Abstract

I focus on the scene of elephant autopsy in The Beast and the Sovereign in order to analyze what Derrida calls "the globalization of the autopsic model" of sovereignty and power. While in the earlier chapters I consider technologies of life, here I consider technologies of death, which are always intimately connected with those of life. I analyze the sovereignty effect and sovereign power that require a unique witness, and witnesses to that witness, in a circulation of the gaze that ends in autopsy. Yet, there is a blind spot in this sovereign gaze that again is both necessary and unsettling to it, namely the dead eyes of the elephant. Like an elephant who never forgets, Sovereign power is erected on death, particularly the death of animals, whether the animals with which we share the planet or the animals within ourselves. In conclusion, I try to imagine a witnessing beyond autopsy, a witnessing to and from the other and otherness, a witnessing beyond recognition, witnessing as joy and mourning that might be the nail we need to take out an even more dangerous and painful one, deadly sovereign power.

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