Marc Nichanian
Image and
Sovereignty
321.011:141.7
141.7 Агамбен Ђ.
141.7 Батај Ж.
Abstract. After Nietzsche, Georges Bataille is the only one who
experienced and exposed, as his most intimate and powerful
project, the reversal of the meaning the word “subject” used to
have until the end of the 18th century, namely, being the subject
of a sovereign. Bataille experienced and exposed the birth of the
(sovereign) subject, for what it was: the ruin of the subject, which
means: the impossibility of witnessing, as a subject, the fact of
being a (sovereign) subject. This revolution of the subject (and
with it the urgent necessity of re-playing the becoming citizen of
the subject) has been largely obfuscated in the recent theoretical
approaches to the question, in particular in Giorgio Agamben’s
apocalyptic conceptualization of sovereignty and bare life.
Keywords: sovereignty, subject, testimony, Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben.
1
What will I do under this title, “Image and Sovereignty”? Will I once again
develop Giorgio Agamben’s apocalyptic theory of sovereignty, and orient
my talk toward a political, or post-political, understanding of the word sovereignty? Or will I follow the intricacies of Georges Bataille’s failed theory
of sovereignty, try to understand why it was doomed to failure from the beginning, and anyway distinguish in the very word sovereignty at least two
dimensions, on the one hand the political dimension and on the other hand
what we could provisionally call a “sacrifical” dimension, in which case
I would need to attend to the significance of the “accursed share” in Bataille’s thinking? Or maybe it’s still more complicated than that. In the last
ten years of his life, Bataille tried to systematize his thinking by distributing
his writings into two large units. In the first one, The Atheological Summa,
he brought together the three books that he had published in the forties –
The Inner Experience, Guilty, and On Nietzsche. And in the second one, he
Marc Nichanian
| 89
wanted to bring together something that was much less clear in his mind.
Volume one looked like a treatise on political economy, but Bataille never
published and never really completed volumes 2 and 3, the one on the History of Eroticism, and the one simply called Sovereignty. It is not clear why
he was not able in particular to complete the volume devoted to sovereignty.
Agamben has his own idea on the question, which he made public first in a
colloquium devoted to Bataille in Italy, Il Politico e il Sacro,1 and later in
Homo Sacer. In the latter, the passage on Bataille’s sovereignty comes at
the end of the second part, where Agamben has explained the connection
between the eminently political concept of sovereignty and what he calls, after Benjamin, “bare life”, where bare life represents the excluded part in the
political life of the city, and sovereignty the capacity of deciding about the
exception, consequently also about the exclusion. Agamben’s explanation of
Bataille’s failure is the following: it is true that unwittingly Bataille recognized bare life as a figure related to sovereignty, its dark obverse so to speak,
but “instead of recognizing bare life’s eminently political [...] nature, he inscribes the experience of this life both in the sphere of the sacred [...] and in
the interiority of the subject”. For him, life “still remains [...] bewitched in
the ambiguous circle of the sacred”.2 To say it briefly, Bataille’s thinking of
sovereignty was not political enough, and he was enmeshed in the dubious
categories of the anthropology of his day, in particular the anthropology of
religion. The conceptual apparatus of sacrifice and eroticism could not grasp
the bare life of homo sacer, and this is shown, according to Agamben, by
Bataille’s interest in the pictures of the young Chinese torture victim. And
that’s the whole of it. This reference to the use of images by Bataille in order
to explain the insufficiency of his treatment of sovereignty is interesting in
itself, but it just shows that Agamben clearly is not willing to make any effort to understand the connection made by Bataille (but of course never made
explicit, or never thought through by him) between the sovereign experience
(or the inner experience as an experience of sovereignty) and the image. It
is true that Bataille himself did not take the image into consideration other
than as a simulacrum in (and for) what he called the “inner experience”. And
consequently if there is an “urgency of thought”, something that needs to
be thought or rethought urgently, bypassing both Agamben’s unwillingness
1
2
See Giorgio Agamben, “Bataille e il paradosso della sovranità”, in
Il politico et il sacro, ed. Jacqueline Risset (Napoli: Liguori Editore,
1988), 115-119.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1998), 112-113.
