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2. Phares; or, Divisible Sovereignty
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c h a p t e r 2 Phares; or, Divisible Sovereignty The special difficulty of these analyses lies in the patient’s horror at violating a parent’s or a family’s guarded secret, even though the secret’s text and context are inscribed within the patient’s own unconscious. The horror of transgression, in the strict sense of the term, is compounded by the risk of undermining the fictitious yet necessary integrity of the parental figure in question. —nicolas abraham, ‘‘Notes on the Phantom’’ Grant me, for now, the distinction between the terrorist and the foundational terror that radical democratic republicanism guards—the condition of its ethical form, the weak concept or the weak norm at its breast. Converting ungovernable semantic excess into a weak norm for thought and conduct seems a tolerable, if still fairly abstract program. Certainly, it would appear to be a distinctively modern one: inseparable from a postRomantic literary-political lexicon, specific to a transitional state form, pertinent at one time but not all. My example has been the construction of political movement in the postwar Spanish imaginary: a Falangist state officially laying claim to modernization; an armed nationalist, separatist movement momentarily in line with the forces of political dissidence; an economy making the transition to a specific form of consumer capitalism; a labile society, opening borders on some levels, closing them on others— all particular circumstances. My claim is broader, though. The mystical body of the Caudillo, subject to fluxes, depositions, substitutions, wounds, and delegations, also stands sublimely beyond these merely accidental eventualities. The flickering border between the sovereign’s mystical and material bodies is the trace—one of them, the most spectacular—of discontinuous processes of secularization and modernization whose pas de deux long precedes Romanticism and the Enlightenment. The diagnostic, 63 64 Phares; or, Divisible Sovereignty exemplary movement from one postwar state form to another trails other movements that may partially determine it and that will necessarily provide a broader palette from which to draw the ‘‘innovative interpretations’’ and expanded ‘‘concepts with ‘surplus validity’’’ that Honneth and Fraser require.1 The border between modern interpretations and concepts, modern events and archaic or future ones, is as labile and indecisive as the porous frontiers of Spain’s imaginary postwar state, or the body of its Caudillo . The concept of sovereignty that partially governs, partially results from these asynchronous movements has a history and a particular logic of expression, a grammar and indeed a literature of its own. The weak pseudo-concept ‘‘terror’’ emerges and subsists in this history, in the logic of expression, in the grammar and literature of modern sovereignty. In this chapter and the next I turn to consider the genealogy of the ethic of terror. Theoretical Sovereignty: Fatherhood Hence the necessity of another problematic, in truth, an aporetic, of divisible sovereignty. For a long time now, at least since the end of the nineteenth century, people have spoken of nation-states with ‘‘limited’’ or ‘‘shared’’ sovereignty. But is not the very essence of the principle of sovereignty, everywhere and in every case, precisely its exceptional indivisibility, its illimitation, its integral integrity? Sovereignty is undivided, unshared, or it is not. The division of the indivisible, the sharing of what cannot be shared: that is the possibility of the impossible. —jacques derrida, ‘‘Provocation: Forewords’’ The two-step project that Derrida announces—describing and displacing the ‘‘integral integrity’’ on which sovereignty turns, setting out an ‘‘aporetic of divisible sovereignty’’ yet to come—remains incomplete. His last works, in dialogue with Giorgio Agamben, Carl Schmitt, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others, sketch its contours and furnish a basket of concepts, here advanced in their briefest, most paradoxical, and most spectacular shape: a ‘‘division of the indivisible, the sharing of what cannot be shared . . . the possibility of the impossible.’’ The string of aporias will let us approach not only the limited, shared distribution of state sovereignty but also the prior, Bodinian distinctions between delegated power and sovereignty, on the one hand, and between derived and posited sovereignty on the other. [18.224.58.62] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:51 GMT) Phares; or, Divisible Sovereignty 65 Less gaudy and less controversial is Derrida’s guarded historical assertion that a certain idiom—‘‘speaking’’ of limited or shared sovereignty in the case of nation-states—has been in use ‘‘at least since the end of the nineteenth century.’’ To pose the matter in this way—to remark that Derrida is both fashioning...