Superanus

Etymologie: Bourg. sôverain; ital. sovrano; du bas-lat. superanus, qui vient du lat. super, sur, au-dessus. (Littré)

In Etats d’âme de la psychanalyse, Jacques Derrida regularly associates the concepts of sovereignty and cruelty, while characterizing these concepts as ‘obscure’.¹ For example, he announces on page 15 that his ‘choice’ fell ‘on two common nouns... cruelty and sovereignty’, and has just put aside (in the name of ‘another beyond’, which will return to haunt us) the question of knowing whether there is ‘a cruelty inherent in the drive to power or to sovereign mastery (Bemächtigungstrieb)’ (p. 14). But he insists immediately on the obscurity of these two terms, and associates this obscurity with the concept of resistance: cruelty and sovereignty resist (differently, but nonetheless ‘the one like the other’ (p. 16: the ‘like’ being perhaps the crucial word here...), and we might imagine that this resistance hangs among things on their very obscurity, their resistance to analytic thought in all senses of the term ‘analytic’. In any case, this resistance, which is not solely conceptual, is related to the ‘globalization’ [mondialisation: I pass over here the difficulties involved in this translation] of the world, to the extent that globalization involves among other things:

Archaic institutions, concepts and practices of the ethical, the juridical and the political which still appear to be dominated by a certain logic, that is a certain onto-theological metaphysics of sovereignty (autonomy and omnipotence of the subject — individual or state —, liberty, egological will, conscious intentionality, if you like, the ego, the ego ideal and the superego, etc.)

(p. 19)

Derrida’s purport would then be to show that psychoanalysis is, if one can put it like this, just made for the analysis and even the deconstruction of all this, but that, following the complex logic of an auto-immunisation, it ‘has not yet undertaken to think, and still less succeeded in thinking, penetrating and changing the axioms of the ethical, the juridical and the political, notably in these seismic places where the theological phantasy of sovereignty trembles’ (p. 21), a sovereignty the best ‘emblem’ of which would be ‘the so-called “cruel” punishments’, in that they recall ‘the sovereign power of the State over the life and death of the citizen’ (Ibid.).

Schematically: there would, apparently, be a relation between these two obscure concepts in that sovereignty (or at least its onto-theological phantasy) would manifest itself as cruelty, or that cruelty, or its drive, would push toward sovereignty as what guarantees its permanent possibility. The Bemachtigungstrieb as such would be linked with cruelty as an essential component of sovereignty, and sovereignty (or its metaphysical phantasy) would be none other, in the end, than the metaphysics of the subject (individual or collective) as tendentially autonomous, voluntaristic and free. The point for Derrida would be to call on psychoanalysis to rethink, or think better, these relations, and especially to think better its own (resistant, auto-immune) complicity with this configuration. This call is also a call to a certain revolution, which would itself lead one to rethink the French Revolution itself, and its regicide or ‘paregicide’, as Derrida calls it.

This striking juxtaposition of sovereignty and cruelty may seem surprising, not only in that it is not common, so far as I know, but also in that the obscurity in question is not, apparently, of the same order in each case. The concept of obscurity itself seems quite obscure, in that it seems that concepts can be obscure in different ways: here we are tempted to say that sovereignty and cruelty are not in the same obscurity: not necessarily that one would be less obscure than the other, but that the obscurity is not the same in each case, and so neither is the light one might hope to cast. And Derrida’s linking of these two obscurities would be the more obscure because of this.

If the concept of sovereignty remains obscure, this is not immediately (unlike with cruelty) for want of analysis in the tradition. Clearly it is out of the question for me to produce a genealogy (even a summary one) of this concept in the...