90 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #5
and Bataille’s hesitations, it is this strange and totally unexpected connection
between the image and sovereignty.
2
In the purest phenomenological tradition, Bataille wanted to conduct an experience (say, in the pages of this diary, which he later published under the
title Le Coupable) and write an account about the experience (say, in the
first book he ever published, L’Expérience intérieure, in 1943), in the form
of knowledge, a nutty or crazy knowledge maybe, but knowledge nonetheless. He was at the same time his own object and his own subject. His object
was the subject. These are his words, I am not inventing. Let us read them
for instance in an article written in 1949, “L’art, exercice de la cruauté”, Art,
Exercise of cruelty, in the very lines where he makes explicit the phenomenological project as he understands it. That experience in which the object
is the subject and in which the issue, the end purpose is the destruction of the
object, hence of the subject, has always been called by him “sacrifice”. And
here is what he writes: “Sacrifice promises us to the trap of death. Because
the destruction that we impose on the object has meaning only through the
threat it is for the subject. If the subject is not really destroyed, everything
remains equivocal. And if he is destroyed, then the equivocacy is resolved,
but in the void where everything disappears”.3 It is a very simple scheme,
therefore, that we are going to see repeated at every corner in different forms,
or always in the same form. It’s obviously a trap. It’s a trap in which Bataille
got tangled up his whole life long, to the very end. One must expose oneself
to destruction, as a subject. This is the meaning and the purpose of the experience. But if one exposes oneself to destruction, then there is no subject any
more, henceforth no experience. It’s as simple as that. Or one should be able
to survive oneself, to survive one’s own destruction. The possibility of experience (and hence of a knowledge of the experience) supposes a survival,
an idea of survival, a reality of survival. We need to know what “survival”
means. We need to know who the survivor is. We need a phenomenology of
the survivor. And this is evidently what Bataille never says. Let’s say this
instead of him, with a different vocabulary. What is a subject? It is the wit-
3
Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. XI (Paris: Gallimard), 485. The
same article has been commented upon by Jean-Luc Nancy in an essay
entitled “The Unsacrificeable”, trans. Richard Stamp and Simon Sparks in
Finite Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 51-77.
Marc Nichanian
| 91
ness of itself. What we call an experience (in the phenomenological or the
everyday usage of the word) supposes a witness. It supposes that I can be
the witness of myself, that I can bear witness for myself. The destruction
of the subject would therefore be the destruction of the witness in man. The
survivor would be the dead witness. That is why we need a phenomenology
of the dead witness. Meanwhile Bataille obviously links the possibility for
the subject to be sovereign, to survive itself in the sovereign experience, to
the image as a simulacrum.
What urges us to thematize the connection between image and sovereignty
is another question, whose formulation might make us more attuned to this
question of urgency raised by the organizers of this conference. And this
question is: Who comes after the sovereign? What I first want to show then is
that it was this question that triggered and informed the philosophical reflection on sovereignty in recent times. I will do this in a very schematic way,
because in the second part of this short talk I want to come back to Georges
Bataille and explore his conceptual use of sovereignty in relation to the image. Of course the question Who comes after the sovereign? echoes another
question, the one asked almost thirty years ago now by Jean-Luc Nancy,
Who comes after the subject? The two questions obviously are not unrelated.
3
In the last ten years of his life, Derrida relentlessly asked questions about
forgiveness and reconciliation in relation to the proceedings of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. He formulated them in the form
of aporias. What does the perpetrator or his namesake apologize for? What
if the wrong brought to the victim was precisely the loss of the capacity to
forgive? The whole procedure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
the way it was first inscribed in the constitution, and then carried out for
two long years, was an extra-legal procedure, put forth in order to save the
nation, to prepare a possible living-together. Mandela and Archbishop Tutu
created a sort of reversed state of exception in order to save the country from
total breakdown. They suspended the law in order to save the functioning
of the law. They suspended the legal order in order to save the legal order.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an exceptional institution. It
was the epitome of a very particular state of exception. But to save the law
is to save sovereignty, the possibility of a sovereign act. The sovereign act is
a performative act. There is no sovereignty outside of the sovereign act and
independently of it. The sovereign is he who acts sovereignly. This sounds
92 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #5
like a tautology, but it is not, because of the performativity of the sovereign
act. The establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which
was in charge of erasing the crimes of the perpetrators without the intervention of the law was an act of sovereignty, in the name of reconciliation. This
could be interpreted also very differently, as the usurpation by the state of
the capacity of mourning of its own citizens. It was through this usurpation of mourning that the state preserved its sovereignty, and was prevented
from crumbling down. Sovereignty in the nation-state and the sovereignty
of the nation-state (if they need to be distinguished) are essentially linked to
reconciliation, and this is why reconciliation is always political, and always
related to the sovereign act, the sovereign decision, Carl Schmitt would say.
