The Beast & the Sovereign Volume 1 (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida)
Jacques Derrida
Language: English
Pages: 462
ISBN: 2:00258623
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English.
The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida's exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001'2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law'the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine's fable 'The Wolf and the Lamb,' Hobbes's biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence's poem 'Snake,' Machiavelli's Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau's evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract.
Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.
Specifically with power, with potency (dynamis), with the deployment of the potentiality of the dynast and the dynasty. That is to say, “there is something more majestic” than the majesty of the king, just as Monsieur Teste, you remember, was described as superior to the superior man, or Nietzsche’s superman as above the superior man. As in Bataille, sovereignty, in the sense he intends and means to give it, exceeds classical sovereignty, namely mastery, lordship, absolute power, etc. (We’ll come.
And a thought of animality (to which I hope one day to return at as great a length as is necessary), I shall set off again here from the difficulty that there is in Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit and elsewhere, in situating not only the animal but the dead body in the field of the three types of entity. The dead body of the living being, animal or man, is strictly speaking neither Dasein nor Zuhandensein nor Vorhandensein . . . No more is the living animal, as such, as living, the beast, either.
The right [le droit] to suspend the law, he does not have to respond before a representative chamber or before judges, he grants pardon or not after the law has passed. The sovereign has the right not to respond, he has the right to the silence of that dissymmetry. He has the right to a certain irresponsibility. Whence our obscure but I believe lucid affect, whence the double sentiment that assails us faced with the absolute sovereign: like God, the sovereign is above the law and above humanity,.
SESSION December 12, 2001 SECOND SESSION December 19, 2001 THIRD SESSION January 16, 2002 FOURTH SESSION January 23, 2002 FIFTH SESSION January 30, 2002 SIXTH SESSION February 6, 2002 SEVENTH SESSION February 13, 2002 EIGHTH SESSION February 20, 2002 NINTH SESSION February 27, 2002 TENTH SESSION March 6, 2002 ELEVENTH SESSION March 13, 2002 TWELFTH SESSION March 20, 2002 THIRTEENTH SESSION March 27, 2002 FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH EDITION When the decision was made to edit and publish.
Not necessarily linked or limited to such or such a state structure (monarchical, oligarchical, democratic, or republican). Even when the sovereign is the people or the nation, this does not damage the law, structure, or vocation of sovereignty, as Schmitt defines it (the positing of an enemy without humanist or humanitarian invocation; the right to exception; the right to suspend right; the right to be outside the law). This is why Schmitt will have quoted, before the passage I just read, an.