Hawthorne, Sacrifice, Sovereignty

Sovereignty is absolute when it is absolved of every relationship, and keeps itself in the night of the secret.

—Jacques Derrida ("From Restricted to General Economy" 266)

I write in order to annihilate the play of subordinate operations within myself (which is, after all, superfluous).

—Georges Bataille (qtd in Derrida, "From Restricted to General Economy" 273)

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil: A Parable" (1835), the riddle of a man whose community is sent into paroxysms of fear at the inexplicable concealment of his identity, is ripe for re-reading in our time of terror and State sacrificial politics. What continues to intrigue about this story—at least one aspect of it, for it is a vast text—is the strange, or estranged, relation between the man, Parson Hooper, and the community, Milford. The emblem of this estrangement between individual and community—a hostly as well as a hostile medium, as we shall see—is the infamous black veil, the "two folds of crape, which entirely concealed [Hooper's] features, except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his sight, farther than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things" (Hawthorne 372). This essay will inquire into the status of this black veil from the point of view of sovereignty and sacrifice. Such an inquiry will demand a number of detours through other important writings on these two difficult concepts, including texts by Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The concepts, to the extent that they are concepts, will therefore open, as they must, onto other concepts and interventions, including "writing," secrecy, community, and, anticipating Nancy, the unsacrificeable. While these "themes" have been written about extensively, if not excessively, over the last several decades, recent world events return us to the awareness of the crisis pressing on the very fabric of our political knowledge and praxis and whose doxa has always been the conceit of the enduring political community.

In A Taste for the Secret, Derrida comments on the paradoxical nature of community, and in doing so suggests the ongoing need for a certain political calculation of space and time:

The desire to belong to any community whatsoever, the desire for belonging tout court, implies that one does not belong. [. . .] This can have political consequences: there is no identity. There is identification, belonging is accounted for, but this itself implies that the belonging does not exist, that the people who want to be this or that are not in fact. [. . .] This is why the family [. . .] is never a state.

(28)

Perhaps one should speak, not of calculation, but of a calculus, a means for thinking about this odd sense—this problematic—that one can simultaneously belong and not belong (including under the sign one the "self," the community, the family, the state, and so on). No problem has preoccupied political theory and philosophy more than this one. The apparent simplicity of the quotation is belied by the difficulty of the problem to which it exposes thought. Derrida's language itself institutes a fissure, or a crisis, within itself that we still do not know how to think, insofar as really thinking this crisis would imply the (political) institutionalization of its "value," the putting to work of this value (of course, this is the whole question), or letting this value "work" on our institutions, letting it come. "There is identification," but "there is no identity"; "belonging is accounted for," but "belonging does not exist"; the desire to do something implies the impossibility of acquisition. These words and phrases institute a limit "inside" themselves, and "appear" as the concepts of presence and absence, belonging and not-belonging, desiring and not. The difference between the "inside" and "outside" of identity establishes a kind of spatial relationship. But also "belonging is accounted for [. . .]"; there is "desire" to belong (is there, therefore, desire not to belong?). Who desires? Who counts? When? If the difference between inside and outside establishes a spatial relation, the question of counting and desiring institutes a temporal dimension. The question at stake is perhaps this: if there is at once...