Derrida was openly suggesting that when a reconciliation project is already
at an advanced stage, when a process of reconciliation is running its course,
a danger always exists. The wound, the original division, the guilt about
the usurpation of mourning: all these things risk being avoided or simply
ignored and denied; truth risks being put at the hands of the willpower of
the politeia or the sovereign state, the state that preserved itself through the
sovereign decision; in the end, mourning risks being usurped or manipulated
once again. Derrida described the whole procedure of reconciliation and the
apology campaigns going on all over the world as a theater of reconciliation.
Which was a way of questioning how the ideal nature of the polis, how the
political, the being-together (as a political unit that pretends to be reconciled
with itself) came into being. In “Avowing – The Impossible” he explained
that forgiveness only makes sense as such when it is a question of forgiving the unforgivable and that, in an analogous manner, avowal would have
no meaning and make no sense if it were not a question of avowing the
un-avowable. Of course, the un-avowable lies beyond the theater of reconciliation, beyond the interests and advantages of politics, beyond the establishment and restoration of democracy or of liberal society. But how would
we have known this (about the un-avowable, about the beyond) if the scene
of reconciliation had not been staged in the first place? And this is why,
albeit reluctantly, albeit with infinite reservations, I have always expressed
my gratitude towards the initiators of that apology campaign and those who
participated in it just by appending their signature. The same gratitude and
the same reservations have been expressed by Derrida in the following way:
[The globalization of avowal] resembles these events in which a thinker of the
Enlightenment (Kant, in this case) thought he recognized at least the sign, at
least the possibility, of an irreversible progress of humankind. It marks a beyond of national law, even perhaps the beyond of a politics measured only by
the sovereignty of the Nation-state. Nation-states, institutions (corporations,
Marc Nichanian
| 93
armies, Churches) must appear before a court, sometimes old heads of state
or military leaders must give account — whether willingly or not — in front
of theoretically universal authorities, in front of an international law that does
not cease to be increasingly refined and to consolidate more non-governmental
rights, obliging belligerents to recognize their past crimes and to negotiate over
the peace of a new living-together, judging in exemplary fashion governing
individuals (dictators or not) while being careful not to forget the states, sometimes foreign states, that have sustained and manipulated them…4
What Derrida was announcing here is a general critique of sovereignty. This
critique was (or would have been) very different in its nature than the one
performed by Agamben in Homo Sacer and State of Exception. The difference is as follows: It is not an apocalyptic critique of sovereignty. An apocalyptic critique is one that reveals the truth apocalyptically. Derrida has always been wary of the “apocalytic tone recently adopted in philosophy”, as
Kant had put it two centuries earlier. The present day is speaking here. And
the present day, in a nutshell, is the globalization of avowal, it is the very
real fact that “nation-states [...] have to appear, sometimes old heads of state
[...] are made to account for themselves in front of theoretically universal
authorities, [...] in front of an international law which continues to become
increasingly refined and to consolidate more non-governmental rights, obliging belligerents to recognize their past crimes and to negotiate the peace of
a new living-together”. Or maybe this was an illusion? One more illusion?
