Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed?

Catherine Malabou

In "Truth and Power," an interview from 1977, Michel Foucault declares: "What we need ... is a political philosophy that isn't erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the King's head: in political theory that has still to be done."

Why does Foucault affirm this persistence of kingship in contemporary political theory? Hasn't the passage from royal to democratic or popular sovereignty already been accomplished for a long time in the West? According to Foucault, this passage hasn't changed the very structure of sovereignty, which is always attached—whatever the polity it characterizes—to monarchy—that is, with a system of power having a single center and in which the law is the only expression of authority. This model is, according to Foucault, that of Hobbes's Leviathan. To cut off the king's head means that we "abandon the model of Leviathan, that model of artificial man who is at once an automaton, a fabricated man, but also a unitary man who contains all real individuals, whose body is made up of citizens but whose soul is sovereignty. We have to study power outside the model of Leviathan, outside the field delineated by juridical sovereignty and the institution of the State."

Western democracies are, according to Foucault, still dependent upon this model because of their juridical structure. They are, then, secretly inhabited by the remnant figure of the sovereign; that is, of the king.

It thus seems that no form of sovereignty can exist independently of the figure of the sovereign. No sovereignty without the sovereign. No sovereignty without a king. This explains why the very notion of sovereignty has to be criticized or, as Derrida declares in his seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, why it has to be deconstructed.

Is such a deconstruction on its way? Does it have any chance to attain its goal? To be accomplished? Have we, after Foucault, after Derrida—and I add, after Agamben—cut off the king's head? My answer, here, is no.

How can I justify such a position? In order to develop my argument, I first turn toward the concept of biopolitics, forged by Foucault and re-elaborated by Agamben and Derrida in two different ways. According to Foucault, sovereignty, as both a structure of power and a polity, has disappeared from the West with the emergence of modernity. A new form of organization, which has nothing to do with sovereignty, substitutes for it. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the pyramidal model of the Leviathan, described in political philosophy, appears as what it is in reality: the ideological mask that hides a disappearance or a void—precisely, the void of sovereignty. Foucault declares that from that time through the eighteenth century, a new form of power emerges that is "absolutely incompatible with relations of sovereignty" and is occulted by the persistent ideological affirmation of sovereignty. This new form of power is constituted by the paradoxical dissemination of power, the existence of multiple networks, sites of control, the supremacy of the norm over the law, of discipline and technologies of conditioning over repression. "One must keep in view the fact that, along with all the fundamental technical inventions and discoveries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a new technology of the exercise of power also emerged which was probably even more important than the constitutional reforms and new forms of government established at the end of the eighteenth century."

This new exercise of power is by no means reducible to the structure of sovereignty: "Power had to be able to gain access to the bodies of individuals, to their acts, attitudes and modes of everyday behaviour.... Hence there arise the problems of demography, public health, hygiene, housing conditions, longevity and fertility. And I believe that the political significance of the problem of sex is due to the fact that sex is located at the point of intersection of the discipline of the body and the control of the population." The intersection of the discipline of the body and the control of population is constitutive of what Foucault calls, for the first time in 1974, "biopolitics."

Later, in History of Sexuality, volume 1, he writes: "For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question." Further, he wrote,

Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner. For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention.

Biopolitics plays a double role. Because it inaugurates a new form of political authority made of micropowers that produce a "subjugation of bodies and control of populations," biopolitics is already, in itself, a deconstructive tool of sovereignty. It challenges its structure. At the same time, biopolitics covers its own deconstructive power to the extent that it hides itself behind the traditional ideological mask of sovereignty. If the emergence of biopower inaugurates the reign of the norm, it conceals the operation of normalization itself behind the old figure of the law. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life. "We have entered a phase of juridical regression in comparison with the pre-seventeenth-century societies we are acquainted with; we should not be deceived by all the Constitutions framed throughout the world since the French Revolution, the Codes written and revised, a whole...