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c h a p t e r 3 The Logic of Sovereignty Llegóse luego don Quijote y dijo: —Dime tú, el que respondes: ¿fue verdad, o fue sueño lo que yo cuento que me pasó en la cueva de Montesinos? ¿Serán ciertos los azotes de Sancho mi escudero? ¿Tendrá efeto el desencanto de Dulcinea? —A lo de la cueva—respondieron—, hay mucho que decir: de todo tiene. Now came Don Quixote, and said, ‘‘Tell me, thou that answerest, was it true, or a dream, that (as I recount) befel me in Montesinos’ Cave? shall Sancho my squire’s whipping be accomplished? shall Dulcinea be disenchanted?’’ ‘‘For that of the cave,’’ quoth the answerer, ‘‘there is much to be said, it partakes of all.’’ —miguel de cervantes, Don Quixote II, chap. 72 (trans. Thomas Shelton) Si vis vaticinari quot scuta sunt in marsupio tui socii, hac arte procedendum est. If you wish to predict how many coins are in the purse of your friend, you must proceed by means of this art. —juan martı́nez silı́ceo, Arithmetica Ioannis Martini, Scilicei, in theoricen et praxim scissa (1519) A group of men enter a famous, forbidden cave located in the cellar of a tower—or is it a church? a house?—in a city on a hill. The date— sometime in the year 1546. The new ruler has sent the adventurers to look for something—treasure, perhaps. They were told, ‘‘In the cave you will find something.’’ They return to the surface much later, terrified and empty-handed, giving strange and contradictory accounts of what they saw underground: vast caverns, animated statues, rivers, mysterious roaring winds. Many of them die soon after. The cave is sealed by the powerful ruler who sent them below, never to be reopened. The ruler goes on to become famous for his cruelty and his generosity. The stuff of myths, no doubt. Even the questions it raises seem archaic. By what authority were they dispatched? Did they or did they not find the 88 The Logic of Sovereignty 89 treasure they were promised, or just told about: told to seek, or advised they would not find? What sort of promise—or threat, or order—took them below? What did they see there? The story is also, in the version that I will set before you in this chapter, the ground on which an influential account of modernity is founded—the account that places in the early modern period the subtle emergence of secular political concepts from a historical substrate in which they were imagined theologically and linked to a new conceptualization of the experience of terror. Sovereignty, in particular the time or times of sovereignty, is my topic in this chapter, and the argument I will make, as well as the stories I will tell, concern not just the logical grounds on which modern sovereignty is established—its divisibility or indivisibility, its topology and topography—but also when historically modern sovereignty arises and when (at what time) we can designate that time. I will link the logic of sovereignty, an experience that we will learn to call ‘‘terror,’’ the temporal conditions and horizons of sovereignty, and the conditions of our recognition or stipulation that here, at this point, something like a modern conception of sovereignty can be located, defined, or described. As I did in thinking about Robert Person’s strange conception of divisible sovereignty, I will put a great deal of weight upon a single word, the historicizing term modern. I am obviously echoing, once again, Schmitt’s lapidary observation that ‘‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,’’1 but with a difference. To the extent that we are Schmittians—to the extent that we inhabit the modernity he describes, which is hardly uncontroversial—we are all nominalists as regards the time and the boundaries not just of sovereignty but of modernity as well: we take all significant concepts of modernity more broadly to be secularized theological concepts, relics of the stuff of myth, divine, providential, or universal histories washed in the prosaic bath of modernization, enlightenment, contingency. Disenchanted, Husserl would say. Three corollaries. First, concepts that represent, mark, or police the limits of ‘‘theology’’—for example , with respect to companion disciplines with different histories, truth claims, and practices—are also limit-concepts for the modern theory of the state. Second, and vice versa, concepts that represent or mark the limits...

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