Whatever it may be, an illusion or not, we are asking ourselves: How are we
to perform this general critique of sovereignty? How are we to prepare or at
least to recognize the space “beyond a politics capable of dealing only with
the sovereignty of the nation-state”? Is it a question of preparing a political
space without sovereignty? Or is it a question of preparing a political space
where sovereignty would not be monopolized by the nation-sate? Let us consider these questions more closely, questions that are for me essential, though
probably in need of some refinement. A political space without sovereignty
– that is difficult to imagine. Did Derrida suggest that thanks to the globalization of avowal, and thanks to the fact that new types of authority, universal
authorities, are now supposedly and in any case slowly replacing the sover-
4
Jacques Derrida, “Avowing — The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance,
and Reconciliation”, trans. Gil Anidjar in Living Together. Jacques
Derrida’s communities of violence and peace, ed. Elisabeth Weber
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 33-34.
94 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #5
eign authority of the states, we are witnessing a “progress of humanity” in
which some concept of sovereignty would be kept without being necessarily
associated with the nation-state? Or was he announcing the disappearance of
sovereignty altogether? And because sovereignty is always associated with
the law, with legal order, is it possible to imagine some sort of universal
sovereignty, associated with some sort of universal law? Would that not be
the door open for what Carl Schmitt and after him Agamben called (again
apocalyptically) a universal civil war?
These questions obviously require developments, which I cannot offer here.
Astonishingly, the paradoxical and very aporetic dream of a universal sovereignty (or a universal disappearance of sovereignty) imagined here by Derrida
after Kant, this thinker of the Enlightenment, was at the core of the debate that
took place in Europe in 1999, at the time of the American intervention in Serbia,
when a number of intellectuals, and among them most prominently Habermas,
justified the American intervention in the name of a not yet existing but already
anticipated universal law. In 1999, Habermas advanced his argument of an anticipated universal law that would justify the American intervention explicitly
against a pessimistic anti-liberalism he associated with the name of Carl Schmitt.
Now can you imagine a universal sovereignty? If there is one thesis that Carl
Schmitt has insisted upon and has transmitted to his contemporaries book after
book, it is this one: universal sovereignty is a contradiction in terms. It would
correspond to a totally apolitical predicament, to a mere absence of sovereignty,
and consequently to a generalized civil war, or maybe to what Benjamin understood and announced under the name of a generalized state of exception. Such a
generalized state of exception would be a state in which sovereignty would not
nominally disappear, but it would be reduced to its own mockery. Benjamin explained and described this mockery in perfectly understandable and convincing
terms already in 1925, in his dissertation on the German Trauerspiel.
4
The same Walter Benjamin, in his powerful essay on the critique of violence,
the essay in which (if we believe Agamben) he was already inaugurating the
debate with Carl Schmitt, through a general interrogation on the nature, the
essence, or the historical and universal functioning of state power (in German, Gewalt can mean violence of course, but also power), had clearly the
ambition of bringing to light the underpinnings of political sovereignty, as a
structure, as a system, as our historical curse. He did not do that at all along
the lines of what would later become the liberal theory of sovereignty, the
Marc Nichanian
| 95
one best represented by Habermas. On the contrary, he took seriously Carl
Schmitt’s arguments about the necessity and the reality of the concept of
sovereignty in order to account for the law of the state, the legal order, any
legal order. He rephrased Carl Schmitt’s formulations about the two types of
power, constituent power and constituted power, in terms of a violence that
creates the law, and a violence that preserves the law, he brought these two
types of violence or power under a single qualification, by considering them
as the two sides of the same coin, the coin of “mythical power” or “mythical violence”, and to this mythical violence he opposed a violence for which
he had no other name but “divine violence”, just because he read some of
its manifestation in the Jewish tradition. It was for him a way of laying bare
both the possibility of and the justification for a final revolution that would
bring an end to the sovereignty of the state, in other terms: to the continuous
rising and falling of what he had called mythical power, the rising and falling
of law-creating and law-preserving violences, of constituent and constituted
powers. The problem is: How did he conceive the temporality of this “final
revolution”? Was this final revolution a means for him for distinguishing the
time of the mythical and the time of the divine, and through this distinction a
means for better characterizing the mythical time that is our historical time?
In that case the message or the conclusion would be: our historical time is a
mythical time. A few years later, in the book on the German baroque drama,
or the Trauerspiel, the Mourning play, he would describe the object of the
Mourning play as precisely the same historical time brought on the stage, and
now more explicitly not only as a mythical time but as a catastrophic time.
