to reclaim. None of this was lost on Arendt. While it would take a number of decades before traces of the Westphalian critique were common across many academic disciplines – that is, the now familiar concerns such as ‘crises of democracy’, ‘crises of identity’, ‘crises of meaning’, ‘crises of belonging’, and so on – she fully understood in 1958 that the world

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