Competing Sovereignties by Joyce Richard;

Author:Joyce, Richard; [Richard Joyce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1016125
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Part 2

Relation

3

The Constitutive Function of Relation

‘The very simplicity of “position” implies no more, although no less, than its being discrete, in … its distinction from, in the sense of with, other (at least possible) positions.’1

Introduction

In Part 1 I put into question the idea that the nation-state is the exclusive occupant of the sovereign position in modernity and tried to show how modern sovereignty is autopositioned. In doing so, I have emphasised how that sovereign autopositioning occurs in relation to community and law. In this Part, I will consider how these autopositioned sovereignties relate to each other. However, this turn to relation should not be seen to indicate a sharp distinction between position and relation; as if position is somehow constitutive of what sovereignty ‘is’, and relation is something than we can observe positioned sovereigns ‘doing’. Rather, the purpose is to investigate the constitutive function of relation itself in how sovereignties come to be positioned.

Intimations of the importance of relation can be observed in the analysis in Chapter 1. In the discussion of indivisibility we observed how the purported indivisibility of Bodin’s sovereignty is exposed by its constitutive relation to its subjects, to law and to God. This dependence on subjects, law and a transcendent concept was also seen to be constitutive of the sovereignty of nation. All of this could be seen to go to a relation of forces within the community of a particular sovereign. But we also briefly observed how nation itself came to be constituted in opposition to that which it was not. It is this mode of relation – a relation between (rather than within) rival sites of authority – on which this chapter will chiefly focus. Of course, as we go it will become apparent that the distinction between inside and outside is quite murky. In Chapter 2, which focused on Derrida’s conception of ‘autopositioning’, we came across the concept of ipseity, described by Derrida as the ‘power that gives itself its own law, its self-representation, the sovereign and reappropriating gathering of the self in the simultaneity of an assemblage or assembly, being together, or “living together”, as we say.’2 In Chapter 2, I focused on the first part of this statement and on the concept of the ‘I can’ as revelatory of the way sovereignty is positioned.3

In this chapter, I will focus on the second part of Derrida’s definition of ‘ipseity’, the idea that the gathering of the self (autopositioning) occurs ‘in the simultaneity of an assemblage or assembly, being together, or “living together”’.4 That is, I will focus on the constitutive quality of being-together in Derrida’s conception of sovereign autopositioning. However, in his work on sovereignty, Derrida himself does not address directly the question of the nature and quality of our being-together.5 For this reason, in this chapter, I will draw heavily on Jean-Luc Nancy, whose work on community we encountered in Chapter 2. The question of our being-together is at the heart of Nancy’s work. By the same token, Nancy’s focus on

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