The mournful and melancholic experience of the Mourning play as a genre,
he would say, is the experience of the catastrophe, history as catastrophe.
And obviously the final revolution of the essay on the critique of violence,
understood that way, is not a revolution that would open the gates to a new
history, in which we would finally get rid of political violence and political sovereignty. It is rather a hypothetic end of history that makes possible
our understanding of history as the rise and fall of political violence. If we
translate this way of reading Benjamin’s end of history with the vocabulary
of deconstruction, the distinction between mythical and divine violence is a
means to draw up the closure of the political, which is the closure of sovereignty as well, the same way Derrida understood the closure of metaphysics.
The problem is that Benjamin did not use the vocabulary of deconstruction.
And in his explicit wording, Benjamin’s “final revolution” can also be read
as a revolution in real time, which will make possible a new beginning. In the
last paragraph of the essay on violence, Benjamin describes one last time the
cycle of rising and falling in the lawmaking and law-preserving forms of violence. He then writes: “On the breaking of this cycle maintained by mythic
96 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #5
forms of law, on the suspension [Entsetzung] of law with all the forces on
which it depends [...], finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new
historical epoch is founded”. And the next sentence is: “If the rule of myth is
broken occasionally in the present age, the coming age is not so unimaginably remote that an attack on law [ein Wort gegen das Recht] is altogether
futile”.5
The problem is that we are reading the English and not the German original.
And almost everything in the translation is based on an interpretation, which
can be right or wrong. For instance the first sentence of this last paragraph
reads as follows: “The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history
— the ‘philosophy’ of this history because only the idea of its development
makes possible a critical [...] approach to its temporal data”. This is a wrong
translation. Because the German original says: “Die “Philosophie” dieser
Geschichte deswegen, weil die Idee ihres Ausgangs allein eine kritische,
scheidende und entscheidende Einstellung auf ihre zeitlichen Data ermöglicht”. The word Ausgang has never meant “development”. It simply means
“exit”, “end”, “way out”. The translator here does not accept that Benjamin
considers the critique of violence as the philosophy of its history just because
history needs to be considered from the point of view of its end, its way out,
its achievement, its final result, from the point of view of a decisive suspension of the legal order, from the point of view of a final state of exception, in
order for us to have a critical view of its temporal data. It is interesting to see
how translators in general have a problem with the end of history, as though
history were so sacred that it is impossible to imagine that someone could
criticize or simply deconstruct history as such. What was at stake for Benjamin clearly was the possibility of making plausible the question “Who comes
after the sovereign?” The critique of violence is first and foremost a critique
of sovereignty. Benjamin writes: “If the existence of violence beyond the law
[...] is assured as pure immediate violence [Ist aber der Gewalt auch jenseits
des Rechts ihr Bestand als reine unmittelbare gesichert], this furnishes proof
that revolutionary violence [...] is possible..”.. Jenseits des Rechts, beyond the
law, beyond the legal order, also means: “beyond political sovereignty”. This
is why it is confusing when the English translator says that divine violence,
which brings political sovereignty to an end, is itself “sovereign”, unless we
5
I am quoting from Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical
Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New: Schocken, 1986). I read
the German original in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. II-1 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1980): 202-203.
Marc Nichanian
| 97
imagine a sovereignty beyond sovereignty. Who comes after the sovereign?
The answer then would be: sovereignty again.
