Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence

PREFACE

PREFACE This book was a product of a series of accidents. In 2009 I found myself teaching philosophy at the University of Western Sydney in a major called “History, Politics and Philosophy.” To acknowledge the historical aspect of this major I wanted to design a new course that would look at the development of an idea. But it was not going to be simply a history of ideas. For it so happened that when I arrived at my new department, I had also finished a first, rudimentary draft of a book in which I was trying to investigate the possibility of a “logic” of sovereignty through a series of reflections on the word “stasis.” The manuscript required an introduction to contextualize the concept of sovereignty. Thinking that combining them would be the most expeditious and efficient strategy to dispense of my didactic and authorial duties, I decided to present the introduction as a course. This proved neither expeditious nor efficient for the completion of the manuscript on “stasis,” but by the end of the semester I realized that I had another manuscript in my hands. These serendipitous circumstances determined the topic and the disciplinary balance of Sovereignty and Its Other. As for the tenor of the book, that was determined by another set of accidents . As a new university that was formed by the amalgamation of a number of higher education institutions, the University of Western Sydney had been seeking rapid expansion of its student population. But this was difficult due to the challenge posed by the fact that the campuses of the amalgamated institutions were located in a large geographical area and were often far apart. To provide lectures to students located in different campuses, a recording system was put in place for students to listen to the lectures if they were unable to travel to be physically present. There were also, of x Preface course, tutorials where face-to-face teaching took place, but still I had to present my lectures to a large student audience that was only going to have access to the recordings—and indeed would never have met me in person, since the large numbers of students meant that teaching relied on assistants. Daunted by this present/absent audience, I decided to write my lectures. Or, rather, because I did not have the time to write them fully, I had to structure each lecture around a series of quotations that I annotated and then synthesized during the lectures. In 2010, as I was repeating the course, these lecture notes became a complete first draft of Sovereignty and Its Other. The notes provided the textual analysis of the book. Meanwhile, having to present lectures that would have been accessible to students listening to them on their iPods, I had to construct a narrative voice that was different from the seminar environment that I was more used to. This voice was instrumental in the rapid writing of the manuscript between July and November of that year. It is not because of the healthy, even philosophical, irreverence toward institutions advocated by Spinoza—a crucial figure in the book—that I cannot thank the university as such for this book. It is rather because institutions are made from the people working in them, and I was very fortunate to be surrounded by stimulating colleagues. I would like to thank, then, Chris Fleming and Chris Peterson, Judith Snodgrass and Anthony Uhlmann, Allison Weir and Jessica Whyte, Cristina Rocha and George Morgan, Gail Jones and Magdalena Zolkos, Charles Barbour, and Alex Ling, and Paul Alberts and Tim Rowse. I also thank Peter Hutchings and Mike Atherton for the institution’s support in the arduous editing of the draft manuscript in 2011. I am grateful also to Norma Lam-Saw for assistance with the manuscript and for her insights. Presenting parts of the book at different research seminars, I was very fortunate to discover a challenging and demanding community of scholars with whom I let my ideas contend. For this privilege I can mention here the following: Kiarina Kordela, Cesare Casarino, and John Mowitt; Stathis Gourgouris, Gil Anidjar, and Andreas Kalyvas; Eleanor Kaufman and Amir Mufti; Justin Clemens; Arthur Jacobson, Peter Goodrich, and Stanley Fish; Peg Birmingham, David Pellauer, and Tina Chanter; Peter Fenves and Bonnie Honig. Andrew Benjamin supported the development of the ideas in too many ways to enumerate, but primarily by being the most challenging and demanding audience of my arguments. [18.117.182.179] Project MUSE (2024...