Will Sovereignty Ever be Deconstructed?

Abstract

In a 1977 interview, Michel Foucault argues for the creation of a political philosophy detached from the concept of sovereignty, as “cutting off the king’s head” is impossible in political theory. Western democracies remain connected to this political and legal model, as there is no sovereignty without a ruler. This creates a need to deconstruct sovereignty in contemporary philosophy. Catherine Malabou contends that philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Agamben have failed in this objective; by attempting to define what resists sovereignty, they inadvertently allow it to persist. Malabou turns to biopolitics, a concept introduced by Foucault and reformulated by Agamben and Derrida, which centers on the control of life. To deconstruct biopolitics, we need an intersection between biology and history, where the political subject and the living being meet. However, for Foucault, Agamben, and Derrida, biology is always linked to sovereignty, portrayed as a science that transgresses its limits to control life. Malabou argues that any biological resistance to biopower is impossible because the biological determination of life must be transgressed. She proposes the existence of two concepts of life: biological life and symbolic life, with the latter revealing the potential for resistance. For Malabou, new biological categories, such as epigenetics, can help find a new materialism. She asserts that epigenetics resists the political reduction of biology to a mere vehicle of power, revealing the intricate relationship between the biological and the symbolic without transgressing the biological. The dialectical plasticity of difference, rather than symbolic indifference, would be the most efficient way to deconstruct sovereignty, highlighting the revolutionary potential of biological mechanisms, especially epigenesis.