5
The same ambiguity exists when we read Agamben’s Homo Sacer. I will
not offer the entire demonstration here, the time allotted to us would not be
enough. Suffice it to say that Agamben characterizes the entirety of historical
time “from the beginning” as pervaded by the sovereign ban. The sovereign
ban is the structure of the political. It defines our understanding and therefore
our practice of the political. What does it do? It originally produces bare life,
which means a life that is excluded from the legal order, be it human or divine,
a life that therefore has no legal or sacrifical value, a life that can be killed or
simply ignored, but which is not, for all that, natural life, because it remains
under the spell of its being outside of the law. What is extremely paradoxical
is that for the sake of his own demonstration, Agamben needs Foucault’s concept of the biopolitical, that modern type of power that exercises its pervasive
influence directly on life, through the control of bodies and the management
of populations, but begins its reign after the end of sovereign power, which for
Foucault was characterized by the power of death. Agamben entirely transforms Foucault’s idea of the biopolitical and makes it the core element of the
sovereign ban, with one more essential caveat: Only today, in the 20th century, with the paradigm of the concentration camps, the increasing indistinction between law and life, and the announced generalized state of exception,
does the sovereign ban make itself felt with all its destructive sway. When
all is said and done, here again the question is: Who comes after the sovereign? And the ambiguity that I was mentioning is much more troubling in the
case of Agamben, because the end of sovereignty is already upon us with this
apocalyptic generalized state of exception, but we don’t see any end for this
end, except the apocalypse itself. Agamben needs an apocalyptic revelation
of the truth of sovereignty in order to get rid of the sovereign structure that
is predicated on the production of bare life, and today on the generalization
of this same bare life. The problem is that this sovereign structure at the core
of our definition and our experience of the political is “originary”, it is there
“from the beginning”. We then need to terminate this structure that characterizes our Western and globalized practice of the political in order to usher in a
politics freed from the sovereign ban and its lethal production of bare life. I
must confess that I am a bit tired of this apocalyptic tone recently adopted in
philosophy. But conversely I find even Derrida’s mild optimism a bit too optimistic, when, two hundred years after Kant, and without any trace of irony,
98 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #5
he recognizes “at least the sign, at least the possibility [...] of an irreversible
progress of humankind”, because the globalization of avowal according to
him, and despite all his reservations related to the global theater of avowal and
forgiveness, “marks something beyond national law, even perhaps beyond a
politics capable of dealing only with the sovereignty of the nation-state”. And
this brings me to the next part of my speech.
6
We saw how reluctant Agamben was to engage with Bataille about his concept and his experience of sovereignty, and how superficially he explained Bataille’s failure in his project to complete the series of the Accursed Share with
a whole book on sovereignty. Another explanation is given by Etienne Balibar
in an article initially written for the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies,
and reprinted in his most recent book, Citoyen Sujet, which by the way gives a
prominent place to its namesake, the essay called “Citizen Subject”, written in
1989 as an answer to Nancy’s question “Who comes after the subject?”6 In this
article Balibar quotes the strange and extremely revelatory footnote, in which
Bataille says “Le sujet, c’est pour moi le souverain”, “The subject for me is
the sovereign”, and he mentions the fact that Bataille’s book was doomed to
fail or to be interrupted, just because of the obstacle encountered by Bataille
in what I would myself call the “revolution of the subject”, since the word
‘subject’, when considered as the subject of sovereign decision, means exactly
the contrary of what it meant — and meant exclusively — until the eighteenth
century, to wit, the subject of a sovereign, the subject as subjected. Geoffrey
Bennington has also attended to this revolution in his own terms, following
upon Derrida’s reflections on sovereignty in Etats d’âme de la psychanalys.7
6
7
See Etienne Balibar, Citoyen sujet. Et autres essais d’anthropologie
philosophique (Paris: PUF, 2013). For an English translation of the
opening study, see E. Balibar, “Citizen Subject”, in Eduardo Cadava,
Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy, Who Comes after the Subject? (New
York, London: Routledge, 1991), 33-57.
See Geoffrey Bennington, “Superanus”, Theory and Event 8. 1,
(2005) (translation of a paper submitted at the Journées PhilosophiePsychanalyse de Castries conference on “La souveraineté” in 2001).
An English translation of Derrida’s “Etats d’âme de la psychanalyse”
is available in Without Alibi ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford
University Press, 2000), 238-280: “Psychoanalysis Searches the States
of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty”.
Marc Nichanian
| 99
What then is the context of that note in Bataille’s book on sovereignty? I quote:
If I have spoken of objective sovereignty, I have never lost sight of the fact that
sovereignty is never truly objective, that it refers rather to deep subjectivity ...
