The Beast and the Sovereign, Biopolitics and Derrida's Menagerie:

The two-volume set of The Beast and the Sovereign is a product of seminars delivered in 2001-03, including Derrida's written texts with supplementation from transcripts of the sessions. Both volumes are timely in feeling connected to particular times and places. The first volume is haunted by occasional mentions of 9/11, terrorism, and rogue states, written with the clear weight of a work still reeling in the face of political violence. The second volume also turns more personal with a consideration of solitude and a contemplation of death as the limit of sovereignty. At the beginning of one lecture Derrida marks the passing of his friend Maurice Blanchot and, for the reader, Derrida's own death hangs as a shadow over his careful contemplation of Heidegger's sense of how we make ourselves mortal. Readers of Derrida will recognize many of the themes that wind their way through the eclectic texts including the concept of sovereignty--sovereign power, national sovereignty, and sovereign selves--at the heart of Rogues (2005) and Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Borradorri, 2004), and other work produced in this time period. The focus on beasts and sovereigns, prescient of some of the major themes in political and social theory today, moves unpredictably through the texts in ways that defy a simple summary of argument and conclusion. Derrida reflects on the question of what is proper to man, a question with ontological dimensions (what is the essential nature of man that differentiates him from other beings), an ethical dimension (what is it proper for us to do), and a potential political dimension. The text is masterly in weaving its way through the first two dimensions, demonstrating the troubling relationship between sovereignty, law, and violence and the always unstable boundary between human and animal. The figures of the beast and the sovereign are brought together in part because of their differences, the former a feminine noun in French and a symbol of nature, the latter a masculine noun and a figure of artifice. Yet both terms have a similarity in relationship to the law, a distinction he draws from Hobbes. The beast lies below the law as that which cannot be properly obedient to the law, the sovereign above the law as that which must enforce the law and cannot be beholden to it. He suggests, "the beast and the sovereign resemble each other in that they both seem to be outside the law, above or alongside the law. And yet, even if they resemble each other, they are not fellows. Nor are they, or so we think, our fellows" (Derrida, 2011, page 45). As a set of readings, Derrida's works create a sense of unease, presenting the world through alien eyes that undermine ontological security and ethical certainty. And his texts often erupt with scenes of violence--the event of terror, the horror of war, the bloody abattoir--that indicate that these exercises are not merely academic. However, even as he turns to Heidegger's concept of walten--to reign or to rule--the question of the political, of the immense stakes of these questions, remains, as he says, to be shown in time, a pas de loup, a time that never arrives. He twice quotes Zarathustra: "what is the most pardonable thing about you is that you have the power and you do not want to reign" (quoted in Derrida, 2009, page 3). It is this central problem, thinking both about the ways that Derrida carefully unfolds the political stakes in thinking through the beast and the sovereign and about the ways that this discussion mirrors larger questions about the political import of Derrida's work, that will guide my discussion of these texts. I want to unfold the question of what is proper to man through, first, his discussion of La Fontaine's "The Monkey and the Dolphin" and its illustration of the problem at hand and, then, an examination of two bodies--the executed versus the consumed body--as presenting the ethical and political stakes of the ontology of humanity. …