At the Borders of the Self: Democratic Iterations as Post-National Sovereignty

• In Event: In Search of the Concrete Universal: Evaluating Benhabib’s Theoretical Vision

Abstract

This essay inquires into the philosophical foundations of sovereignty beyond the nation-state. Revisions of sovereignty amidst the contemporary form of globalization, while disaggregating or dividing sovereign authority, nevertheless continue to conceive sovereign power as the imposition of an ultimate rule or command, structured by the faculties of reason and will. This enduring investment in sovereignty as ‘mastery’ neglects its potential as a principle that relates, not merely orders or commands, with distinct modes of coordination and recognition. And thus it limits the promise of post-national sovereignty to transform a political community’s claim to self-identity. Having tabled this criticism, the essay turns to Seyla Benhabib's 'democratic iterations' for an alternative conception of sovereignty able to sustain the transformative demands of post-national politics. 'Democratic iterations' reframes rational opinion- and will-formation as a process of remembering, reinterpreting, and reconfiguring public norms. This creative process hinges on the ability of a political subject to see in the past a contingent experience that could have been otherwise--to rescue surplus meaning from the boundaries and distinctions one inherits. Attunement to this character of political time is the proper domain of neither reason nor will, however; it centers, I argue, the faculty of judgment. To conceive sovereignty as the authority to judge entails a distinctive mode of sovereign self-authorship, in which legitimation no longer attaches to the coherent unfolding of commitments on the basis of norm or decision but instead to keeping alive a shifting 'web of narratives' whose meanings are fragile, complex, and interdependent. The joining of sovereignty to judgment--as opposed to reason or will--casts new light on Benhabib's turn in her work to international legal theory, in general, and to refugee law, in particular. Most notably in her guiding trope of exile, Benhabib ties law's democratic legitimacy--its sovereign root--to its openness to the claims of others. This is due to the form of political judgment such openness makes possible. Indeed, the legal claim of the refugee avails of the same form of normativity as does the political standing of the social critic or the critical hermeneutics of the common law judge. Despite a veneer of human rights simpliciter, such claims do not in fact project a 'view from nowhere'; instead, they reveal a view from just 'outside the walls of the city', without which the symbolic and material repressions of the polis--and thus its ethical limits--would remain illegible, unamenable to judgment, and, therefore, illegitimate.

Author

• Paul Linden-Retek, University at Buffalo