[In the world of things] we perceive power relations, and doubtless the isolated
element undergoes the influence of the aggregate, but the aggregate cannot
subordinate it. Subordination presupposes another relation, that of object to
subject. [La masse ne saurait le subordonner. La subordination suppose un
autre rapport, celui de l’objet au sujet].8
It is here that Bataille placed his footnote: “The custom of sovereigns saying ‘my subjects’ introduces an ambiguity that I cannot possibly avoid. In
my view the subject is the sovereign. The subject I speak of has nothing
subjugated about it”. When quoting this footnote (directly from French, and
consequently with a different wording), Geoffrey Bennington adds a very
ironic “Maybe”. And for Bataille this double usage of the word ‘subject’ was
just the result of a pun, an awkward and undesirable play with words. “Ce jeu
de mots inévitable est mal venu”.9 Awkward and undesirable maybe, but very
effective, for historical and philosophical reasons that Bataille did not want
to take into account. What interested him was the quasi-phenomenological
description of the experience of the sovereign subject, or in more ancient
times the experience of the individual in the crowd, who spent a large part
of his/her time working for the sovereign, but recognized him/herself in the
sovereign. “The sovereign summarizes the essence of the subject, through
which and for which the instant, the miraculous instant is the sea into which
the rivers of labor are flowing...”10 Clearly Bataille had some difficulties
with the word ‘subject’, but no less clearly these difficulties were part of his
problem. The subject is the sovereign. What a beautiful statement, with its
speculative meaning, for which at the same time Bataille did not want to see
and to explore the revolution of the subject that happened in the course of
the 18th century.
Now, let us say a word about that strange book called Sovereignty. It begins
with a theoretical part, which opens with an equally strange sentence: “The
8
9
10
Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. VIII, 283. See The Accursed
Share, vol. II and III, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books,
1993), 237.
Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. VIII, 285. The Accursed Share, vol. II
and III, 240 (But here in the text I kept G. Bennington’s translation).
Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. VIII, p. 286. The Accursed Share, vol.
II and III, p. 240.
100 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #5
sovereignty I speak of has little to do with the sovereignty of states, as defined
by international law”.11 It should be the object of an investigation in political
philosophy, to see how the sovereignty of the states and the sovereignty of
the sovereign within a state are related to each other. But Bataille is not worried by this coincidence either. He defines sovereignty economically according to the principles of the accursed share. The sovereign is he who does not
accumulate. In archaic societies the objective institution of sovereignty was
supposed to represent that principle (or that experience) of non-accumulation. Non-accumulation means that the sovereign or the supposed subject as
sovereign lives in the instant, precisely the miraculous instant. He dissipates
the riches of those who are laboring and accumulating. The question that occupies a large section in this unfinished book concerns communist society as
instantiated by the Soviet Union of that time, the extent to which there still is
a possibility of sovereignty in that type of society, and (because this inquiry
gives a negative result) then what remains to do if and when any trace of the
archaic and medieval institutions of sovereignty have disappeared once and
for all, in today’s catastrophic state of abandonment. “The world of accumulation is the world that has gotten rid of the values of traditional sovereignty...” Only the “man of sovereign art” is able to “measure himself up to this
overweening catastrophe in which we are living”.12 The man of sovereign art
(by which Bataille has in view himself and Nietzsche) lives more or less as
though he were “the last man”. He is the one who keeps a memory of what
sovereignty was or could have been. He keeps the memory of an impossible
sovereignty. This is not quite the way Agamben has since formalized the
paradox of sovereignty. The reference to the “last man” is a belated and almost unnoticeable echo to what Bataille had written in 1943, on the last page
of the central section of his Inner Experience, the section called “The Torment”: “Blanchot tells me: Why not carry on the inner experience as though
I were the last man?”13 Let us short-circuit all explanations and summarize
in one simple formulation what happens here: the last man is the survivor.
Beyond all paradoxes of sovereignty, we need a phenomenology of the survivor in order to be able to account for the essential connection between the
inner experience, which as we know has its own authority within itself and
11
12
13
Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. VIII, p. 247. The Accursed Share, vol.
II and III, p. 197.
Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. VIII, pp. 450 and 456. The Accursed
Share, vol. II and III, pp. 423 and 429.
