Abstract
In Part I of this essay I take a canonical case of political theology, Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, and show how Agamben derives his account of sovereignty from an interpretation of Schmitt that relies on the interesting theological premise of an atemporal act or decision, one that is traditionally attributed to god’s act of creation, and that is only ambiguously secularized in the transcendental moment of German Idealism. In Part II I show how this reading of Schmitt can be used to avoid a certain kind of negative political theology associated with deconstruction because Agamben’s reading of Schmitt explains the emergence of certain specific temporal structures associated with the sovereign political decision: the sovereign political decision cannot be represented as having a beginning, and hence recedes phenomenologically into a kind of a priori past; and the sovereign decision cannot be represented as completed, and hence it is experienced as a ‘perpetual expenditure of energy’ that lacks comprehensible relation to a goal. In Part III I defend Agamben’s interpretation of sovereignty as a transcendental act from Negri’s objection that Agamben simply equates without argument Negri’s radically democratic conception of revolutionary constituent power with Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty. My defense relies on identifying Agamben’s ‘paradox of sovereignty’ with a ‘paradox of democracy.’ In Part IV I realize a corollary of the identification of the two paradoxes, of sovereignty and democracy: that political borders are the spatial site of the application of the act of political sovereignty, and possess a kind of transcendental spatiality akin to the special temporality associated with sovereignty. I apply this understanding to the privileged special case of the US-Mexico border: the structures implicit in Agamben’s analysis explain some crucial features of this case of walling: its manifest failure to achieve, even in principle, the purpose for which it is allegedly intended; the failure of democratic polity to address those affected by the wall; the appeal to sovereign powers in the legal legitimation of border policy. I defend Agamben’s analysis against other apparently competing views, especially those of Wendy Brown and argue that the transcendental act of sovereignty comprises a kind of primary political repression that opens up the space for ideological understandings of the wall, but does not itself comprise one. In Part V I address the question whether Agamben’s derived category of ‘bare life’ can also be used in the context of the border, arguing that it can. I conclude with some critical remarks about the limits of Agamben’s view.
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Notes
- 1.
Ausnahme is literally an exception, and the term Ausnahmezustand is often translated (including by Agamben) as ‘state of exception’ even though its corresponding technical sense in English is ‘state of emergency’.
- 2.
This passage is interesting because he presents Gadamer as giving a critique of Kant, whose account of ‘the relation between the particular case and the norm’ is of ‘a merely logical operation’ that put everything on the wrong track (1998, p. 39). Agamben, I think, underestimates the importance of Kant here, although he is correct to say that Kant thinks the rule regress argument concerns only what he calls general (rather than transcendental) logic.
- 3.
- 4.
Consider Schmitt’s description of de Maistre later in the text: ‘In … de Maistre we can see a reduction of the state to the moment of pure decision, to a decision not based on reason and discussion and justifying itself, that is, to an absolute decision created out of nothingness.’ (1985, p. 66; 1922, p. 69).
- 5.
Quite possibly, the objections recur at the level of a (collective) practice.
- 6.
Norris (2006, pp. 19f) criticizes Mouffe’s appropriation of Wittgenstein on just this point: that she interprets Wittgenstein’s talk of a ‘decision’ as it were ‘existentially’, where Wittgenstein clearly has something else in mind.
- 7.
Fichte and Schelling take up this notion of a constitutive transcendental act: Fichte in his quasi-mythic Tathandlung in which the transcendental subject is responsible for the creation of the entire empirical world; and Schelling, who, in his middle period works, elaborates a sustained analogy between the atemporal choice of moral personality and the criterionlessness of god’s decision to create—or, ultimately, to exist at all. But it is in Schopenhauer’s philosophy that the notion reaches its most general expression in a conception of the world as it is in itself, an active striving that is endless and aimless because non-temporal and non-spatial.
- 8.
‘[T]the past clearly cannot be a present at the same time as the present; but as past, it is certainly simultaneous with the present, and it is easy to see that the same holds true of the future.’ (Schelling 1813, p. 197) But the ‘simultaneity’ of the past with the present does not constitute the past as present (as a ‘now’). It follows from this that this conception of the past is never present since it is ‘simultaneous’ with every present moment in the sequence of nows, but is not itself present in any of them. Schelling’s argument is taken up again by Bergson and more recently Deleuze.
- 9.
In this sense the contemporary wall is quite different from the cold war paradigm of the Berlin wall.
- 10.
The public rationale for these measures is expressed in the slogan adopted by the US Border Patrol when the primary fence was built: ‘Prevention through Deterrence’. As Congressional Research Service documents explain, this strategy calls for ‘reducing unauthorized migration by placing agents and resources directly on the border along population centers in order to deter would-be migrants from entering the country.’ (Haddal et al. 2009, p. 33)
- 11.
Agamben rejects the characterization of the assertion of sovereignty within the state of exception as ‘plenary’ for reasons derived ultimately from his use of an Aristotelian metaphysics of potentiality (2005, pp. 5–6). But his rejection concerns only the description of such powers as ‘plenary’ i.e. full, not the understanding of sovereignty at issue.
- 12.
- 13.
See, for instance, editorials in the El Paso Times, the Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio-Express News, the Yuma Sun on April 4th 2008 (all of which specifically mention environmental laws) as well as editorials in the Austin-American Statesman (April 4th 2008), the Boston Globe (April 7th) and the New York Times (April 3rd).
- 14.
Aliens found within 100 miles of the border are subject to ‘expedited’ removal ‘without further hearing or review’ (Scaperlanda 2009, p. 68).
- 15.
For three reasons: (1) this follow a fortiori from the fact that it is not any kind of punishment; (2) if it were a punishment it would be wildly disproportionate to the violation; (3) there exist other separate civil penalties for the violation that are proportionate (e.g. fines).
- 16.
See ‘Mexican Congress votes to decriminalize illegal immigration,’ Arizona Daily Star, Saturday, May 3rd 2011.
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Welchman, A. (2015). Border Sovereignty. In: Welchman, A. (eds) Politics of Religion/Religions of Politics. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9448-0_4
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