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6. The Freedom of Sovereignty: Remembering Lost Pasts
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176 6 The Freedom of Sovereignty Remembering Lost Pasts If the world insists on blowing up, we may be the only ones to grant it the right to do so, while giving ourselves the right to have spoken in vain. —GEORGES BATAILLE, The Accursed Share, volume 2 The Power of Mastery, the Freedom of Desire In the worlds of liberal democracy and advanced capitalism, of white supremacism and advanced patriarchy, power operates fundamentally on a model of mastery and domination. To master our conditions is to set ourselves free. We measure our freedom by our ability to overcome limiting conditions, whether those are individuals, developed institutions , sovereign nations, or economic barriers, historical prejudices, personal hardships. We do this primarily through domination, reducing the Other to our own frame of reference, to the terms of our own narcissistic desire. To transcend and master the limitations upon our desire is to free ourselves: the more power we have, the more free we are to do as we please. To be free is to transcend, or transgress when necessary, any and all prohibitions on our desire. Freedom is the ability to do as we desire; and power is its necessary and apparently sufficient condition. Mastery, freedom, desire— 177 The Freedom of Sovereignty these are the ingredients of cultures of phallicized whiteness. We must understand the precise contours of their designated meanings if we are to survive in these cultures. True to its Lockean roots, power is understood here as a tool that one owns. It is a particularly good and efficient tool, increasing its power through its repeated use. The more we wield power, the more power we will have. The more we master the world, the stronger we become. Power is understood as yet another unit of private property, perhaps even the fundamental one: the unit through which all other units are acquired. A sort of Urproperty , it belies the mythical status of the ‘self-made man.’ If we do not have power, the best we can do is work to get some small piece of it. Again true to the contract theories of classical liberalism, this power can be controlled , set down and picked up at will, transferred to others, put away with the briefcase and Palm Pilot that bear its public marks. Because we cannot be free without it, power must be what we all most fundamentally want. This perfectly closed economy demands it of us. We thirst for power, desiring it more than all else precisely because it is that which will set our desires free. Power is what allows us to desire at all. It is our condition of possibility as desiring beings. This is how it sets us free, liberating us to act on our desires and liberating our desires to act on us. If we are not free, we may not become the persons that we essentially are. Desires define the essence of who we are in this schema of the world. If to be free is to act on our desires, then it is also to bring our essential identity to fruition. Not to have the power to be free, to liberate our desires, consequently means not to become ourselves. And in this Lockean world the failure to develop our self, just like the failure to cultivate all forms of private property, finally means not to be fully human. But, while necessary, power may turn out not to be the sufficient condition for this closed economy. There is another structure that both grounds this closed system and grounds itself, ensuring its own repetition: an economy of scarcity. In conceiving power as a unit of private property which we must have in order to dominate the social field and thereby liberate ourselves, we both assume and enact a fundamental dynamic of scarcity. To conceive of any entity as a unit of private property is to initiate an economy of scarcity. The dual functioning of the logic of the limit exposes this connection: to conceive of entities as contained units places them in a social field structured by the logic of prohibition, where the boundaries of one entity are what another entity must overcome, transgress, domesticate. To write this in the register of power, to conceive of power as a quantifiable mass of which we [44.192.107.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:18 GMT) 178 Moving toward Resistance own greater and lesser portions leads us necessarily to conceive of...