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1988), 61. Oeuvres Complètes, V, 67.
Marc Nichanian
| 101
is sovereign for that very reason, and the institutional sovereignty of which
the last man is the witness, the one who bears witness. He bears witness for
the disappearance or for the impossibility of sovereignty. The real paradox
then is only secondarily the one of sovereignty, as Agamben would have it.
The real paradox is that only the experience is sovereign, but actually there
is no witnessing for that sovereignty. Sovereignty cannot be witnessed. It is
this very simple reality that Bataille has constantly repeated, or if you prefer
that he has constantly experienced. Sovereignty cannot be witnessed. The
sovereign subject cannot be the witness of himself. Before the revolution of
the subject, before this mysterious event in the Western world through which
the word subject changed its meaning and received the opposite meaning,
through which consequently the subject became the sovereign, there was
supposedly a possibility of witnessing sovereignty in its institutional forms,
and this is why Bataille devoted a whole book to institutional sovereignty.
But this was only the prehistory of the sovereign subject, the time when
everyone could have an image for sovereignty under the guise of the institutional sovereign. Today no witnessing is possible. And if this is what Bataille
has constantly repeated and experienced, writing after writing, then we can
finally understand what he meant with his famous sentence: The experience
is for itself its own authority, but it needs an expiation. This is (I recall) the
theorem of sovereignty. In The Inner experience, Bataille, who nevertheless needed an authority for his powerful statement about authority, refers
to Blanchot. The latter would have told him that the experience is its own
authority, “Blanchot me dit [...] que l’expérience elle-même est l’autorité. Il
ajoute au sujet de cette autorité qu’elle doit être expiée”. This is awkward
because in 1939, before he met Blanchot, Bataille himself had written the
exact same sentence without referring to any authority, except Nietzsche’s.
It was in the last issue of the journal that the group Acéphale was publishing,
in a text called “La Folie de Nietzsche”, Nietzsche’s madness. I quote: “Who
has once understood that only madness can bring man to his completion
must choose with open eyes [...] No betrayal of what he discovered in the
form of shatters and tears will appear to him more hateful than art’s feigned
deliriums. For if it is true that he must become the victim of his own laws,
if it is true that the accomplishment of his destiny requires his ruin [...] then
the very love of life and destiny demands that he commits first in himself the
crime of authority that he will expiate”.14 Since the 18th century, the revolu-
14Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. II, 548-549 ; in the French original:
“S’il est vrai qu’il doit devenir la victime de ses propres lois, s’il est
vrai que l’accomplissement de son destin demande sa perte [...] l’amour
102 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #5
tion of the subject has had as its most direct consequence that the subject
from now on obeys his own laws, and is now for that very reason a sovereign
subject. Bataille, after Nietzsche, is the only one who, in his most intimate
and powerful project, experienced and exposed this reversal, this birth of the
(sovereign) subject, this obeying one’s own laws, for what it was: the ruin
of the subject, which means very precisely but in different terms: the impossibility of witnessing as a subject the fact of being a (sovereign) subject. And
as Blanchot would say in 1957, in his last novel (if it is still a novel): “Even
a God needs a witness”. Again in French: “Un Dieu lui-même a besoin d’un
témoin”.15 Which means: an Image.
Marc Nichanian was professor of Armenian Studies at Columbia University, New York, until 2007, and is now teaching philosophy as a visiting
professor at Sabanci University, Istanbul. He is the author of Entre l’art et
le témoignage (three volumes, MétisPresse, 2006-2008), and Edebiyat ve
Felaket (Literature and Catastrophe), the Turkish translation of a series of
public lectures in Istanbul (Iletişim, 2011). His most recent publications are
Mourning Philology (Fordham University Press, 2014), and the Armenian
translation of three novels by Maurice Blanchot (Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, The Last Man, Yerevan: Inknagir, 2013). Forthcoming: Le
Sujet de l’histoire. Pour une phénoménologie du survivant (Paris: Lignes).
15
même de la vie et du destin veut qu’il commette tout d’abord en luimême le crime d’autorité qu’il expiera”.
Maurice Blanchot, Le dernier homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 22.
Marc Nichanian
| 103